Not stir-fried. Fried, and the distinction matters here. The noodles are pressed down onto a well-oiled iron plate and left there, undisturbed, until a proper brown crust has formed on the underside. Parts of it go past brown into scorched, and that is intended. Bean sprouts and pork go in alongside.

The result has two textures and the dish is essentially about the gap between them: sprouts that snap, and noodle that has gone hard and brittle where it met the metal. Everything else is in service of that contrast.

It comes from a shop in Hita called Sofuren. The founder, in the mid-1950s, is said to have been turning over the question of whether there was such a thing as a grilled noodle dish rather than a fried one, and worked toward this.

The lengths the shop goes to are what convinced me the original question was a serious one. The noodles are made differently according to the season and to the humidity on the day. The bean sprouts are grown in-house, from beans selected for the specific texture they will give. All of that infrastructure exists to guarantee one thing, which is that the underside of the noodles will be hard when the plate reaches the table.