The buckwheat is milled with the hull still on it. The flour comes out dark, almost grey-black, and the smell is strong enough to reach you before the bowl does. Anyone used to the pale noodles of Tokyo needs a moment to accept that this is the same grain, and a second moment to notice how much more of it there is to taste.

Warigo soba arrives in three round lacquer dishes stacked one on another. You pour concentrated broth onto the top tier, eat, then tip what is left down into the next. It looks like etiquette and functions as washing-up: three dishes, one measure of broth, nothing wasted.

Kamaage is the winter version, served straight from the pot in its own cooking water, never rinsed. The starch stays in, the liquid is faintly sweet, and you adjust the strength yourself with broth from a flask. The style is said to come from festival days, when nobody had time to rinse anything.

The tradition arrived in 1638, when a lord transferred to Matsue brought soba makers with him from Matsumoto. A later lord, a tea master by inclination, ate it in public and brought it into the tea kitchen at a time when soba was thought common. The vessels and the sequence are practical arrangements from those years, kept on long after the reasons for them stopped applying.