Tantanmen (Japanese dan dan noodles) Period BOrigin theory BVerified

From dry to soup

The dandan noodles familiar in Japan are a bowl of steaming, sesame-scented broth with boiled noodles sitting in it, sharpened by chili oil. But Sichuan's dandan noodles were originally dry, with no broth at all. The soup version that a Japanese diner pictures at the word tantanmen was shaped in Japan in the second half of the twentieth century.

The man who reworked it was Chen Kenmin, a cook from Zigong in Sichuan who arrived in Japan in 1952. In the autumn of 1958 he opened the Szechwan restaurant Shisen Hanten in Tamura-cho, in what is now Nishi-Shinbashi, Tokyo. Dry noodles without broth were still unfamiliar to Japanese diners at the time. So Chen recast the dish in the manner of ramen, in a bowl of broth, and added sesame paste too.

Wheat noodles, sesame, pork, and chili were all ordinary things in a postwar Japanese kitchen. In Chen's hands the dish moved toward a Japanese table that liked its noodles in soup. The soup-style bowl that came of it spread from Chinese restaurants to ramen shops.

In Japan today, dandan noodles mean a bowl of sesame soup, and that settled image is said to go back to one cook's adaptation. That Chen Kenmin turned the dry noodle of its homeland into a soup bowl for Japanese diners is told in much the same way by a ramen-history column, a food-magazine article and an encyclopedia entry, and no account has been found that disputes his part as its creator. The food-magazine article does, however, mention one view that a soup-style dandan noodle had already appeared in Hong Kong in the 1940s. The article gives no source for it, and the claim remains unconfirmed.

Chen's own path is on record. His arrival in Japan in 1952 and the opening of the first Shisen Hanten in the autumn of 1958 are set down in the restaurant's own history, and his appearances on NHK's cooking program Kyo no Ryori from 1966 in NHK's profile of him. Neither of those two records, though, mentions dandan noodles. It is the ramen-history column that says the noodles, too, were shown on the program in their soup form, and that this is how dandan noodles came to be known in Japan as a soup dish. The column does not say in which year the change to soup was made, or in which broadcast the noodles appeared.

That soup-style dandan noodles were being served in restaurants can be traced through another record. A 1968 book on Chinese noodle dishes from the publisher Shibata Shoten lists a "tantan tanmen" (担担湯麵) from the Kintetsu Daihanten restaurant in Kanda, Tokyo, made by putting sesame paste, soy sauce and other seasonings in the bowl, pouring in hot broth and adding the noodles. By 1968 at the latest, then, soup-style dandan noodles were on the menu at a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo. The entry names neither Chen Kenmin nor Shisen Hanten, so it does not tell us who first put the noodles in soup, and it cannot yet be called the earliest record.

Sichuan's own dandan noodles were the dry street noodle carried and sold on a shoulder pole, and Japan's soup bowl is a style that branched from it. The two noodles, sharing a name yet differing in form, show how a dish is reworked as it crosses the sea.