Hot Dog!
The best part of barbeques is how excited people get about barbeques. If you combine meat, outdoors, beer, and fire and then drop people into it that combination, they will lose their mind. You don’t even have to marinate them first. BBQ originated in the US in the 1800s during cattle-drives. I did not look that up; I just went to a really, really good school.
However, the most intriguing example of BBQ I’ve seen in a while is BD’s Mongolian Barbeque. BD stands for bondage and discipline, which is what it takes to make someone understand the conceptual leap involved in their advertising campaign.
Mongolian BBQ actually originated in Taiwan in the 1960s, which is like Mongolia, in that they are both geographical locations, both have names, and people live in both places. The chain says that their BBQ technique is from the ancient Mongolian Empire when it was common for soldiers to cook with their swords on their shields over a big fire. While this story never happened in actual history, that’s no reason it can’t sell actual stir-fry.
Many companies have created complete falsifications of history to sell their product. For instance, The Soup Nazi: never made any soup. He made chowder. And he was a Fascist. Pretzels were not originally sold out of Roman chariots (though they did cost twice as much in the Coliseum.) Lastly, Polly-o string cheese did not originate during the French Revolution. That is completely ludicrous. It was used during the Salem Witch Trials to determine who was a warlock. (Hint: the warlocks didn’t need to peel them).
