It arrives on a steamer basket and it has not been steamed. Some shops sell it as seiro soba without using a basket at all. The name is the only part of the arrangement that survived.

In the early Edo period there was a fashion for steamed soba rather than boiled, cooked in a basket over water and eaten straight out of it. Buckwheat noodles then were more fragile than they are now, and steaming handled them more gently than a pot of boiling water did.

Boiling won in the end, and the basket stayed. What sits under your noodles today is a piece of equipment that no longer does the job it was built for; the slatted floor, which was there to let steam through, now exists to let water drain away. The tool became a plate.

The dipping sauce in the city is dark and salty — the sharp kind, as against the sweeter, milder broth of the west — and the rule everyone repeats is that you dip only the last inch of the noodles before drawing them up. Nobody in particular decided that. Between the basket and the etiquette, a good deal of what people talk about here has nothing to do with how the buckwheat actually tastes, which is arguably the most Tokyo thing about it.