The tongue is cut thick, scored shallowly on both faces, salted, and left in the cold for several days before it meets charcoal. What arrives has more resistance than you expect and less fat, and it is served in a quantity that looks modest until you start.

The dish begins around 1950 in a single shop in Sendai. Under the occupation, beef was arriving in volume, and butchers were left with the cuts the American soldiers did not want. The shop's founder took the tongues. Supply was thin enough that he travelled into Yamagata, Fukushima and Iwate to find more, in a country that was still short of food.

The set that comes with it is barley rice, oxtail soup, lightly pickled vegetables, and a chilli-miso condiment. The barley was a wartime economy that stayed. The condiment came from the founder's home province, Yamagata. It is, in other words, an assembly made by an outsider from other people's things, which is what most local specialities turn out to be.

More than a hundred shops belong to the trade association now. After the bullet train reached Sendai in 1980 the dish changed register: cheap food for working men became something visitors come for. It costs accordingly.