There is black oil floating on the pork broth. Garlic, fried until it burns, then pressed into oil — mayu, it is called — and alongside it, chips of fried garlic scattered over the surface. The broth underneath is white; only the top of the bowl is dark.

The noodles are straight and medium-thick, made with little water and cooked slightly firm, so that they carry the broth up rather than dissolving into it.

Tonkotsu ramen began in Kurume, moved through Tamana, and arrived here. One shop opened in Kumamoto in the autumn of 1953 and another the following year. The garlic, which is the thing everyone now associates with the city, was worked out here rather than carried in with the broth — one cook at one shop is credited with it.

The biggest difference from Kurume and Tamana is not an ingredient at all. Those places keep a pot going and top it up, adding to a broth that has been running for years. Kumamoto uses up each day's stock the same day and starts again. That one procedural decision — not an ingredient, not a technique, a rule about time — is why the pork smell here is lighter, and it is a good example of a cuisine diverging from its parent by changing a rule rather than a recipe.