The noodle is more resistant than it looks. Held up to the light it is almost clear, and you expect it to give way; instead it pushes back against the teeth and refuses to break. Wheat flour and potato starch are worked together and forced through a press, which is why it behaves less like a noodle than like something extruded.

The dish arrived in Morioka in 1954, when a man from Hamhung opened a restaurant here and served the cold noodles of his home. He changed the buckwheat for wheat, which gave the noodle its glassy look. The name Morioka reimen came much later, in the nineteen-eighties, by which time nobody in the city thought of it as foreign.

The broth is beef bone, cold and clear. Around the rim sit radish kimchi and, disconcertingly, fruit: watermelon in summer, pear in autumn, a slice of apple. First-time visitors nearly always pause at this point and ask whether it is meant to be there.

It is. Between the chill and the chilli, one sweet thing settles everything down. You understand, eventually, why people order it after grilled meat rather than before, and why the city counts it as one of its three noodles rather than as somebody else's.