We Tried the Most-Metal Burger in Fast Food: The Halloween Whopper

A black hamburger bun is so much more badass than a man bun, but how does it taste? We scarfed down Burger King’s new Halloween Whopper.

While every other food provider in the United States is trying to cram pumpkin into every single thing on their menu, Burger King introduced an item that we could get behind—the Halloween Whopper. What makes a whopper Halloween themed? They didn’t go too crazy with the Halloween theme by stuffing the burger with candy (gross) or topping it with a copious amount of ghost peppers (intriguing). No, they went the simple route and just gave it a black bun. That’s it.

That being said, the black bun is pretty insane. Much like Mick Jagger when it comes to doors, I feel that if it is possible to make something black then that’s the color you go with. So at 11 this morning I went down to the local BK and picked up six of them. The whole office acted as guinea pigs, a task that was undertaken with varying levels of gusto, and tried the Halloween Whoppers.

Obviously, it all begins and ends with the bun. At first glance, you see a burger on a black bun and you assume that it has been either set on fire or sitting on a counter for months. But once you wrap your head around the idea, which does take a second or two, it just seems like any other bun. In fact, you don’t really notice the black bun after a little bit, instead you notice how the black bun brings out the other features of the burger. On more than one occasion I found myself thinking, Damn, that lettuce is green. I also thought, Are these the world’s brightest colored sesame seeds? Does the King know that there are black sesame seeds, because if he did, he really dropped the ball.

Let’s be honest, you didn’t come here to find out what the burger looked like, you want to know how it tastes. From the very first bite I was overwhelmed with flavor, there was just so much going on. By the second or third bite that notion calmed down and I realized that the Halloween Whopper wasn’t that different from its less festive cousin with one major difference—A-1. Not only is A-1 applied in copious amounts on the burger, but it is also cooked into the bun. Originally I thought that the black bun was purely a trick done with food coloring, but nope, it’s A-1. And probably some food coloring.

The double dose of A-1 dominates the burger in taste as powerfully as the black bun does in look. So if you are a fan of A-1 you are probably going to be doing backflips of excitement. If you aren’t overly fond of the steak sauce, as I am not, you may be irked by it replacing the standard ketchup. As a grown man from Chicago I believe that ketchup represents everything soulless and wrong in this world, so it pains me enormously to say this, but I really missed the ketchup.

Overall I found the Halloween Whopper to be fine. There was nothing terrible about it, but there was also nothing great other than the bun fitting into my aesthetic. The general lack of enthusiasm permeated through most of the tasters, in other words, no one was screaming with excitement and throwing the devil horns in the air. At 5:45 the sixth and final burger was still sitting on the conference table hoping for a brave, or at least hungry, soul to scoop it up.

Keeping with the hardcore look of the burger, Inked‘s Editor-in-Chief Rocky Rakovic gives the burger three out of a possible 666 pentagrams. It would have been four if the bun had been favored with (beef) blood.

Our office manager, Arielle, came up with the perfect analogy for underwhelming burger.

“The Halloween Whopper is like a model,” Arielle says. “It looks great, the bun is just WOW, but when I take a bite out of it it’s just an average burger. A beautiful average burger.”