What kind of gift could make a little girl cry tears of joy at her very pink birthday party? A puppy? A Stanley cup? A ticket to Disney World?
In a 33-second video posted on TikTok earlier this month, the source of elation is a bright pink pack of buldak carbonara ramen. As of Friday, the video has garnered more than 57.7 million views and 43,000 comments, including “She’s so real for this,” and “That was a fair reaction, buldak carbonara noodles are so good.”
Around the world, millions have been charmed by the product from Samyang Food, on shelves since 2017 but only recently the object of viral fascination. (In January, search queries on Google for “buldak carbonara” quintupled compared with the same period of the previous year, when search interest first began to rise.)
Recipe: Ramen Carbonara
This year it seems to have reached the attention of the food obsessed — including the rapper Cardi B and the TikTok food critic Keith Lee — all of them enamored with the heat-tinged instant noodles and often going to great lengths to get their hands on them. In her own video, Cardi B describes how she drove — well, her driver did — 30 minutes to find the noodles.
