Noodles
Supagetti Naporitan
Ketchup-based spaghetti invented at a Yokohama hotel after the war
After Japan's surrender, Hotel New Grand in Yokohama was requisitioned by GHQ, and the occupying troops there ate boiled spaghetti simply tossed with ketchup. After the requisition ended, Irie Shigetada, who became the hotel's second head chef, built a proper sauce around caramelized onion and garlic and fresh and canned tomato, turning the soldiers' snack into a hotel dish.
- Origin: Kanagawa Yokohama
Lineage
What it's made of
Ketchup's sweet tang and butter's richness come first, followed by the sweetness of stir-fried onion and garlic. A dusting of grated cheese and coarse pepper is standard, with ham, green pepper, and mushroom the usual colorful toppings. Thick spaghetti is used and boiled until properly chewy, and the sauce runs right to the edge of the plate, its color alone enough to raise an appetite.
How it's made
Just after the war, GHQ troops stationed at the requisitioned Hotel New Grand ate boiled spaghetti simply tossed with ketchup. After the requisition ended, the hotel's second head chef built a proper sauce from caramelized onion and garlic and tomato, turning the soldiers' snack into a hotel dish. The order and heat at which the ingredients are fried is what gives the sauce its depth.
Why it took this shape
That the dish grew from occupying soldiers' simple rations still shows in a sauce built around ketchup. Working canned tomato and cheese, both hard to get in postwar Japan, into a proper Western-style plate reflects the constraints of the era it was born in. The process of polishing a simple wartime snack into a proper dish is itself the story the plate tells.
Before you go
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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
- SupakatsuThe dish is traced to Izumiya, a Western-style diner in Kushiro founded in 1959. In a city not yet used to Western food, and in a climate that runs cool even in summer, the restaurant served its spaghetti on a hot iron plate so it would stay hot at the table, the idea that became spakatsu.
- Ankake SupagettiThe dish is traced to So-le, which opened in Nagoya's Higashi ward in 1961. At a time when spaghetti and meat sauce were still unfamiliar to Nagoya diners, the shop strained the sauce's solids out, added a peppery kick, and thickened it enough to cling to noodles, served on 2.2mm strands thicker than standard spaghetti.
- Tarako SupagettiSpaghetti tossed with salted cod roe and butter, a wafu-style pasta. Said to have branched off from the wafu supagetti line pioneered by a Tokyo spaghetti specialty shop that opened in 1953.
- PizaPizza with its tomato-and-cheese base intact but reworked with Japan-only toppings built around sweet-savory flavors and mayonnaise. Said to have spread mainly through delivery-pizza chains from the 1970s on.
- Toruko RaisuPilaf, napolitan-style spaghetti, and a pork cutlet plated together, a yoshoku dish from Nagasaki. Its name has several competing origin stories, from a Turkish rice dish to the plate's three colors.
Also from Kanagawa
- 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.
- Hiratsuka-kei TanmenA clear, salt-based broth carries a faint edge of acidity, topped with wakame seaweed and chopped onion — a thinner, less thickened bowl than the typical Kanagawa tanmen, said to have taken root among Chinese-style diners in Hiratsuka.