Dining · Japanese, Vegetarian · Seto Inland Sea
Aisunao
A mostly vegan, brown-rice restaurant in a hundred-year-old house in Naoshima's Honmura district, open since 2006.
The Restaurant
Aisunao serves brown-rice vegetarian lunches in a traditional house of about a hundred years, renovated into a small restaurant behind a blue curtain in Honmura. It has been open since 2006. The cooking is mostly vegan, home-style and unfussy, and a blackboard in the dining room shows the prefecture each ingredient comes from.
The signature is the Aisu Nao set, a brown-rice lunch with a vegan option. The brown rice is pesticide-free and grown in Okayama, and the desserts contain no eggs or dairy: a rice-flour matcha cake, and, seasonally, soy milk ice cream and sweet red bean soup. Uchi Japan also mentions goziru, a miso soup thickened with soybean paste, and a rice-flour cake with bamboo charcoal and rum raisin.
Good to Know
Last orders are at 2:30 pm, and the restaurant closes on Mondays and on irregular holidays. Cafe-only visits are welcome. See the guide to the Seto Inland Sea art islands for the wider island.
Sources: Naoshima Tourism: Aisunao; Uchi Japan: Naoshima restaurants. Check the official websites for current information.
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