Butter rice, seasoned with ketchup, wrapped in a thin omelette in the manner of an omuraisu. On top of that, a piece of white fish in breadcrumbs, then ketchup and tartare sauce over the whole thing. Everything the plate is going to give you is visible at once.

The name is a puzzle that nobody has solved. The usual explanation is that it combines Hun, for Hungary, with thon, the French word for tuna. It is not a Hungarian dish, and the fish on it now is not tuna. Two wrong words, joined, and the result has stuck for half a century.

It started as staff food. The account has it that a head chef at a department store restaurant in Kanazawa built it so that the kitchen could eat rice and a main course from one plate inside a short break. A cook who had worked there opened his own place and put it on the menu under this name in 1967. Another shop, opening in 1970, is also named as the origin, and the two accounts have never been reconciled.

Food invented for staff is food invented for speed. This one has kept that shape — one plate, no sides, nothing to assemble — and has been the thing visitors are told to eat in Kanazawa for more than fifty years.