Goth Cheese Is Here and It's Pretty Gnarly

If your eyebrow piercing has closed up, you’ve retired your knee-high Docs, and you’ve finally grown out your last Manic Panic-dyed strands of hair, then you might not have any interest in topping your burger with a pitch-black cheese that melts into a grim, inky pool. But on the other hand, maybe it will be exactly the thing to lure you back over to your goth side.

If so, you’ll have to hop a plane to Jakarta, Indonesia, where “Venom Cheese” recently appeared on the menu at Willie Brothers, a steakhouse that offers a variety of Western-style plates from “grill sweet Alabama corn” to a “wild wild West cowboy burger.” Cheese, in all its forms, makes up a solid portion of the restaurant’s menu; recently, it debuted a steak topped with truffled raclette which, according to the UK’s Metro, went down like gangbusters with customers. Following up on that dish’s success, Willie Brothers recently added the jet-black mozzarella to its menu, to be enjoyed over a burger, a steak or, somewhat more puzzlingly, over a conical tower of creamy garlic rice wrapped with sliced meat and dribbled with oozing black dairy in a kind of middle-school science experiment nightmare.

The cheese is the latest in a long line of trendy food products infused with activated charcoal, which is purported to confer a long list of dubious health benefits from “detoxification” to teeth whitening. It kinda seems like such properties would be greatly reduced once incorporated into items such as bubble waffles and soft serve, but hey, what do we know?

The Willie Brothers invention is simply plain old mozzarella cheese laced with the stuff (food-grade charcoal is typically derived from burnt coconut shells), producing a wheel from the dark side that, according to Insider, “melts into a gooey black pool as it's scraped onto your plate.”

A visit to the steakhouse’s Instagram page shows various iterations of the disturbing cheese in all its pitch-black iterations, but a video uploaded by a diner is the most chilling image, showing the greasy, clumpy dairy cascading atop a pile of gray meat.

It’s enough to breathe terror into the heart of even the iciest goth.