Nothing is stirred together. A thin disc of batter goes down on the steel, and then cabbage is piled onto it in a heap that looks unmanageable, with pork belly and crisp scraps of fried batter on top. A little more batter is trickled over to hold the thing together, and the whole tower is flipped. The pancake becomes a lid, and the cabbage steams underneath it.

Meanwhile noodles are frying on another part of the griddle, and the tower is lifted across onto them. An egg is broken and spread into a circle, the stack is set down on that and turned once more. Nothing is ever mixed. It arrives as a cross-section, layer above layer, and the cook has spent the entire time keeping those layers apart.

The ancestor was a children's snack from before the war, batter and spring onion cooked on a plate and sold for one sen. Afterwards, when a sheet of steel was most of what a person needed in order to start a business, it grew into something else. By about 1950 there were whole streets of stalls doing it.

The noodles were not a chef's idea. A customer put a pancake on top of his fried noodles and ate them together, other people saw him and wanted the same, and it turned out to cost less than ordering the two things separately. The most distinctive part of the dish was decided by the room, not by the kitchen.