Yakisaba Somen

yakisaba somenNagahamamackerelSaba Kaidolocal specialty

Shiga · Nagahama

35.3803°N, 136.2671°E

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.

Essential Information

Opening Hours

10:30 AM – 3:00 PM Tuesday to Sunday

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

Entrance Fee

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

Best Season

Year-round

Visit Duration

45 minutes – 1 hour

Getting There

Access Information

Yokaro at Motohama-cho 7-8, Nagahama City, about 10 minutes on foot from Nagahama Station on the JR Hokuriku Line and a short walk from Kurokabe Square. Open 10:30 AM to 3:00 PM Tuesday to Sunday. 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.

Insider Guide

Premium

**Lunch only, and it closes at 3:00 PM.** A common trip-breaker. Turning up at 4:00 PM in Nagahama expecting dinner does not work. **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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