Noodles
Beppu Reimen
A postwar returnee's cold noodle, refit with a Japanese fish stock
The dish's spread is traced to around 1950, when a cook repatriated from what had been Manchuria began making cold noodles in Beppu. Genso Arirang, founded that same year, is often named as the pioneering shop; the local style pairs a Japanese-style seafood stock with noodles made from buckwheat, wheat, and starch.
- Origin: Oita Beppu
- About 800 km west of Tokyo
What it's made of
Noodles made from buckwheat, wheat, and starch, served in a Japanese-style seafood broth — the naengmyeon idea refit with local dashi, which is where its identity lies. Lighter on the tongue than the beef-bone broth typical of other regional cold noodles, the dashi's aroma rises first and the finish is clean, letting it be eaten easily even in the heat.
How it's made
A dough blending several flours gives the noodles their chew; they are boiled, then served chilled in a seafood stock rather than the beef broth typical elsewhere — the choice that sets this region's version apart. Garnishes such as shredded egg and cucumber keep it light, some shops adding kimchi for extra heat.
Why it took this shape
The dish's spread is traced to around 1950, when a cook repatriated from what had been Manchuria began making cold noodles in Beppu; Genso Arirang, founded that same year, is often named as the pioneering shop. In a town rich in hot springs and seafood, reaching for a familiar seafood stock instead of the beef broth of home reads as a natural local substitution — a tourist and hot-spring town's openness to reworking an imported technique.
Before you go
- How to read a ticket machineShops that use a ticket machine (shokken-ki) often place their most popular items in a similar spot.
- 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.
- What staff say, and how to respondCommon set phrases you'll hear at restaurants, with what they mean and what to do when you hear them. You don't need to memorize them — just recognizing them is enough.
Dishes in the same style
- Abura SobaNo broth is poured at all — noodles are tossed in a soy-and-sesame-oil tare pooled at the bottom of the bowl, said to have started at shops in the Musashino area in the late 1950s, with vinegar and chili oil stirred in partway through.
- Abura ZomenPork and somen are fried together with a splash of broth, the oil and stock emulsifying into a silky coat on the noodles. Just how somen took root in wheat-free Amami isn't clear, but the dish is a fixture whenever people gather, not least for the August Dance festival.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Contrast
- Morioka ReimenIn 1954, Aoki Teruhito, born in Hamhung in what is now North Korea, opened the restaurant Shokudoen in Morioka and combined the mild flavor of Pyongyang-style cold noodles with the spicier taste of his hometown's version. Early reception was rough, and the recipe was reworked over years of customer feedback until the noodle settled into its current potato-starch-and-wheat form.
- Kure ReimenChinrai-ken, which began as a postwar street stall on Kure's Nakadori, created the dish in 1955 as a successor to its signature wonton noodles. Using ordinary Chinese-noodle-shop noodles would have made it hiyashi chuka rather than something new, so the shop had a chewy, custom flat noodle made and paired it with a broth built for sweetness and a little heat, with the sourness dialed back.
Also from Oita
- Aji no MaruzushiA whole horse mackerel, cured in plum vinegar and opened flat, is wrapped around vinegared rice and rolled in red shiso leaf — a celebratory sushi from Saiki, painstaking to prepare, built on the rich mackerel landed from the Bungo Channel.
- AmimeshiKrill simmered sweet-savory in mirin, soy sauce, and ginger is folded into freshly steamed rice — a dish from the Usa, Nakatsu, and Bungotakada coast, where krill are hauled from the Buzen Sea tideflats each autumn and winter; a favorite of the northern Oita coast.
- Atama RyoriGills, jaw, and innards of a large fish like grouper are quickly parboiled along with the flesh and piled onto a single platter — a dish from inland Taketa, far from the sea, said to have grown from a wish to waste nothing of a rare catch, served with a citrus dipping sauce.
- Ayu UrukaAyu (sweetfish) flesh or innards are minced with salt and left to ferment for about a week — an Oita salted delicacy said to have begun as a way to keep the clean river's seasonal catch; the innards-only version, nigauruka, carries a distinctive bitterness.
- Dango-jiruWheat dough kneaded and stretched into flat ribbons is simmered with root vegetables and shiitake in a barley-miso broth — an everyday Oita dish born of the prefecture's flour-based food culture, where poor rice land pushed wheat to the fore; the ribbons keep a firmer bite than udon.
- Gan-jiruA live mitten crab is ground shell and all, strained, and simmered into a broth seasoned with salt or soy sauce — a Usa dish in which the protein sets into soft curds as it heats, often gathered with mustard greens added to draw out more flavor.