Steve Levenstein | Inventor Spot

KISS your buns? With pleasure but for a limited time only, and it’ll cost you 100 yen each time. We’re talking about the KISS Super-Spicy Chili Tomatoman meat buns on sale at Japan’s Circle K Sunkus convenience stores of course, a tasteful promotion seeking to boost awareness of Gene Simmons and the band’s upcoming Japanese tour.

The buns are delivered cold to each individual Circle K Sunkus location and are then heated to serving temperature in an in-store steamer. Peel back the collectible black-on-white wrapper featuring the made-up faces of each band member and you’ll find a gray flattened spheroid branded with a small KISS logo.

The bun’s not moldy; its rock-like look is purely intentional and is achieved through the use of Bamboo Charcoal in the pastry mix. It’s not near as black as Burger King Japan’s Premium KURO Burger so it’s got that going for it, which is nice. It gets better… lurking in the center of the bun is a fiery red tomato-meat mixture which, combined with the stone-simulating bun, evokes scenes of molten lava oozing down the slopes of Vesuvius, Kilauea, or Japan’s own Sakurajima.

The molten lava impression gets much, MUCH stronger once purchasers bite into that fiery red center: punching up the potent tomato and beef flavor is a hefty dose of habanero pepper and not just ANY old habanero pepper either.