Well, #17 if seventeen is very large.
Yes, Thai restaurants in the US are usually pretty mild. My Thai wife and I lived in Hawaii for a spell, and she did not care for any of the ones there. And ones on the mainland were all substandard. Oddly enough, the closest I’ve come to the authentic stuff in Thailand, and my wife agrees, was in a couple of Thai restaurants in Lubbock, Texas, of all places!
I grew up eating spicy food. I was very comfortable with peppers. My German wife hated my hot cooking for a few years. Training worked and now she is disappointed if I don’t add some hot.
We like peppers.
Like previous posters said, flavor is crucial using pepper to hide boring flavoring is bad.
My Uncle gave me a jar of dried ground Habaneras 4 years ago. When you unscrew the cap it makes people cough and wheeze, we were afraid they wouldn’t let us take it on the plane. It’s very dangerous HAH homeland security. Too bad he didn’t grow anymore this year.
Moved from IMHO to CS.
I love spice. I have very, very rarely ever found something to be too spicy. I’m always floored by what low spice tolerances most of the people I know seem to have. Sweating means it’s working.
I like stuff spicier than most people I know. I use this stuff fairly liberally on burritos, eggs, sausages, whatever. There are a few restaurants that test my limits though. One is a burrito shop out in Concord, across the street from Fry’s. I can just barely tolerate their spicy carne asada, but man is it good. The other is a little Thai shop in downtown Oakland. There, if you ask for a 1 on your curry, you get a 4. You ask for a 5, you get anywhere from an 8 to a 12. I hesitate to discover what their idea of a 10 is.
I had a roommate that would dribble Dave’s Insanity Sauce over his scrambled eggs in the morning and not shed a single tear. He would think nothing of eating a habnero raw.
I myself am a lightweight. I see no reason to make my food cause me pain. Any of the flavors you can get from hot sauce can be replicated (in my experience) without the ‘hot’ part.
I love almost any spicy Asian from Hunan to Thai to various Indonesian cuisines. Some of it can be too hot but usually there’s plenty of white rice to get you through the rough spots.
I can’t stand authentic Sichuan. They use sichuan peppercorns, which are just vile. True Sichuanese cooking is inedibly hot. And if you took out the spices, it’s really not very appetizing food.
Personally, I much prefer Crystal hot sauce to Tobasco.
I like spicy food, so long as it’s good food. My previous girlfriend, who also liked spicy food, said that I have an asbestos palette - I would cheerily eat stuff and pronounce it “a little warm” that made her gasp.
Sierra Leonian Pepper Soup.
It’s just exactly what it sounds like. So hot I only had two bowls!
I have never tasted anything as hot, and I have eaten native Thai, Indonesian, Mexican, and brutaly sadistic bar food.
Peanut Butter soup is good too, from the same place, and also many other west African countries. Mostly the Sierra Leonians are the hottest, although now and then a Gambian extremist will singe your nose hairs, as well.
Crying into your soup is not allways a bad thing.
Tris
I like spicy. There are limits though.
My quest for hot led me to order Chicken Vindaloo, which was a painful excercise. It took an hour, four pints and plenty of yoghurt to get the damn thing down. And of course, there was nothing to lessen the pain during next morning’s bowel movement.
you can aerosolize lidocaine though a mask like you give an albuterol tx if you like, at least i’ve heard of it as a pretreatment for a ng tube placement
I hear ya! I don’t like the heat to compete with (or drown out) the flavor, which it does most of the time. On a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’m around a 3 with regard to heat. It needs to complement the food; not bulldoze over it.
Plus, if it’s too hot, I can’t taste anything for days. 
I like it hot enough to feel it, but not so hot that in obscures the other tastes in the dish.
I like spicy food and in my youth I would eat anything that tasted like fire. I could eat stuff that would clear out people in a hundred foot radius. I have since learned to appreciate the flavor more so instead of looking for outright heat I now seek a milder level with additional tastes.
I don’t like the vinegar that is often used to try to make things “spicy” at all. I find it bitter and rancid rather than hot so I don’t care for foods done in a “buffalo” style where vinegar seems to be the primary component. Set just about anything else spicy before me, though, and I’ll try it.
I have tried hundreds of mexican hot sauces and salsas,doesn’t really matter how hot they are just so they have a good flavor.Most of the habanero sauces use to much vinegar which really takes from the flavor of the pepper.If you can handle the hot,habaneros have a super flavor to them and are well worth trying.The best tasting sauces I have found,believe it or not, are Ortega Taco Sauce(hot or medium) and for habaneros, Buckhorn Bakery. They make three levels of hotness;Hot,Hotter and Hottest. All three are very good, but for taste I like the Hot.
Explosive flavor up front with heat back. Too much heat up front just numbs the tastebuds. I like the slow burn that starts at the back of your mouth and eventually pops a sweat around your eyes.
I like hot, but I am picky about it. Like some posters have already mentioned, if I’m trying a new restaurant or a new food item, I’ll start on the mild side because I want to make sure it’s not one of those things where the hot is masking lower quality food, or even another interesting more subtle taste. Once I’m satisfied on both of those counts, I’ll go hotter with future meals.
One thing I don’t like is wasabi, which doesn’t make sense even to me, because I usually like things like horseradish and strong mustards. But there’s a flavor in wasabi aside from the spiciness that I find really unpleasant. It drives me crazy when people say “oh, too hot for you?” when I decline it. It’s not too hot, I just don’t like how it tastes!
Spicy stuff never burns on the way out for me. Not sure why.
I’ll agree with you there. I love hot food usually, but wasabi is icky. I’m especially fond of Thai food, but none of the restaurants around here make it hot at all. At home we live off Nando’s extra hot peri-peri sauce. It’s not unbearably hot, but I love the flavour. Also, the introduction of Hell Pizza was unquestionably the greatest thing to happen to New Zealand. Ever. I mean, they add chili for you!