What Was Burger King Thinking When They Released This Bizarre New Burger?
Burger King has set a new standard for the most bizarre menu items with its new Kuro burgers, recently available at its Japanese locations.
While items like Wendy's Baconator and KFC's Double Down rely on taking traditional fast-food ingredients to their logical extremes, the Kuro burger is something totally new: its buns and cheese contain bamboo charcoal, the patty has lots of black pepper and the onion/garlic sauce is made with black squid ink.
The new sandwiches have the dubious distinction of being pitch-black, as if they're gussied up for a heavy-metal concert:
I mean, look at this:
Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft reports that the new burger comes in two varieties: "the Kuro (Black) Pearl and the Kuro (Black) Diamond," the latter of which has a bevy of (thankfully) regularly colored toppings. That's good, because I don't think I could have taken black mayonnaise on top of creepy black cheese — or, God forbid, black tomatoes, onions and lettuce.
Other bizarre fast-food items: Japan gets all the weird stuff, like Burger King's Meat Monster, which featured a gigantic grilled chicken patty, a layer of bacon and two thick patties:
Japanese Wendy's also offered $16 foie gras burgers in 2011, amid heavy competition:
Japan also got this tasty-looking Black Diamond burger with truffle sauce, which you could get with a bacon potato pie:
Finally, it also sold something called the Windows 7 Whopper:
The burger chain Lotteria also released a chocolate-and-honey-mustard burger in Japan earlier this year, because apparently the island nation has a higher tolerance for bizarre palate-smashing that American fast-food reactionaries just can't stomach.
Disturbing all-black burgers aside, fast food in Japan looks a lot more interesting than it does here. With monthly sales falling for the fifth time since Don Thompson became CEO in July 2012, maybe it's time for the Golden Arches to consider bringing some of its foreign creations stateside.
h/t wlky
