As all weird things tend to, this dark and delicious tale began in Japan. It is the place that made eyeball licking a youth fetish after all, but we digress. Sometime late last year, Burger King Japan went to new outlandish heights to grab eyeballs by introducing the Premium Kuro Burger, with black buns and cheese coloured with bamboo charcoal. It basically broke the internet so hard (with comments ranging from ‘this burger is from Satan’ to ‘Gross, but I would probably still put it in my face’) that obviously McDonalds didn’t take long before they introduced their own version blackened with rival ingredient, squid ink instead. Fast food battles in the new age make Mortal Kombat fatalities look angelic, it would appear.
Anyhoo...here’s why the old scoop just got fresh again. The trend just made its debut in India, in New Delhi’s Khan Market no less. Barcelos, a South Africa-based food chain with just one store in India at present are the not-so-original geniuses behind the extra tan burger, with a single difference. Instead of getting too complex with ingredients like squid ink or bamboo they just use red, yellow and blue food colours in the right proportions to create its own shade. The store’s GM of operations, Rohit Malhotra insisted “somebody had to introduce it here” so they did. “It is very beautiful to look at and during our introductory tasting session, people loved it. Till now, they had only seen it on the net,” he told the Economic Times. Of course, he does seem to be forgetting the twitter maelstrom that showcased what those Japanese black buns really looked like but who cares about these minute details.
Bangalore-based brand expert Harish Bijoor however, claims it’s just a ploy to break monotony. “”You have yellow and purple tomato ketchups in the US. In Bangalore, there is a restaurant that sells golden dosa.”
Umm, okay. Fair point Bijoor. Honestly, this doesn’t sound like anything to debate over. All we know is that anything that uses the exact opposite logic of Fair & Lovely in India has our support. You know what they say…once you go black, you can never go back. (Don’t quote us on that or marriages might break).