It’s not a just a lunch, it’s a work in progress. Not all creativity results in cartoon stories … BC Osaka over by the mall offers a cold bar, sushi, and all the Chinese buffet favorites, but the main attraction for me is the Mongolian barbecue. It’s interactive and action packed.
The raw ingredients here are chicken, shrimp, wheat noodles, onions and pea pods, with lots of garlic and a little hot chili sauce, plus the key ingredient in all great Mongolian barbecue, eggs. All art is choice, and this is the phase that determines the success of the whole enterprise. Don’t put too much on your plate, and choose complementary flavors: advice that can easily be applied to most endeavors.
Dedicated Mongolian barbecue restaurants use a dozen or more individual woks, but BC Osaka, which also offers teppanyaki, sticks with the flat top. You can tell by the cleaver work that these cooks can flip a shrimp tail into their hats when called upon to do so. 
What to do with the eggs is always an important question– whoever runs this kitchen favors cooking them separately, frying them on both sides until they are almost done, then chopping them up and adding them to the rest of the ingredients for seasoning and the last minute or so of cooking. This keeps them from getting tough, and I am all in favor.
There are those that feel that a finished Mongolian barbeque is not the most attractive plate of food in the world.
It is, however, extremely tasty, particularly on a cold snowy day. This is probably my second favorite way in the whole world to eat eggs.
Mongolian BBQ at BC Osaka, huh. And here I was, expecting an illustration of B.C. Osaka, the famed Mongolian merchant ship captain. Plying the waters between his adopted home port of Osaka, Japan, and various other ports throughout Southeast Asia and the South Pacific in the years leading up to WWII, B.C. was known for his quick wit, garrulousness, and tremendous strength. He once settled an argument between himself and a trio of sake vendors by first drinking them under the table and then immuring them in their warehouse behind a wall built of their own barrels. The trio quickly agreed to drop the matter, and B.C. duly freed them, taking one barrel as his fee for the night’s work. The famed “sake wall” stood for many years and was used by the vendor trio as an advertising tool; it was disassembled or destroyed sometime during the war.
As war loomed, B.C. grew wary of growing Japanese nationalism and militarism and decided that he must betray his adopted home in order to save it. He began running supplies for the Allies. While sometimes stopped and questioned by the Japanese, his wits and fame in his adopted home got him out of trouble. As the war intensified, the heat became too great, and he retreated to Tonga to wait for the end of hostilities.
After the war, B.C. was often seen traveling with a little girl. The origins of this child remain a mystery. Some say she was the product of an affair with a Bangkok prostitute; others claimed that she was an orphan that B.C. plucked from the wreckage of a town somewhere along the Japanese coast. She would grow up to be B.B.Q. Osaka, taking over her father’s business. Later in life she retired from the merchant trade and circumnavigated the world by sailboat before settling in Chile and disappearing off history’s radar.
While many tried to find out, none ever knew what B.C. stood for. Asked throughout his life how a Mongolian decided to take to the high seas, B.C. would smile and say, “My people are famous as horsemen. I just decided to ride a sea horse.”
(Hoping for more blogging hi-jinx, Rick glances around, looking for Wolfie’s flight of fancy involving another fantastic explorer, soldier, aviatrix, circus clown, or what-have-you. Sighing, he realizes that he’s the first in, and scrabbles for a worthy character with which to astound and amuse The Hostess and various passersby)
*clears throat*
Say! When you mentioned BC Osaka early on in your post I fully expected to see pix of the great
Butch Cassidy Osaka, renowned deep sea diver, high wire walker and general renaissance man.
Named by his sailor dad and exotic dancer mum after the notorious Western outlaw, BC was raised in various duty ports around the world, and received his education from many sources, not the least of which was his mother, who had an insatiable appetite for science fiction and weekly news magazines.
After serving a hitch in the Navy himself, he followed the wild goose for several years, and ended up touring throughout Europe with a small circus, where he learned (and excelled at) nearly every job from souvenir huckster to roustabout to the aforementioned high wire aerialist.
Finally growing restless with the circus life he headed to America where he lived rough in the West for some months, exploring all the hideouts of his namesake. From his stay there he got a taste for prospecting, and made himself wealthy by buying up old time gold rush claims for a pittance and working the original mines and tailings with modern recovery techniques.
Getting gloriously drunk one night while vacationing in Europe, he made a rash bet with Karl Walenda, and vowed to wire walk across the Danube…blindfolded.
Durned if he didn’t do it, too. Although practically unknown in the United States, he was the toast of Germany and France for many years thereafter.
One of the best wire walkers ever, and yet you seldom hear of him on this side of the Atlantic.
DANG! He beat me to the post!
(Stumbles away, sobbing)
Too slow, old man. Too slow. But your historical research is impeccable as always. The mad coincidence of there being TWO adventurous fellows by the name of B.C. Osaka has led some historians to the erroneous conclusion that they were the same person, or brothers, or that both were some sort of hoax cooked up by the blogosphere. In the end, the truth remains, and it is indeed stranger than fiction.
Btw, Rick, e-mail me your mailing address. I have a little surprise for you.
Well, I’m more Eurocentric, and you’re more Asiacentric, and both of us are eccentric, so the our mutually exclusive research really makes quite a bit of sense.
It wasn’t known until many years later, when DNA analyses were made from artifacts related to both men (the nature of these artifacts has been deliberated kept vague so as not to offend), that the Osakas were either identical twins, or, more disturbingly, clones. The differences in their appearances remain unexplained, except by time and personal history.
Well, if the clone theory is true, then BC Osaka Mongolia was the original, his adult life started well before WWII, and BC Osaka Wild West was active as an adult in the late 50′s, 60′s and 70′s. One wouldn’t think that the cloning arts would have been sufficiently perfected post WWII to pull off a successful human clone.
Are you certain that the genetic sources were handled properly? I would suspect a tainted sample, mistake by the labs involved, or outright fraud before believing the clone theory.
And the identical twin theory is nonsense on the face of it, the timelines don’t match at all, unless you posit a frozen embryo harvested in the 1920′s and implanted in the 1940′s. I find that quite unlikely….
You are forgetting, I think, the hundreds of mad scientists that roamed the landscape through the entire Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. I’m sure, with your sophisticated knowledge of all things pulpish and comic-y, could name a dozen figures of the Golden Age of Genre Fiction who were fully capable of preparing a clone in an Etheric Chamber, or popping an embryo out of the freezer and into the Galvanic Womb. And then there are the magicians, and the aliens … We’re just lucky there are only two Osakas.
Or are there?
Oh, I don’t entirely rule out the possibility, but where is the Mad Scientist or Mad Magician’s driving motivation to clone a perfectly ordinary, if brave and staunch, Mongolian freedom fighter? Especially if all he’s going to do is implant the cloned embryo in an ordinary, if lovely, exotic dancer? Insofar as I know, other than being skilled in several circus arts, BC Osaka Wild West had no overwhelmingly useful traits, or major run ins with the law, no mad schemes to dominate the world, no serious attempts at Mad Science inventions, or indeed anything but a healthy body, quick wits, and a clever idea to make money. Hardly the material to build an heir apparent, or even a solid henchman.
Sorry, the clone thing just doesn’t wash with me.
By the same token, it’s not impossible that some Fu Manchu wannabe was just doing some practical experimentation to see if he could master the art before building a useful character from scratch.
I believe I’m going to have to head to the U of M library to do some more research.
The obvious reason for cloning anyone with a healthy body and quick wits is to get a really good sleeper agent, or maybe even a grow-your-own minion. Of course, the BC Osaka genes make for a tough and independent person, and none of the plans the nefarious operators had for these youngsters quite worked out, as the stories above amply illustrate.
I’ve just uncovered some further speculation that says that the mysterious daughter, BBQ Osaka, was a sex-reversed clone of her father, and that she was one of three triplets. The other two were raised in different parts of the world by different people to reduce the chances of discovery. When the well-known BBQ retired to Chile sometime in the late 1980s, she was actually going home to a commune founded by the other two sisters. The three of them maintained a harem of casual lovers and reportedly mothered (not necessarily birthed) at least a dozen children, who (with their children) now reside in various places throughout the world, meaning that there are many Osaka descendants out there, many of whom might not even be aware of their lineage.
Then again, this source insists that BBQ stood for “Big Boob Queen”, so the validity of the research is somewhat in doubt.
Well, certainly, if Pam’s speculations about cloning are correct (I’m still doubtful) then the comparatively minor chore of replacing one y chromosome with a duplicate x chromosome would be a snap. Wolfie, see if you can confirm any of the speculation you posted, maybe check to see if anyone has done any serious genetic comparisons. That would go a long way toward proving Pam’s hypothesis…in the event that they’re truly identical.
If it turns out that a) the three sisters actually exist, and b) they’re genetically identical and not merely similar looking regular siblings then Pam wins out, but if they’re merely close relations then my ideas are probably right.
Occam’s Razor suggests that the mild coincidence of two adventurous men having the same initials and last name is considerably more likely than having a heretofore undocumented Mad Scientist or Mad Mystic performing touchy and complicated (not to mention expensive!) genetic research and experimentation to make clones that then lived exciting but diverse lives with no known payoff for the geneticist. Or so it seems to me.
Now, about BBQ standing for Big Boob Queen. Got any documentation? Photos?