Armani Is Bringing Indochine’s Downtown Glamour to Milan
The legendary New York restaurant, a longtime favorite of Giorgio Armani, will head to Italy with its famous banana-leaf interiors and Franco-Vietnamese cuisine in tow
Indochine was one of Giorgio Armani’s favorite restaurants whenever he visited New York, a personal affinity that recently evolved into a collaboration between the Italian fashion house and restaurateur Brian McNally’s legendary Lafayette Street haunt. This past February, an Indochine pop-up took over Emporio Armani Ristorante in Milan, recreating the banana-leaf walls and exuberant floral arrangements that have made the downtown Manhattan institution instantly recognizable. Following its success, Armani has made the partnership permanent. On September 22, the restaurant’s first floor will permanently transform into Indochine Milano—the restaurant’s first Italian outpost—with its own dedicated entrance on Via dei Giardini.
Indochine has cultivated an alluring mystique since opening in 1984. Its tropical-themed dining room, with banana leaf prints ambling across the walls and extravagant sprays of flowers spilling through the dining room, provided a seductive backdrop for generations of downtown artists and Hollywood A-listers. Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat frequented its tables, as did Madonna and Mick Jagger; Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and Leonardo DiCaprio later joined its constellation of regulars and high-profile guests. Giorgio Armani himself made the restaurant a favorite stop. More than four decades later, those unmistakable flourishes will cross the Atlantic as Indochine Milano faithfully translates the original’s sultry design flourishes.
The restaurant’s acclaimed Franco-Vietnamese cooking will also make the journey. Dinner will feature Indochine signatures such as spicy beef salad and crisp salt-and-pepper shrimp with ginger, shiitake mushrooms, and eggplant, alongside Vietnamese barbecue chicken. It will serve dinner exclusively on the first floor, while the newly rechristened Armani/Caffé will occupy the ground level and its outdoor terrace. Executive chef Ferdinando Palomba—a longtime collaborator who has overseen the kitchen at Emporio Armani Ristorante & Caffè since 2008—will also oversee breakfast and lunch there, interpreting Italian and Mediterranean classics through the polished culinary vocabulary associated with Armani.
The partnership also continues Armani’s successful courtship of hospitality. The company entered the field in 1998 with its debut Emporio Armani Caffè restaurant in Paris, attached to the fashion house’s boutique on Saint-German-des-Prés, and later helped introduce Nobu to Italy through Armani/Nobu, which opened in 2000. Today, the group operates over 25 restaurants across Europe, China, and the Americas. By transporting a restaurant that Armani himself frequented into the heart of Milan, the house turns a decades-long affection into a permanent destination that will no doubt become one of Milan’s most coveted tables come late September.