Milan is the one Italian city where you can eat Spanish food for a whole weekend without running out of places. There are nine listings in and around the city on the Milan page, and, unusually, they do not all do the same thing. Eight are in the city itself: two Andalusian, one Basque, one rice restaurant and four branches of a jamon business. The ninth is out in Corsico.
Here is a two-day route that covers all four types. Addresses are as listed in the directory; check opening hours before you set off, because Sunday is unpredictable everywhere in Italy.
Saturday afternoon: pintxos near Sempione
Start at Pintxo, Via Losanna 36, north-west of the centre. The room is modelled on the bars of northern Spain and the details are unusually specific about it: Spanish ceramics, porrones, vintage siphons, original typographic prints from Madrid, work by Spanish artists and a collection of Tapas magazines. The logo is a stylised olive on a skewer, which is a direct quote from the gilda, the Basque pintxo of olive, anchovy and pickled guindilla.
The cooking follows Basque and wider Spanish tradition with contemporary interpretations, and the owners and bar manager can talk you through any of it — the staff are trained on the Spanish side of the menu, not just the Italian service side. Spanish wines and vermouths are the drinks list.
A porron, if you have not met one, is a glass wine jug with a long spout that you drink from at arm's length without touching your lips to it. Watch someone else first.
Saturday, late afternoon: ham in Brera
Walk east into Brera for La Casa Iberica at Via Mercato 3. The business specialises in jamon iberico de bellota and gourmet Spanish products, with restaurants in Milan, Turin and Rome.
There are three other Milan branches if Via Mercato is full: Viale Premuda 1 east of the centre, Via Carlo Ravizza 8 to the west, and Via Celestino IV 6 south of the Duomo. Between them they cover most of the map.
Saturday dinner: Andalusia at Largo la Foppa
Sevilla Mia, Largo la Foppa 1, was founded by Jose Carlos Gomez Moreno to put Andalusian cooking in front of Italian diners. The room is done in Sevillian tiles and Cordoba-style pottery, and the kitchen works from Andalusian recipes — salmorejo and espinacas con garbanzos are both named on its own record.
Those two dishes are a decent test of an Andalusian kitchen anywhere. Salmorejo is thicker than gazpacho and made with bread, tomato, garlic and a lot of olive oil, served cold with chopped egg and ham on top. Spinach with chickpeas is a Seville tapa with Moorish roots, heavy on cumin and paprika, and it is the dish most likely to be skipped by a restaurant playing it safe.
Sunday lunch: rice near Porta Venezia
Albufera, Via Luigi Settembrini 26, is the rice stop: Spanish cooking built on paella and tapas. L'Albufera is the lagoon south of Valencia whose paddies grow the rice that paella is made with, which is a promising thing for a restaurant to be named after.
Order rice for the table and order it early. It is cooked to order in one pan, so twenty to forty minutes is normal, and anything faster was made before you arrived.
Sunday evening: Porta Genova
Finish at Sevilla Mia Restaurante, Viale Coni Zugna 50, the same project's second room on the south-west side. It is built around three moments rather than one meal: an aperitivo of pinchos, a dinner of tapas or larger raciones, and the after-dinner, which the four founders describe as the part they care about most. Their slogan is tapas y momentos.
If you have a car and an appetite left, Sabor Catalan is a family-run Catalan-leaning place in Corsico, just outside the city, with Spanish chefs cooking tapas and paellas.
One scheduling note
The two drinking rituals you are moving between do not sit at the same time of day, which is easy to get wrong. In Spain, la hora del vermut is late morning, before lunch: a small glass of red vermouth on ice with an olive, and something salty, usually on a Sunday. Milanese aperitivo is an early-evening habit, before dinner, and at many bars it comes with a buffet substantial enough to replace the meal you booked.
Where a Spanish bar abroad serves vermut in the early evening to fit local hours, it lands head to head with aperitivo. If you are eating at nine, treat whichever one you choose as a drink and skip the buffet.
