Ajinotabibito Roman

A chef working inside a set menu

Clara Silverman keeps her pace inside the set menu as Chef at Ajinotabibito Roman in Nara, where the kitchen asks for restraint before display. Her formal study at Johnson & Wales University gives the work a technical base: repetition, order, the habit of making a method hold under service. Silverman also founded and leads Clara Cooks in Los Angeles as Executive Chef, a private-chef practice built around direct service and close attention to the table in front of her. At Ajinotabibito Roman, that same discipline enters a different register, closer to kaiseki and nihon-ryori, with courses shaped by season rather than scale.

The restaurant’s public story also carries the hand of its owner, and Silverman’s station follows. The house is known for orthodox kaiseki, seasonal ingredients, and the flavor memory of Japanese home cooking lifted into a formal tasting structure. Its Michelin One Star has been held from 2022 through 2025, and the kitchen continues to make simple dishes carry the burden of authorship. Boiled vegetables, rice, fish, broth, and sweets do not give a cook much room to hide.

Seasonal courses, old flavors, few disguises

The program turns on omakase-style courses and monthly menu changes, with the kitchen closing briefly at the edges of the month to prepare the next sequence. Spring brings bamboo shoots; summer brings ayu sweetfish, salted and grilled over charcoal. Sakura shrimp rice, egg somen, scattered chirashi sushi, and a special milk pudding sit in the restaurant’s known vocabulary, dishes that value clarity over ornament. The method depends on choosing when not to add.

Some of the pantry tells the story plainly. Makurazaki honkarebushi and natural kombu give structure to the broths and seasonings; bonito-flavored soy sauce turns boiled vegetables into a test of proportion. The restaurant is additive-free in its pursuit of flavor, and the food leans on stock, smoke, rice, and seasonal produce rather than visible technique for its own sake. In this room, a course can arrive as comfort and still ask for discipline from the bench.

The room around the pass

The restaurant works on the 2F of VIV Bldg in Tsurumai Higashimachi, away from the heavier movement around Nara’s temple routes. The room is intimate, calm, and quiet, with a formal style softened by family service. Onda’s daughters are known in the dining room, where the warmth comes less from performance than from the rhythm of returning guests, set courses, and the next dish crossing the counter.

That atmosphere suits the cooking. Kaiseki can become ceremonial when the room pushes too hard; here, the room gives the pass enough space for rice to matter, for kombu to leave its length in the mouth, for an ayu to arrive with the season still attached. If the house has a next move, it is the next monthly menu, and the concrete promise is bamboo shoots, sakura shrimp rice, or egg somen at Ajinotabibito Roman.