Burger King released a "kuro burger," or black burger, earlier this September, just a month before Halloween. Like a small child, amplified advertising caught my attention, and I couldn't resist the temptation of trying it. I knew I would be disappointed, but I developed a craving that couldn't be tempered. It tasted a bit spooky.
Having a taste for food adventures, I knew getting to Burger King would be a food quest and I was up for the challenge. I had to hop on a train over an hour away to Shinagawa, as there is no Burger King in my neighborhood. After getting off the train, I got utterly lost and frustrated, but once I reached a certain spot, I smelled the distinct aroma of fast food nearby. After a few twirls in the light rain around the same block, I followed the smell, and found Burger King lodged next to a Labi department store.
Like you had imagined, this burger is black, including the bun. There are two kuro burgers available. One is the kuro pearl, which comes with cheese but without vegetables and mayonnaise. The second version I tried was the kuro diamond burger, or the deluxe version of the kuro burger, with similar main staple ingredients to that of the whopper, with onions, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise, but it has a wildly different flavor profile. The bun tasted of plain charcoal, but not smoky barbecue charcoal. It was unsavory. The cheese and special sauce was supposed to taste like squid ink, but I'm not sure what it tasted like, perhaps some kind of artificially processed food product that is made to taste like squid ink. The artificial seafood taste was rather unusual and didn't blend in with the burger theme. It would have tasted better in some sort of seafood dish or on top of rice. Each bite had me thinking the next one would be tastier and better, but no, each bite was equally disappointing. I think the best part of the burger was the vegetables and mayonnaise, as those ingredients had not been tampered in charcoal or squid ink.
I finished my burger as I had paid about 8,000 yen (8 USD) for my meal and wanted to make sure I wasn't wasting my hard earned yen. The fries were a bit cold and soggy, as they had been sitting out of the fryer for a while, but otherwise tasty, just like battered french fries from any Burger King. This burger was not for me, but chewing the burger got bits of it glued to the grooves of my teeth, which was pretty amusing. I also stumbled upon a decent used bookstore in Shinagawa called Good Day Books, which I would not have otherwise visited had it not been for the kuro burger. The selection was quite decent, and the prices were slightly discounted from the original prices, but not a discount in comparison to used bookstores in the United States. But it did the trick, and I stocked up on a few reads.
