Some history about the noodle dish, and some speculations. I can’t stop thinking about this.
The yock has blown up on the social media apps, cooking websites, and all over generally. Unfortunately, most of the history is myth, and what’s being lost is some actual history.
I don’t know the origin of the dish, but there is some recorded history that conflicts with the popular story, which seems to be largely myth.
The main journalist writing (and righting) history is Regina Boone, a journalist from Richmond VA, whose father’s father, Tsujiro Miyazaki, owned a restaurant, the Horse Shoe Cafe, in Suffolk, VA, which served yock-o-mein. Miyazaki’s son, Raymond Harold Boone, sold the restaurant to Perry Jane Davis Lambert, in 1945. Employee Bernice Cofield learned to make the yock, and sold it at church fundraisers. Today, it’s part of the Black culture there. This is detailed in the John Davis interview at SFA.
Boone’s stories: Pilot, NHK, Style Weekly
My grandfather ran the Tokyo Restaurant in the 1930s in Portsmouth VA. The link has a picture to the restaurant, which shows “Yock A Mein” on the window. The restaurant was located on High Street.
This is history, not myth. The history isn’t the origin of yock, nor is it an explanation of how yock became African American food, but it documents a clear spread of yock from a Japanese business to a Black business, into the Black culture in the Tidewater area.
Now, the New Orleans origin stories about yock – they aren’t backed up by facts – at least not facts that predate the Tidewater facts. The New Orleans stories of the time before the 1950s are myth at this time. Eventually, as more facts are unearthed, we may find a different origin story, or this origin story may be reinforced.
Not only that, but the Southern Foodways Alliance stories about yock also engage in mythology, by not presenting facts about the Chinese production of yock that predate the 1950s in the Tidewater area.
Factoids and Speculations
There’s basically two forms of yock: New Orleans and Tidewater (or Hampton Roads) around VA and MD. The descriptions are quite different.
New Orleans is the dominant style online, and it’s got obvious Creole or French influences, particularly in how the soup is made. This is probably a local variant, for obvious reasons. It’s also called Old Sober.
The Tidewater version seems to have the following features: “linguine” style wheat noodle, chicken broth soup with soy sauce, garnishes are sliced steak, a boiled egg sliced in half, and green onions or bulb onions. Also, some people add ketchup and/or vinegar. (I need to screenshot comments on different site to establish this fact.)
The prep I am reading sounds like yock is really close to Japanese udon, at least the old style, which is udon wheat noodles, a fish broth (dashi) + soy sauce broth, a boiled egg sliced in half, a slice of fish cake, green onions, and some cooked spinach (which I think is a Toyama thing).
That’s what I grew up eating, except we used a square noodle instead of a rectangular “linguine” style. However, there are udon with rectangular cross sections available:
Yokogiri udon has a rectangular cross section. Kishimen is a little wider.
These also show up as Wel Pac Yokogiri Udon. It appears to have a rectangular cross section.
Note that foods change, so I’m recalling an udon my mother made in the 1970s, and she came over in the late 1960s, so her sense of what udon is, is stuck in the past. Today’s udon tends to be fresher, rather than dried.
Udon shops have been in the US over a century, but today’s tend to use fresh noodles. This is a relatively new thing, even in Los Angeles. I remember the first time we went to get fresh udon from Sanuki no Sato in Gardena, back in the 90s.
Before then, I recall most places serving dried noodles. The dominant noodle company was Nanka Seimen established in 1905 in Los Angeles, and their product is pictured above. The history of mass production of udon indicates that Nanka Seimen was formed not too long after udon mass production was begun.
Fiber Foods of Norfolk
The Sam Lee Noodle Company, est. 1906, eventually became the Norfolk Noodle Company, and then Fiber Foods. Here’s a quote from the FF site’s cached copy from 2024:
Established in the 1930s, Norfolk Noodle Factory has become well known for its unique Yock Noodle, also known as Yock-a-Mein. This popular product is famous up and down the East Coast, and homeward-bound Atlantic Fleet sailors have spread it across the nation. Now known as Fiber Foods, the company remains rooted in Norfolk, Virginia, and continues to turn out the same fine product for your enjoyment. The main difference is streamlined production techniques.
Expanding distribution from Norfolk to the entire Tidewater area, orders now reach us from around the U.S. and abroad. Fond memories of Yock have created customer loyalty that defies time and distance. The lingering memory of Yock’s unique taste keeps people reaching out to us again and again.The name may have changed, but we’ve kept the traditional ingredients and methods of fabricating and drying the noodles. All this to remind customers of the Yock they enjoyed 90 years ago. Don’t miss the Products page of our site to learn about exciting new items in our delicious lineup.
Now, our Web site enables us to rediscover long-lost friends and make new ones. Come taste Yock for the first time, or let the flavor of the past carry you back to the Norfolk you once knew.
Image of yock from the Fiber Foods site:
So, in all likelihood, I’d guess yock has Chinese origins, because of the noodle type, and the name, but Japanese restauranteurs probably made it more Japanese style.
Japanese style noodles are all variations on Chinese style, but with a lot of “stuff” added. Noodles originate from China, but the local people adapt it. The main Japanese adaptations were to produce the noodle by slicing it rather than pulling it, and serving it with add-ons to the broth.
There’s another historic factor here – in that ingredients were harder to come by in the past. So, whatever Asian made yock-a-mein, they’d be limited to what’s available: eggs, meat, veggies.
Ketchup and Vinegar
One thing that’s odd about yock is that some people eat it with lots of ketchup or vinegar, or both. I wondered why. My father used to add ketchup and hot sauce, and I thought it was weird.
Well, out of my ignorance about Filipino food, I didn’t know there was a soup that basically tastes like ketchup and vinegar in broth: sinigang. It’s a stew, and one of the most popular Filipino foods.
Sinigang is a tamarind broth with stewed ingredients. It’s sweet and sour.
So, how could Filipinos influence yock?
Note about where yock is popular: Norfolk and New Orleans.
These are two major port cities. Who are in the port cities? Sailors.
Are Filipinos sailors? Hell yes. They are one of the major ethnic groups in shipping, and have been for centuries.
The first settlement of Asians in the US were Filipinos in Louisiana, escaping slavery.
When I asked my father about Asians in Portsmouth in the 30s, he said, yeah, there were others. There were Chinese, but the largest group were the Filipinos.
According to the Nat Geo article, Filipino sailors were in the US since the Civil War, and were cooks in the Navy (just like my grandfather), and were in the Tidewater cities.
So, I have no historic proof, but I suspect that the practice of adding sourness to the soup is by Filipino sailors. Sourness would make the food taste right.
Why would Black people in the South continue this, though?
I suspect it’s the ketchup and hot sauce. Southern cuisine tends to combine meat flavors with sweet flavors, and ketchup does exactly that, just like BBQ.
Old Sober? Osoba?
Yock articles often note that it’s called “old sober”.
I think the origin of that names is one of the Japanese names for noodles, “soba”.
In Japanese, if you want to “honor” something, you prepend it with an “o-“. It’s pronounced “oh”. This is called an honorific. Here’s a list of words and their honorifics:
| Plain | Respectful | Pronounciation |
| nigiri | onigiri | oh-nih-gih-ree |
| jiichan | ojiisan | oh-jee-san |
| benjo | obenjo | oh-ben-joh |
| soba | osoba | oh-soh-bah |
The pronunciation of “o-soba” is almost the same as “ol’ sober”, if you pronounce “sober” as “sobah”.
Now, I don’t have a lot of evidence on video that people pronounce it that way. Most of them pronounce it as “sober” with the “r” at the end, but I found this video that pronounced it “old sobah”.
The use of honorifics has changed, but in Hawaii, it’s stuck around and people use “o” in front of many words, a remnant of the habits of the Meiji era people who came to the islands to cut sugar cane in the late 1800s.
So, while it might seem odd to refer to soba as “o-soba” today, it may have been common among Japanese in America in the early 1900s.
In Japanese, there’s three words for noodles: mein, soba, and udon. Mein and udon are from Chinese, and don’t refer to a specific type of noodle. Soba stared as buckwheat noodles, but became generic.
You can still find a product in the US called “chuka soba“, which is a Chinese style noodle. “Chuka” means Chinese, so chuka soba is “Chinese soba”. It’s typically used for chow mein, but, in Japan, “chuka soba” was the name of ramen before it was renamed by the “Chikin Ramen” product (the first instant ramen) in the late 1950s.
Yakisoba means “fried soba”, but the noodle used is a yellow, round noodle, closer to chow mein (which also means “fried noodle”). I’ve found that pancit works well for yakisoba. This is what some call “lo mein”.
What about Mein?
If anything points to a Chinese origin of yock, it’s “mein”. It means “noodle” in Chinese, and is used through much of Asia, including Japan.
There’s evidence of Chinese noodles in the Tidewater, the Sam Lee Noodle Company, est. 1906.
I started to wonder if there was a reason why “yock-o” might appear in the name, and considered the fact that Yokohama has a large Chinatown.
Yokohama is a port city which established a Chinatown in the late 1800s, and had Chinese people there since the 1850s.
This is all speculative, but perhaps “yok-o” is a reference to Yokohama Chinatown and the noodles there. It would also point to a Chinese origin for yock, but Chinese via Japan, or perhaps an adaptation of Chinese noodles, by Chinese people, in Japan.
I’m assuming, the customers for this noodle, initally, are sailors, and there were Asian sailors from Japan, China, and the Philippines in these port communities.
In the Tidewater area, where there’s the oldest evidence of yock, it’s spelled “yock-o-mein”, not “yacamein”. “Yoko” would have a meaning to these sailors, who may have worked on ships that docked in Yokohama.
What about Yatka Mein or Yat Gaw Mein?
One of the arguments about the Chinese American origin of yock is that “yat gaw mein” means one-item noodle in Cantonese.
I think this is a relatively good premise for a Chinese origin, but I wonder, why would we have the “one item” noodle, and not a “two item” or “three item” noodle?
Another suggestion is that it refers to a single order of noodles. Again, it makes me wonder, what do you call it when a customer orders two noodles?
Baltimore and Philly Yat Gaw Mein
They seem to have a noodle more like a chow mein, but with thick noodles. It sounds almost like yaki-udon.
This is a recipe for Baltimore yakamein that sounds more like chow fun. The embedded video shows a woman making yakamein, and she uses udon as the noodle, and it looks like sukiyaki or hotpot to me.
But why does everyone yock’s origin is Chinese?
Because, to many Americans, anything Asian is Chinese. They don’t really consider that Chinese noodle knowledge was spreading around Asia around 2,500 years ago.
While the origin of all noodles is Chinese, that doesn’t mean that we should classify anything that’s noodles as Chinese.
Yock for the Future?
The past of yock is unclear, mainly because the history of people of color in the Americas isn’t well documented.
The only concrete evidence I have points to Japanese Americans and African Americans sharing the culture.
However, already, we are seeing how the present rewrites the past. The mythology of New Orleans yock is hiding the facts of Tidewater yock.
We need more facts about yock recorded before all the people and evidence are gone.
Meanwhile, let’s face facts: New Orleans yacameat is going to take over.
The reasons are simple:
- French style broth wins out. Technique is world class. It’s richer and greasier – look at how well tonkotsu ramen is doing compared to the shoyu ramen (which is more common in Japan).
- It’s got more meat! Come on, it’s not even a contest. There’s 2 or 3 meats in some of these yacameat bowls. It’s getting to be like gumbo.
- Americans don’t really care about the noodle. They’re using spaghetti. Yock noodles aren’t even that special.
- White people on the Internet have adopted, and adapted, this yock as *the* yock.