Haitai Honey Tong Tong

I sound like a 70's
porn star name, don't I?

The Attraction:

A few months backed, I posted a video about the honey-butter chip craze in Korea. It was only a matter of time until those chips (or bootlegs of said chips) would make their way over to the States. One incarnation of those chips are these Honey Tong Tong chips. My pal Grace was kind enough to grab a bag of these for me at her last trip to the Korean grocer. Lets see what this is all about...

The Review
Let's clear up several things first; these are not the original Honey-Butter Chips that initiated the craze in South Korea. Those chips were made by a collaboration of two snack manufacturers, Calbee, from Japan and Haitai from South Korea. These chips are made only by Haitai. Interestingly enough, Calbee has also produced their version of these chips called, you guessed it, "Honey-Butter Chips" (Incidentally, I have a pack of those too, so check back for a review soon.)

I crack open the bag and take a calculated whiff. "Butter?" Interesting that although the good folks at Haitai didn't spell out the "butter" portion of the chip, (at least not in English) it's definitely in there. There is, however, a subtle pat of butter on the potato within the illustration at the front of the packaging. I pick up a chip and as the illustration on the bag shows, these are not regular shaped chips. They look almost like a large, triangular, version of a shrimp-flavored chip.

"Take a bite, already!"

First bite; nice crunchy texture and the butter flavor comes a 'knockin, but as you move towards the tail end of the bite, the sweetness comes around and says,"Don't You Forget About Me." The flavor is really interesting. It's not quite salty. It has a butter-on-toast taste to it and then the faint sweetness at the end of the honey to clean the butter flavor away. Yet it seems that the butter helps arrest the sweetness of the "honey", so as it's never really salty, it's also never too sweet.

"Excuse me,
only popular chips are allowed in here!"

The Sweet:

Good "new" flavor combination delivered on a crisp, puffed chip

The Bitter:
As good as these are, can anything really live up to all the hype? Also for about $3.99 for a 65g bag, this stuff is not cheap.

I look a bit like a shrimp chip,
but there ain't no shrimp flavor

Conclusion:
I'm so curious what the original taste like. I'll be even more curious after I try the Calbee version of these chips so I can compare all three at some point. Until then, Haitai's version will do just fine. Is it a drop-everything-and-get-a-bag snack changer? I wouldn't say so, but it's a refreshing new flavor combination that I would welcome for an occasional visit into my snack basket.

Video of the Week
While on my quest to learn more about video games recently, I came across this video of some guys from Motherboard, the technology leg of Vice, trying an old game for the Sega Dreamcast System called Caution Seaman. Think Tamagotchi, but creepier.

Whatever happened to Super Mario Bros?