Federico Rottigni’s Sensorium Milano reveals its secrets like a painting with many layers. The philosophy of the Non-Ristorante on the Via dei Crocefissi, the almost ascetic atmosphere, the authentic and uncompromised ingredients — all of this prepares the stage for the evening’s true centrepiece: the Ayahuasca Menu.

The Ayahuasca Menu is a nine course multisensory experience at Sensorium Milano. It is conceived as a structured inner journey in which taste, sound, scent and texture work together to shape emotional and cognitive perception.

An evening at the Sensorium follows a choreography that has been thought through with care. Once the room, the sound and the light have gently woken the mind and the senses, the curtain lifts on a performance that unfolds over roughly two hours.

The Name and Its Resonance

The term Ayahuasca is deeply rooted in the indigenous traditions of South America. In Quechua, it names a drink as the “vine of the soul” or “wine of the spirits,” prepared from Banisteriopsis caapi — a liana — and further plants such as Psychotria viridis or Diplopterys cabrerana.

For centuries, Quechua communities have used it in ritual nocturnal ceremonies, as a means of opening a connection to the spiritual world. The drinking of the warm liquid is accompanied by shamans with song, smoke and specific ritual acts. It is considered a medicine and a teacher that leads the individual back to themselves.

Rottigni chose the name deliberately — provocative and at the same time a poetic metaphor, without seeking or imitating any psychoactive effect. “Ayahuasca is for me a metaphor for an inner journey,” he says.

“A way of uncovering layers of one’s own character that remain hidden in everyday life.”

A Sensuously Composed Dramaturgy

The nine-course menu is a sensory score. Each course marks a new stage in an interior process — from the first tentative approach to the unknown, through to a gentle and intimate closing embrace. Rottigni moves through the evening more as companion than as cook. He guides the guests through a landscape of flavours that bloom on the tongue, textures that stir long-forgotten memories, scents that linger at the fingertips and sounds that hold the room like a warm presence.

“Every element on the plate, every sound in the room has its deeper justification,” Rottigni says of his composition. “The aim is to create a protected, sensual framework within which guests can allow themselves to embark on this intimate journey.”

This approach connects seamlessly with what the atmospheric preparation has already achieved. The softened acoustics and the warm, honey-coloured light have already created the state of openness that Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, describes as the neurobiological precondition for extraordinary perceptual experiences.

The Beginning: The Courage of First Contact

The intimate journey opens with La Medicina. Healing aromas settle like a gentle veil over the senses, easing the travellers into what is to come. Non Chicken Curry follows, where the familiar and the unexpected dissolve into one another with a light-handed playfulness. Then comes Mareada, spreading waves of perception through the body like a soft surge — an invitation to release old certainties and open to the unfamiliar. Receptive to new impressions, unknown aromas register as enrichment rather than challenge. Spence describes this moment as particularly significant: “Experiments show that negative expectations alter taste. When the context succeeds in creating trust, even a sensation that initially seems demanding becomes a stimulating and rewarding experience.”

Deeper Registers: Reflection and Emotional Permeability

As in a symphony, the tonality shifts as the next movement begins. Magic Mushrooms Taco plays with unexpected textures that burst or melt between the teeth. You invites self-reflection through its reduced aesthetic. Caothic Quantum draws something apparently chaotic into a surprising harmony.

One course, through its purist simplicity, releases an almost meditative stillness that settles over thought like warm honey. Another evokes, for each guest differently, scents that range from damp earth to warm summer rain — and suddenly, images from a long-forgotten childhood surface behind the eyes.

Rottigni draws deliberately on the direct connection between the olfactory sense and the limbic system, the pulsing centre of emotion and memory. This scientific understanding merges seamlessly with his philosophy of authentic ingredients: products from small producers that “carry a story and a very particular energy,” as Rottigni puts it, unfold their transformative presence here. Spence confirms: “Scent bypasses the rational mind. It can place us directly into past emotional states.”

The Emotional Apex: Serendipity

The peak — and for many guests, as Rottigni observes, the most emotional moment — is Serendipity. The seventh course arrives as a small bowl of creamy rice pudding, refined with fruit and covered with delicate white wafers that are broken directly in front of the guests with a soft crack. It is the rice pudding above all that reaches most people: that unmistakable register of childhood shelter.

The dessert unfolds within a layered soundscape — the familiar ring of school bells, the warm voice of an Italian teacher, then, spatially displaced, the melancholic voice of an older English-speaking woman moving through her memories. Woven through it all, a recurring, almost hypnotic musical motif, built on low frequencies that cause the body to vibrate gently.

These multisensory elements merge into a singular, all-encompassing experience that reaches both body and soul. Observations show that around ten to twenty percent of guests are moved to tears at this point. This remarkable phenomenon forms part of a scientific paper that Rottigni and Spence have co-authored — available to read in the Insights section.

The Closing Embrace

After the intensity of what has passed, the return to the present is handled with great care. Guiding Spirit and The Soul of Things form the harmonious conclusion of the menu. These courses embody the clarity that follows an emotional storm, and guide the guest into a state of stillness and interior calm.

Drawing on neuroscientific findings, these final taste experiences lower cognitive and emotional stress levels, and help to anchor the insights that have been gathered. They complete the circle back to Rottigni’s original vision: to bring people back into contact with themselves.

The Ceremonial Master in the Background

Rottigni observes his guests’ reactions from a respectful distance. He never intervenes, never moderates. The process must remain a deeply personal one. “The experience belongs to the guest. I simply provide the instruments and the sensory space.”

This conscious withdrawal is the foundation on which the Ayahuasca ritual rests. It creates the protected space in which vulnerability becomes possible. Guests speak of moments of profound emotional movement, of sudden insights that flash through consciousness, of a feeling of long-missed connectedness that holds them like a warm embrace.

Rottigni sees himself confirmed in a central observation: “We have forgotten how to listen to the signals our bodies send. We eat without tasting. We look without seeing.” The Sensorium Milano offers a sensory path back to that lost attentiveness.

A Catalyst for the Inner Map

The menu, as Rottigni describes it, is a living catalyst for exploring one’s own perception and for gently dissolving emotional blockages. The individual components — a bitter herb that tingles on the tongue, a sweet root that conjures childhood, a trace of smoke that moves through the nose — become sensory symbols on an interior map.

The flowing sequence of courses, the subtle interplay with music that runs through the evening like a thread, and the barely perceptible shifts in light together form a narrative arc. It leads softly from initial curiosity through moments of sensory challenge and personal reflection, to a final, warm embrace.

A Contemporary Reinterpretation

The Ayahuasca Menu at the Sensorium Milano is a contemporary reinterpretation of ancient rituals. It draws on the universal, sensory language of food to lead its guests, with great care, back toward themselves. It is a courageous and profoundly human experiment — one that reinvents, from the ground up, what a restaurant can be.

In doing so, it fulfils a deeper purpose: not simply to satisfy hunger, but to nourish on a register that reaches far beyond appetite and touches something quieter and longer-lasting. In a time of relentless stimulation, it offers a sensory space for slowing down — and a warm return to a form of attention that, for many, has long been buried.