Order an Italian in Niigata and what arrives is thick noodles, stir-fried, with meat sauce ladled over the top. It was born in 1960 at a sweet shop in the Furumachi district. The company's former chairman had been to Tokyo, seen something at a teppanyaki place in Kyobashi, and came home with an idea he then spent a while turning into this.

The noodles and the sauce are both custom, worked out over repeated attempts with the manufacturers rather than pulled off a shelf. Bean sprouts and cabbage are folded through the noodles so the texture shifts as you chew. The pale pickled ginger on the side is made by an old pickle house in the city, for this dish and nothing else. Three other sauces exist: white, curry, tomato tuna.

Described in parts it makes very little sense. It smells like yakisoba. It chews like fried udon. What sits on top is a meat sauce heavy with tomato paste and grated cheese, and the whole thing is eaten with a fork rather than chopsticks.

None of the pieces belong together, and the city has been eating it for over sixty years anyway. That is the part worth noticing. A dish does not have to cohere on paper to become the thing people mean when they say they are hungry and they are going home.