The man who worked it out was Hiroshi Yokoi, who cooked western food at the Nagoya Kokusai Hotel. Around 1959 he set out to make Italian pasta something that would take root here, and started combining demi-glace with the meat sauce that came with the pasta.

It took him about two years. In 1961 the result went on sale at a restaurant in Higashi ward, and in 1963 he opened his own place in Naka ward.

The specifications are exact. The pasta is 2.2 millimeters. It is boiled in advance and then fried in oil, treated like yakisoba rather than like pasta, which is the part that offends visitors and is also the point. The sauce runs seven parts vegetable other than tomato, two parts tomato, one part meat, simmered across two days and stirred every thirty minutes so it does not catch, then rested a week in the cold. The heat in it comes from finely ground black pepper and nothing else.

The menu names are their own small system. Vegetables on top is a Country. Meat on top is a Milanese. Both together is a Mirakan, which is those two words run into each other, and it exists because enough customers asked for one plate with everything on it that the kitchen gave in and named it.