A roof tile is heated until it would burn you, and green tea noodles are laid directly onto it. Not a plate. The underside of the noodles catches on the hot clay and goes crisp while the top stays soft, and by the end of the meal the best part of it is whatever has stuck to the tile.

On top go shredded omelette and thin slivers of beef, then chopped spring onion, nori, a slice of lemon and a small mound of grated daikon with chilli worked into it. A bowl of warm broth arrives alongside, and you dip.

The idea came out of a war story. In 1877, soldiers besieging Kumamoto Castle are said to have cooked wild greens and meat on roof tiles between engagements. A man named Takase Shinichi, who ran an inn at Kawatana hot spring, heard the story and in 1961 built a dish for his guests around it. The noodles are the green kind, with tea worked into the buckwheat, which is what makes the browning on the tile visible at all.

So this is a little over sixty years old, which is a great deal younger than the phrase local speciality usually implies. It has never really travelled, either. The tile is heavy and it has to be dangerously hot, and it turns out that those two facts are enough to keep a dish where it started.