The dish is said to have started in Hitachinaka and to have spread out from there, chiefly by way of Mito, across the central part of Ibaraki prefecture.

What defines the bowl is the sauce: a thick, sweet-salty an absolutely loaded with ingredients. Liver. Kabocha squash. Nira. Cabbage. All of it gets ladled over the noodles while it is still scalding.

There are two ways of serving the thing. Hot, in which the an goes over hot noodles in the ordinary manner. And hiyashi, where the noodles are chilled and firmed and then the scalding sauce is poured over them. The second of those is the one worth traveling for, and it is also the one that sounds most wrong when described: cold noodles underneath a hot, thick sauce, the two of them eaten together in the same mouthful.

The combination of squash and liver sitting together in a single bowl is not something I have encountered anywhere else either, in any cuisine. It has been perfectly ordinary local food in central Ibaraki for decades now. The chilled version, as I understand it, exists because somebody wanted a way to keep eating this through an Ibaraki summer, which is a reasonable thing to want.