Nagasaki champon: a port city's everything-in-one bowl

Some noodle bowls are about restraint. Champon (ちゃんぽん) is about abundance. It arrives piled high with cabbage and bean sprouts, slices of pork, squid, shrimp and pink-edged fish cake, all glistening from the wok and half-submerged in a cloudy, gently savoury broth. Somewhere underneath are thick noodles that were cooked right in the soup. It's a meal that seems designed to make sure nobody leaves hungry.

According to the best-known story, that's exactly what it was designed to do.

A port city's story

Nagasaki, on the western coast of Kyushu, has a long history as Japan's window on the wider world. During the centuries when Japan tightly restricted foreign contact, Dutch traders were confined to Dejima, a small artificial island in Nagasaki's harbour, and Chinese merchants lived and traded in their own quarter of the city. Goods, ideas and recipes arrived here long before they reached the rest of the country, and Nagasaki's Chinatown remains one of the best known in Japan.

Champon is usually credited to Chen Pingshun (陳平順), a Chinese cook who ran a restaurant called Shikairo (四海楼). Around 1899, the story goes, he created a cheap, filling dish for the Chinese students then living in Nagasaki, many of whom had little money and needed a nourishing meal. By combining inexpensive pork and seafood with plenty of vegetables, he made a bowl that delivered a great deal of flavour and sustenance for very little.

Where the name comes from is less certain. One popular theory links it to a Fujianese expression about having a meal. In everyday Japanese, champon has also come to mean mixing different things together, which suits the dish rather well.

How champon is made

What sets champon apart from most ramen is the order of operations. In a typical ramen shop, noodles are boiled separately, placed in a bowl of broth and then topped. Champon is built in the wok.

First, pork, seafood and vegetables are stir-fried over high heat, picking up a little smoky char. Then a broth made from pork and chicken bones goes straight into the pan, and everything simmers together. The thick noodles cook in that same soup, soaking up its flavour as they soften, and the whole lot is tipped into a deep bowl.

That method explains the taste. The broth is rich but not heavy, with sweetness from the cabbage, depth from the seafood and a gentle wok-fried aroma running through it. The noodles are soft and plump, more substantial than most ramen noodles. It's less a soup with noodles in it than a whole meal in liquid form.

Typical ingredients include cabbage, bean sprouts, onion, pork, squid, shrimp and kamaboko (蒲鉾), the fish cake that adds a cheerful flash of pink. The exact mix varies from cook to cook. If you want to compare it with Kyushu's other great noodle soup, our guide to Hakata tonkotsu shows how differently two neighbouring cities can treat a pork broth.

Its crispy sibling: sara udon

Where you find champon, you'll often find sara udon (皿うどん) on the same menu. The name means "plate udon", though it has little to do with the thick wheat noodles most people picture when they hear the word. The best-known version is a bed of thin, crisp fried noodles, topped with much the same stir-fry as champon, but in a thick, glossy sauce rather than a soup. Some shops also offer a version with thicker, softer noodles.

The fun of the crispy kind is watching the textures change. At first the noodles crackle under the sauce. As you eat, they soften at the edges while staying crunchy in the middle. Many people in Nagasaki like to add a splash of Worcestershire-style sauce at the table, and I think it's worth trying at least once.

How to eat champon

• Go hungry. Champon is a full meal on its own, and portions tend to be generous.
• Start with the vegetables. They're on top and at their crunchiest at the beginning.
• Keep the noodles moving. Because they're cooked in the soup, they keep softening. Enjoy them while they still have a little spring.
• Try both dishes. If you're eating with someone, order one champon and one sara udon to share. They're two sides of the same idea.
• Leave room for the broth. By the end it has absorbed flavour from everything in the bowl, and it's the best part.

Generosity as a recipe

I think champon tells you something lovely about Nagasaki. It's a dish attributed to a cook looking after young people far from home, built from whatever was affordable and good, in a city that spent centuries welcoming ingredients and ideas from elsewhere. How that fits into the wider arrival of Chinese-style noodles in Japan is a story our history of ramen picks up.

The result is a bowl with no single star. Pork, seafood, vegetables and noodles all share the stage, and the broth ties them together. In a world of minimalist bowls, there's real joy in one that simply gives you more.