It started around 1975 as staff food in a Saga city restaurant. Warm rice, meat stir-fried sweet and salty, raw lettuce and tomato piled on top, mayonnaise squeezed over the lot. Somebody cooking for the kitchen crew used what was within reach. Regulars saw it, asked for it, and it went onto the menu without ceremony.

Fifty years later it is in coffee shops and restaurants across the city and in home kitchens too, and individual places have gone their own directions with it, using Saga beef, Mitse chicken, wild boar. The base has stayed the same. It still looks, on first sight, like someone put a salad on a plate of rice and then changed their mind halfway.

The name is the interesting part. The strongest explanation is that a film everyone was watching at the time was set in Sicily, and someone borrowed the island. That is as far as it goes. There is no founding document, no restaurant with an unambiguous claim, no dated menu.

So a city's signature dish has an origin nobody can verify and a name nobody can account for. In most places that would be treated as a problem to be solved. Here it seems to be regarded as a feature, or at least as none of anyone's business.