The story
Villa Aida sits at 71-5 Kawajiri, Iwadecity, in Iwade, Japan, where the Italian kitchen earned a Gault&Millau score of 17 for 2026. The restaurant cooks from the vegetable fields around its own building, and chef Kanji Kobayashi has built the menu around them.
Kobayashi marked the restaurant's 28th anniversary in 2026 and wrote that the kitchen moved to a vegetable-only menu after a period of trial and rebuilding. He had visited vegetable restaurants in New York, Vienna, Spain, Italy, Paris and Shanghai before making the change. Dairy, honey and eggs still appear in some preparations, and the team plans to reduce them gradually.
More than 300 vegetable varieties grow in the fields around the restaurant. The kitchen judges the size and shape of each one before pairing it with other ingredients. Surplus harvest becomes candied, pickled and dried vegetables, bottled tomatoes in summer, and olives pickled in salt in autumn. The We're Smart Green Guide also lists the restaurant with 5 Radishes for 2026.
Dinner is a course menu of eight plates and two desserts, built around seasonal produce and the chef's own ideas. Kobayashi's earlier restaurant, Ristorante AiDA, opened in the town where he grew up and is close to twenty years old. That history shows in a menu that treats the Italian cooking as a conversation with the local farms.
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