Home-style ── Machi-chuka (Japanese-Chinese diner food)
Tanmen
Tanmen — stir-fried vegetables and pork in a clear salted broth over ramen noodles
Bean sprouts, cabbage, and pork stir-fried over high heat go into a clear, salted chicken broth with ramen noodles. Chinese 'tangmian' just means noodles in soup generally, but Japan's tanmen is said to have settled into its own specific dish under that name.
- Origin: Kanagawa Yokohama
Lineage
What it's made of
Lean in over the bowl and the first thing to hit is the smell of vegetables seared over high heat. Bean sprouts, cabbage, and carrot go limp but keep some bite, sitting over a clear, salted chicken broth. Paler than a soy or miso ramen, it's said to owe its character to the sweetness of the vegetables and the fat rendered from the pork.
How it's made
Garlic, bean sprouts, cabbage, and pork are stir-fried fast in a hot wok, then a chicken or pork-bone broth is added and seasoned with salt. Boiling it hard enough to turn faintly cloudy is said to be the key to drawing out the vegetables' flavor, and the vegetable mix and how much bite is left in them mark each shop's own touch.
Why it took this shape
One account traces tanmen to a Chinese restaurant that opened in Yokohama in 1955, where a cook repatriated from Manchuria is said to have recreated a home-style dish he'd learned there. The same shop is said to have made gyoza its other signature, and the pairing of stir-fried vegetables with a salted broth is thought to have spread as the kind of dish a neighborhood diner could build from limited ingredients in a single hot wok.
Before you go
- Yokohama ChinatownSaid to be one of the largest Chinatowns in Japan, with more than 150 Chinese restaurants and food shops. Offerings range widely from street snacks to formal course meals.
- How to shop at a supermarketHow to choose prepared foods, sashimi, and packaged sushi, when discount stickers tend to appear, region-only specialties, buying by weight, the checkout and bagging flow, and sampling etiquette at a local supermarket.
- Foods to look for in summerA guide to foods often seen in Japan around summer — eel on the Day of the Ox, hiyashi chuka, somen, shaved ice, edamame with beer, and hamo — with rough pointers for finding them.
Dishes in the same style
- Annin-dofuA dessert descended from Chinese medicinal cooking that uses apricot kernels. In Japan it is often made with milk and almond essence, and the Hong Kong style of fruit and jelly floating in syrup took hold at Chinese restaurants and in school lunches.
- BambanjiSteamed chicken pulled into shreds and dressed with a sauce rich in ground sesame, served cold. It is based on a Sichuan dish, and in Japan a milder, sweeter sesame sauce with cucumber and other vegetables became the norm.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Kanagawa
- DoriaButter rice topped with shrimp in cream, covered in white sauce and cheese and baked. Said to have been improvised at a Yokohama hotel for a guest who wasn't feeling well.
- Ebi MayoBattered, fried shrimp are tossed in a sweet mayonnaise-based sauce — said to have begun when a Cantonese chef, unsatisfied with a mayonnaise-dressed shrimp dish he'd eaten in the United States, remade it his own way.
- Gyu NabeA Yokohama-born hot pot of beef, tofu and chrysanthemum greens simmered from the start in a soy or miso-based sauce. Born of the port city's encounter with Western meat-eating culture, it is said to trace to a tavern owner who opened one of the first beef-pot restaurants.
- Harihari-zukeDaikon cut thicker than ordinary kiriboshi strips, dried, then pickled in a soy-based sauce — a Miura Peninsula specialty. Its name is said to echo the crisp "hari-hari" bite, developed in Miura, a daikon-growing region since the Edo period.
- Herahera DangoA confection from Sajima in Yokosuka City, flattened dumplings of wheat or glutinous rice flour coated in sweet bean paste. Offered at the shrine during a summer boat festival to pray for a good catch and good health, it is still shared among family.