Yakisaba Somen

**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.