It is an Okayama specialty, and it came from Shibuya. The original was a menu item at a curry restaurant in Tokyo called Indeira, and a man named Idei, who happened to be from Okayama, obtained the owner's permission to take the recipe home with him when he left.

He opened a curry and coffee shop in Hokancho in Okayama in 1966. What happened after that was not the plan at all. The curry itself was perfectly fine. But this was what people actually wanted.

The rice on the plate is black, and the reason for that is not only the Worcester sauce going into it. Caramel is doing most of the work. The stated base of the flavor is a proprietary spice blend together with caramel sauce, which is why the taste comes out faintly sweet with a distinct toasted quality that Worcester sauce on its own would never produce.

Small shrimp are folded all the way through it, and it arrives on a flat plate rather than in a bowl, generally with something green sitting beside it. A dish carried three hundred miles west by a single homesick employee, and now known everywhere by the name of the city that received it rather than the name of the one where it was actually made.