In 1899 a Chinese restaurant called Shikairo opened in Hiromaba-machi in Nagasaki, on the site of what had been the Chinese quarter of the city. Its founder, Chin Heijun, had come from Fujian province in Qing China.

What he was actually trying to solve was a practical problem in front of him. Chinese students and members of the local Chinese community in Nagasaki needed food that was good, filling, nutritious, and, above all, cheap. His answer to it was noodles in a chicken and pork bone broth, loaded up with whatever the mountains and the sea around Nagasaki happened to produce that day. That is champon, and it is still made that way.

Sara udon branched off from that. The champon noodles are grilled first, then fried together with the same ingredients, and a small quantity of broth is added at the end and allowed to soak into the noodles rather than pooling around them in the dish.

The result was a noodle dish with no soup in it, served flat on a plate, and it was named for exactly that and nothing else: sara, plate, and udon, noodles. The name describes the crockery and nothing else. A hundred and twenty years on, that is still exactly what it is called, and the plate it comes on is still flat.