I cannot tolerate hot and spicy foods. Without doing any investigation beyond looking at the picture on the sign, I ordered an Asian Salad at Wendy’s yesterday. It came with a package labeled “Spicy __nuts” (don’t remember the variety) and a package of dressing with a red pepper on the front, so naturally, both of those items went in the trash. So that left me with the greens and some berry pieces and some chicken which was mildly spicy but not intolerable.
This all raised the question in my mind; in American food culture does ‘Asian’ always mean hot and spicy when attached to the name of a food?
No. There are spicy cuisines - Szechuan chief among them - but most pan-Asian food is not particularly spicy. ETA: And in my experience, the term is not used, even wrongly, to indicate spiciness. A certain “odd” spice flavoring like ginger or lemongrass, sometimes, but not hot-spicy.
In fact, one of my favorite sightems (to use a Herb Caen expression) was a pack of “bowl noodles,” with the labels mostly in Chinese, a few English titles… and a picture of a red pepper with Picante! splashed across it. Welcome to the 21st Century, folks. Detective Deckard will take your order…
I can’t call myself a “foodie” but, to me, if a restaurant says it has “Asian” food, that means it has items from more than one type of Asian cuisine (e.g., Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Szechuan, Cantonese, etc.). In terms of spiciness, these cuisuines run the whole gamut so an entre` doesn’t have always have to be spicy.
Nah. I’m loathe to do anything spicy but I don’t automatically assume “Asian” is spicy. I’m surprised that Wendy’s Asian chicken salad has spicy nuts and dressing. I’ve seen Asian chicken salads on a lot of menus and they are all sweet.
Checking out the Panera menu… they have a Thai Salad which is pretty much like that Wendy’s salad and their Asian salad is lettuce, chicken and sesame dressing. Both have crispy wontons.
ETA: I would assume “Thai” was spicy and “Indian” was spicy but not “Asian” nor “Chinese” nor “Japanese.”
It doesn’t mean spicy, but when food is decribed as Asian it usually implies something highly seasoned, and often the seasonings are spicy. Using ‘Asian’ to describe food doesn’t mean anything at all really, look how big Asia is and all the possible foods that could come from Asia. But in commercial speak it usually means Eastern Asian-ish, which many Americans will translate to mean 'Chinese.
Indian can out-scorch TexMex, if you give it a chance. We went to a new Indian place up here where “spicy” means another small shake of black pepper (preground), so I ordered my lamb something or other “very spicy.”
It was very, very, very, very spicy. Even my son gasped at a taste of it. I think I’ll settle for menu-spicy next time.
I don’t think that “foodies” are too focussed on what restaurants that offer sauces in packets do. The term usually refers to people who like restaurants run by chefs with a strong, artistic style.
Pretty much my thought. Sweet & sour or teriyaki, or something sesameseed oily thing, that’s kind of what I think of generically as “Asian” from a fast-food perspective. Even from non-fast food, Asian is not by default synonymous with “spicy.” There are a lot of spicy Asian cuisines, but they are not all so.
In my personal “spice level” guide, TexMex and Mexican food are medium spicy. I’ve very rarely encountered anything blistering in those cuisines. Maybe some of the habanero salsas of the Yucatan peninsula. Sichuan, Hunan, much Indian, Thai/Laos, are the most consistently top-tier spicy (and there are some African foods that are nuts, too.)
To me, “Asian” usually means some combination of the flavors of soy sauce, fish sauce, ginger, garlic, sesame, sugar and heat. The heat usually comes in the form of something like sauteed dried chilis or some sort of prepared chile paste or sauce like sambal oelek or sriracha.
But… 9/10 of dishes labeled as “Asian” are usually flavored with soy sauce, ginger, garlic, sugar and sesame oil without any fish sauce or heat at all.
In the fifties Oriental* restaurants were rare in the Midwest and almost always called Chinese restaurants. The main type of food they served was Mandarin which is mild and well-suited to Midwestern taste buds.
I believe it was in the early eighties that we began to see the introduction of the more spicy Szechuan and Vietnamese style cuisine.
Now it’s nearly impossible to find a restaurant specializing in Mandarin food around here - Southern MN.
A word which has fallen out of favor but was used nearly to the exclusion of Asian when discussing food at that time.
Something like camarones al diabla and some of the salsa roja dishes can get fairly fiery but it’s still a full tier or so in heat below the cuisines I mentioned. But if you hit the Yucatan, you can find some xni-pec and other habanero-based salsas that really do satisfy when it comes to heat. Still, overall, the food in the Yucatan is not particularly spicy, just these couple of salsas.
Yes, they are. Like puly says, they’re only about medium as far as world cuisines go, but enchiladas and other saucy tex-mex dishes are quite often spicy. Not overly hot, but much more than “not spicy at all”.
My mom, bless her heart, still uses Oriental. It just seems so… racist. She doesn’t mean it in any racist way what-so-ever, it is simply a hold over from her growing up in the fifties in the midwest.
This. Also if something has soy sauce or ginger in it I might consider it “asian”.
ETA: I see I was ninja’d by a fair bit.
Also:
They are if you put hot peppers like jalapenos in/on them. Also most places have a few levels of spiciness of salsa. A mild green, a mild red, a medium red and damn this is hot red which is what I get.
No matter what it’s called or what’s on the label, I wouldn’t assume anything from Wendy’s would be spicy. You can only just barely get spicy at Taco Bell-- Any non-Mexican fast food place, forget about it.
The use of “Asian” as a descriptor of American dishes is terribly vague. I have seen “Asian” used to describe dishes containing any combination of these ingredients: fish sauce, chili paste, sriracha, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, sesame seed oil, sesame seeds, mandarin oranges, almonds, cashews, peanuts, crispy won ton pieces, won ton wrappers, red pepper flakes, green onions, green or red peppers, tofu, curry, vinegar, coconut milk.
Only a few of those items are hot/spicy.
The term “Asian” basically has come to mean “flavors that the recipe creator associates with the entirety of Asia, not reflective of any particular cuisine or style.” It’s very generic and potentially misleading, like calling Polish, French, Spanish, German, and British foods “European.”
