Beef offal and vegetables, fried together in a sweet-salty miso sauce, with ramen noodles folded in towards the end of the cooking. In Tottori this is a fairly ordinary item to find on a menu, particularly at grilled meat restaurants, where the offal is already on hand in the kitchen.

The noodles used are usually medium-thick ones. Some places use offal taken from Tottori wagyu cattle. The offal itself has both chew and depth to it, the miso sauce is heavier than a yakisoba sauce would normally be, and the vegetables go slack against the hot metal. The three things become one thing on the plate.

When it started I could not establish. Not one of the pages I opened says. The prefecture's tourism material describes what it is and how it tastes. The shops describe their own version. Nobody at all gives a date, or a founder, or the name of a first restaurant.

That absence may itself turn out to be the answer. Dishes tend to acquire origin stories at the moment somebody decides to promote them to outsiders. This one appears to have simply sat on the menu, in ordinary restaurants, being ordered by people who live there, for long enough that nobody thought to write down when it began.