Piano35

Dining at altitude: the context of Piano35

Turin's fine-dining scene has never been purely about the plate. The city carries a particular self-consciousness about architecture, craft, and setting that shapes how its restaurants are received and remembered. Piano35 takes that tendency to its logical conclusion by placing a Michelin-starred kitchen on the 35th floor of Renzo Piano's Intesa Sanpaolo headquarters at Corso Inghilterra 3, the tower that has become the most recognisable element of Turin's contemporary skyline. At 150 metres, the dining room operates in a register that no ground-floor contemporary Italian table in the city can claim. The comparison set here is not just other €€€€ kitchens like Opera, Andrea Larossa, or Cannavacciuolo Bistrot; it is the rarer category of destination restaurants where the physical approach is part of the proposition.

To understand Piano35, it helps to understand the building. The Intesa Sanpaolo tower, completed in 2015 to Renzo Piano Building Workshop designs, was conceived as a civic object as much as a corporate one, incorporating public-facing levels, green terracing, and a bioclimatic glass skin that manages temperature and light. The restaurant sits inside that logic. The dining room is surrounded by a greenhouse structure, and natural light defines the room in a way that conventional interiors cannot replicate. The panoramic terrace, accessible before the meal, gives an unobstructed view across the city centre to the Alps. These are not incidental features; they are the frame within which the kitchen's work is received.

Three tasting paths and the editorial behind them

The structure of the dinner menu at Piano35 reflects a particular Italian contemporary trend: the attempt to define what a single kitchen owes to its immediate territory, to a broader national tradition, and to its own culinary lineage. Rather than presenting a single chef's tasting menu in the conventional sense, Piano35 offers three distinct tasting courses running in parallel. The first is dedicated to Piedmont, a region whose larder (truffles, tajarin, hazelnuts, Barolo, Barbaresco, bagna caôda) is among the most codified in Italy. The second broadens to Italian cuisine and its regional flavours. The third references Piccolo Lago, the restaurant on Lago di Mergozzo from which this kitchen derives its formal heritage.

That third path is the most architecturally interesting choice. Piccolo Lago has held Michelin recognition for years and operates as a lakeside fine-dining address with an emphasis on Verbano-Cusio-Ossola produce, particularly freshwater fish and mountain ingredients. By making that lineage explicit as one of three menu options, Piano35 positions itself not as an autonomous project but as part of a longer conversation between a mother house and a satellite with its own metropolitan brief. The approach has parallels with how some Parisian chefs have extended their cooking through regional outposts, or how Enrico Bartolini has built a multi-site model across Italy. The comparison is instructive: multi-site Italian fine dining increasingly requires each address to earn its own identity rather than inherit the parent's. Piano35's 2024 Michelin star confirms it has done that.

Local ingredients, imported method: the EA-GN-15 axis

The intersection of Piedmontese produce and technique drawn from beyond the region is where Piano35 is most legible as a contemporary Italian kitchen. Piedmont already has one of Italy's strongest indigenous cuisines, and the creative challenge for any starred kitchen here is how to extend that tradition without domesticating it into a heritage exercise. The approach visible in the menu structure suggests an answer: use the Piccolo Lago lineage to import a sensibility shaped by Alpine and lacustrine ingredients, apply that to Piedmontese raw materials, and let the juxtapositions carry the interest.

The maltagliati course documented in the menu provides a specific example. Two large, irregularly cut pasta pieces are cooked in seafood sauce and dressed with borlotti, fish, squid jus, and squid ink. The form is classical Piedmontese pasta-making; the dressing borrows from coastal Italian cooking in a way that would be foreign to a traditional Piedmontese table. The result is a dish that requires knowledge of both registers to fully read. This is a pattern found at the sharper end of the Italian contemporary tier nationally: Osteria Francescana in Modena has long operated on similar logic, as has Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence and, on a different coastline, Quattro Passi in Marina del Cantone. What distinguishes the Piedmontese version is the particular weight and seriousness of the regional food culture being reworked. Shortcuts are more visible here than elsewhere in Italy.

Among Turin's own contemporary tables, the contrast with Magazzino 52 or Scatto is worth considering. Those addresses work with a lighter, more casual editorial proposition. Piano35 operates in the register of formal contemporary Italian fine dining, where the cooking is expected to answer for itself under scrutiny — the same pressure felt at Italian addresses further afield like Atelier Moessmer Norbert Niederkofler in Brunico, Dal Pescatore in Runate, or the Adriatic coastal programme at Agli Amici Rovinj. Piano35 is firmly in that tier, but its setting and the three-menu structure give it a distinct operational identity within it.

Lunch, dinner, and the practical shape of a visit

Piano35 runs two formats depending on the day and the hour. The full tasting menu experience operates at dinner on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, with service running from 7:30 PM to 11 PM. A lunch service on Friday and Saturday (12:30 PM to 2:30 PM) offers a simpler bistro version — a meaningful distinction for readers calibrating the investment. The bistro lunch is the more accessible entry point, both in terms of time and likely expenditure, and it provides access to the terrace and the building's geometry without requiring the full commitment of an evening tasting menu. The kitchen is closed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday.

At the €€€€ price tier, Piano35 sits alongside the city's other formal contemporary tables. Booking should be treated as essential, particularly for weekend dinner seatings given the limited days of operation. The building's entrance on Corso Inghilterra 3 has a dedicated restaurant access point at ground level; guests are guided to a high-speed lift for the ascent to the 35th floor. The panoramic terrace visit before sitting down is not a formality , the view from that height, with the Alps as backdrop and the Po plain extending to the north, provides a spatial orientation that informs the meal's Piedmontese framework. It is worth arriving with enough time to spend a few minutes outside before the kitchen begins.

For broader Turin planning, our full Turin restaurants guide maps the city's dining tier by tier, while our Turin hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide cover the city's other registers. Turin has enough density at the formal end of the dining market to justify the dedicated planning. Piano35, with its architectural premise and confirmed Michelin recognition, sits at the point where that planning effort is most clearly rewarded with something that cannot be replicated elsewhere in the city, or in many cities beyond it. A Google rating of 4.5 across more than 2,100 reviews further confirms a consistency that goes beyond the setting alone. The cooking, by the evidence available, holds its own at altitude. At L'Olivo in Anacapri or comparable Italian contemporary addresses where landscape and kitchen interact, the setting can either amplify or expose the food; at Piano35, the 2024 star suggests the kitchen is doing enough to deserve the view.

Frequently asked questions

Can I bring kids to Piano35?

At €€€€ pricing inside a formal Michelin-starred setting in Turin, Piano35 is not structured around younger diners , the tasting menu format and the building's high-altitude environment make it a direct call for adults only or older teenagers with a genuine interest in the meal.

What's the overall feel of Piano35?

If you come for the terrace view and stay for a Michelin-starred tasting menu in a greenhouse-framed room above Turin's skyline, the experience lands somewhere between an architectural visit and a serious dinner: formal enough that the cooking and the awards (one Michelin star, 2024) carry full weight, but with an openness and transparency , literally, given the glass , that prevents it from feeling as enclosed as some starred rooms at the same price tier in Italian cities. If you want a more intimate, street-level contemporary Italian table, other €€€€ options in Turin fit that brief better; if the combination of confirmed kitchen quality and an extraordinary physical setting is the priority, Piano35 is the logical address.

What's the signature dish at Piano35?

The documented standout from the Italy-focused tasting path is the maltagliati: two large, irregularly cut pasta pieces cooked in seafood sauce and dressed with borlotti, fish, squid jus, and squid ink. It is the dish most clearly emblematic of the kitchen's editorial position , classical Piedmontese pasta form carrying flavours drawn from a broader Italian coastal tradition, the kind of move that a Michelin-recognised kitchen earns the credibility to make.