A Bone To Pick

One of the choices that comes up whenever trying to pick a restaurant is invariably 骨头. Eating bones? That sounds oddly unappetising. I set out to investigate.

吴记 (Wu Ji) is a chain of perpetually busy restaurants specialising in the aforementioned 骨头.

First, a quick word about the name. 吴 is a common surname. On the mainland it's often described as 口天的吴 (or the 'Wu' with a 口 'mouth' and a 天 'sky' character), but in other territories that use traditional characters, such as Hong Kong, the name appears as the slightly more complicated 吳. 记 means 'record' and doesn't signify much here on its own. The two words together can be taken to mean 'Wu's restaurant'.

Amusingly, families in Mandarin speaking regions named 'Wu' have a problem when choosing first names. 吴 is synonymous with 无 meaning 'without'. Any attempt to name your child something auspicious then, instantly backfires. 大明, meaning 'big and bright', becomes 吴大明 under the Chinese ordering of names, which sounds an awful lot like 无大明 (meaning 'Not big and bright').

When we arrived waiters were weaving their way between tables piled high with hearty DongBei fare. As far as I could see, every table had at least one plate of 骨头.

It turns out that 骨头 is similar to ribs. Even though there's plenty of meat, the meat-bone ratio is somewhat low simply because the bones are so huge. In a concession to this fact, each table features a big shiny bucket into which all the unedible bits are thrown.
It reminded me a bit of the organic gun in eXistenZ that Jude Law builds out of bits of gristle and his own teeth.

Each place is provided with a single glove, and a straw. The glove is essential. Even using your hands, with some pieces, it's really difficult to get at the meat. With chopsticks, it becomes impossible. The problem isn't helped by some viciously sharp bone fragments. The straw on the other hand baffled me at first.

It turns out that they are used by jabbing them into the particularly big chunks of bone to suck out the marrow. Yum!