Yakisaba Somen

Little knownBarely documented in English. This is the kind of place the site exists for.

Investigado y escrito por Hinato

yakisaba somenNagahamamackerelSaba Kaidolocal specialty

Photo: Asturio Cantabrio / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · original

Yakisaba somen was a gift, not a restaurant dish. In the farming villages around Nagahama a family whose daughter had married out would send a grilled salted mackerel to her husband's house at the busiest point of the rice planting, so that she would be fed properly during the work. The household simmered the fish in soy and sugar and cooked thin somen noodles in the resulting liquid.

What you get is a grilled mackerel fillet on a nest of noodles that have absorbed the sweet-salty braising stock, served cold or at room temperature. The mackerel came over the Saba Kaido from the Sea of Japan coast, salted for the journey, which is the same trade route that gave Kyoto its own mackerel dishes. Yokaro, in a 200-year-old merchant house near the Kurokabe quarter, is the shop most associated with it.

Información esencial

Horario

10:30 AM – 3:00 PM Tuesday to Sunday

Cerrado: Closed Mondays, opening if Monday is a public holiday and closing the following day instead

Entrada

¥950 for yakisaba somen | Saba Kaido set from ¥1,390

Mejor temporada

Year-round

Duración de la visita

45 minutes – 1 hour

Cómo llegar

Información de acceso

Yokaro at Motohama-cho 7-8, Nagahama City, about a short walk from Nagahama Station on the JR Hokuriku Line and a short walk from Kurokabe Square. Closed Mondays, opening if Monday is a public holiday and closing the following day instead. Yakisaba somen ¥950; the Saba Kaido set from ¥1,390. Other restaurants in Nagahama and Kohoku serve their own versions.

Guía privilegiada

**It is served cool, and that is correct.** The noodles are meant to have taken up the braising liquid and settled, not to arrive hot. People send it back thinking it is a mistake. **The dish is a gift, historically.** Sent from a bride's family to her married household during the rice planting so that she ate well. That is why it is rich, and why it is a Nagahama dish and not a Shiga one. **The building is 200 years old.** A merchant house with the interior intact, which is half the reason to eat here rather than elsewhere. **Kurokabe Square is next door.** The glass quarter in the converted black-walled bank building, and the reason most people are in Nagahama at all. **Salad pan is the other Nagahama thing.** A local bakery's bread roll filled with takuan pickle in mayonnaise, sold across the town, and considerably stranger than it sounds.

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