Restaurant Review: 10 Corso Como Brings a Whimsical Corner of Italy to New York City

In Milan, 10 Corso Como– not coincidentally at Corso Como 10 – is a Mecca for locals and visitors alike. Indeed, it’s a virtual playground with an eclectic high-end shop that opens seamlessly into a café, a restaurant, a photo gallery, and a bookstore.

The whimsical emporium (there’s really no better word for it) opened in 1991 in the Porto Nuova district of Milan by Carla Sozzani and has since then opened branches in multiple cities including Beijing, Seoul, and Shanghai – and now New York City. It offers fashion items from Comme des Garçons, Dior, Gucci, Prada, and others, superb exhibits, and a restaurant and café with a focus on Italian cuisine.

My dining companion and I arrived on a cold winter evening, not knowing exactly what to expect, and found ourselves in a gallery of photographs that stemmed from a collaboration between Swiss photographer Jean Clemmer and Salvador Dalí, practically forgetting we were there to have dinner.

To get to the restaurant, however, we first had to go shopping. This was no ordinary store, we found. Carefully interwoven between items to purchase was an extraordinarily colorful display of items by designer Ettore Sottass as featured by the design store Kartell, under the rubric “Kartell Goes Sottass.” The colors on the Mademoiselle chairs by Philippe Starck literally popped and the range of vases, stools, and lamps came in such colors as acid green, electric yellow, and neon pink.

I momentarily forgot why I was there. Indeed, as a former fashion magazine editor, Sozzani sought to create a living magazine of sorts, and that is exactly how it felt as we walked through it.

Glancing ahead, I saw what had to be the restaurant, a chic and equally eclectic space with a most unusual bar. The dining room was refined yet displayed somewhat of the goofy spirit with an unusual Jackson Pollock-like pattern on the tabletops.

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