Also: Olive Garden.
You reminded me…I went to an Indian restaurant in Mass once. It has since resulted in a new personal rule, which I’ll mention in a moment.
The Indian food was the BLANDEST I’ve ever tasted. Indian food is meant to be “spicy”. This does not mean “hot”. This means “full of spices”. There are supposed to be multitudes of flavors dispersed throughout the food.
Instead, everything was generic and bland and boring. I started looking around the restaurant. Every single person in the restaurant was white, and most were over 50.
The service and everything was impeccable. But I’ve since formulated a rule: Never eat at an Indian restaurant where you don’t see any Indians eating.
You can pretty much expand that rule to “never eat a spicy cuisine anywhere in New England unless…”
I’ve gotten used to the phenomenally bland food here and located the small handful of restaurants that understand what “spicy” and “hot” actually mean. But in doing so we’ve crossed off almost every Mexican, Indian and Thai place for 25 miles around. (Not to mention the occasional diner whose food is no spicier, but has a “hot” option composed of pure ghost pepper sauce. Which means you can’t just tiredly ask for “really hot,” meaning three shakes of the Tabasco bottle instead of two, without the chance of getting something that will crack engine blocks, yuk yuk.)
But… your rule holds. We have one Indian place on the list at which I made the mistake of asking for a “variable” dish very hot, and yes, I was from California and knew what “very hot” meant, and thank you.
It was very hot, and my family got their yuks watching me eat it while tears ran down my face. I now just ask for “hot” there. And it usually is full of Indian families… so, yeah. Good rule.
There is a creole restaurant called Yvette’s in St Martin’s French Quarter that we love. It is located in a family’s home, basically some tables in their game-room. On any given night maybe 3/4 of the diners are locals and 1/4 tourists.
They have jars of homemade “pepper sauce” that they remove from tourist’s tables. They explain that it is “too spicy” for anyone not used to it.
On two occasions I’ve seen Americans argue that they wanted to try the peppers. One guy tried them, turned red, and was obviously distressed. He laughed and admitted that it was way hotter than anything he’d ever experienced. The other person was a woman who I worried was going to die. She was coughing, couldn’t breath, and spent maybe a half hour laying on the floor.
If they beg you not to try something, maybe they know what they are talking about.
Probably good advice.
However, as a California boy whose first SO learned to cook in El Paso, my notion of what’s hot and too-hot is a little different from most of my Nwingland neighbors, and most who come from the bigger, generally reddish states of the heartland.
What’s frustrating is that until I’ve sampled a few of their dishes, I don’t know what a restaurant’s OMG THIS IS KILLER HOT! label means here - from Taco Bell spicy to “might blister porcelain” - that hee-hee-ghost-pepper stuff. So I either eat something a lot blander than I wanted, or end up with something not fit for human consumption (at least, humans who aren’t really drunk and clanging their balls at everyone).
And in the end, a lot of restaurants here simply have no idea what “hot” means, because Tabasco blows all their fuses.
Travel food is just as problematic. I really do love spicy-but-not-deadly food, and it can be a challenge to order something in the right range if there’s no shared notion of what “spicy” means. For the record, I have yet to order something too spicy in places that try to seriously warn patrons about their heat levels. They’re just looking out for the folks from Boston and Topeka, and it’s all good to me. Unless they think ghost pepper convulsions are funny.
We ate at Chabin’s Cafe while we were in Marigot. So good.
I still remember my good friend when I was a child (Irish girl) freaking out because she ate something she found hot, and drinking glass after glass of water, tears coming out of her eyes, etc.
The item in question? A radish.
I worked with a guy - another California native, but of midwestern family stock - who had to special order his stuff at Taco Bell lest it be too hot.
I use that rule for any ethnic restaurant. I prefer to be the only white guy in there. Once, years ago, my wife and I looked up in a local paper listings of best restaurants and decided to try this top ranked Thai place. When we walked in and looked at the other patrons and my wife turned out to be one of the only Asians there other than the staff, I knew it was a mistake. No horror stories, just not good food and didn’t belong on any best of list.
I don’t have any stories to top the others here, just the usual ones of poor service and poor food and many instances of wait staff telling me not to order certain things because Americans won’t like it, so I’ll go back to lurking and reading.
Continuing in the vein of food being too spicy, I too wish there was a universal rating. I find Thai the most troubling as they are all over the board and end up with something either too mild or too hot. I do like spicy food, once went to a chili dinner and a coworkers place and me and an Indian coworker were the only ones who found it way too mild and needed to spice it up, he was surprised how spicy I liked it.
My first encounter with wasabi was at a thanksgiving dinner of a family whose mother was an immigrant from Japan and whose father had parents from Puerto Rico.
There was a great spread on the table, including tortillas and a bowl of some smooth guacamole.
I grabbed a tortilla and started to spread some guacamole on it.
I love guacamole so I got plenty.
I noticed that everyone at the table was watching me make my little taco, including my gf whose family this was.
The rest of the story tells itself really.
:smack:
Well to be fair all the kids I’ve known, who didn’t grow up with a typically spicy/hot cuisine, hated spicy/hot stuff. I did. But as I’ve aged and my palette has grown spicy/hot is one of my favorite flavors.
Yeah this is a great rule.
I’ve made this mistake too, once.
Maybe restaurants that specialize in multiple heat ratings should offer pre-order samples of their spices/sauces.
Glad you like the place, but this sounds more gimmicky than anything else. I’m from a Cajun family. Sure we like it spicy, but not so spicy it would strip paint off cars. The store bought stuff is just fine. And that’s pretty much been ther truth for any Cajun I’ve known.
That said though, if they were to do that to me, I’d be all like: “Oh yeah? wanna bet?”. Which I’m sure is the intention for having such a policy.
I’ve eaten at restaurants thousands of times (mostly cheap diners 
) but wracking my brain can’t come up with a story interesting or amusing enough to compare with the other stories in the thread. (The time I crossed “vomited in the streets of a world famous tourist resort” off my bucket list might have came closest.)
I will tell an anecdote or two about spicy Thai food.
Once I took a woman to a Thai restaurant in San Jose. “I’m from North Africa, we’re used to very spicy-hot food” she said when asked how hot she wanted her food. “Our food is hotter than that,” said the owner’s wife. My friend wondered how she could be sure her food was hotter than North African food! 
Punchline: My friend turned red and almost started smoking when she tasted her food.
When I was first learning to speak Thai, “Phet mai?” and “Mai phet” were among the first phrases I learned, meaning respectively “Is it spicy-hot?”, “Not hot”. I used to joke that “mai” must mean “very” instead of “not.” Since the “not spicy” food was often too hot for me, you can imagine how hot Thai food can get! I had to learn Thai rapidly just to be able to survive food-wise! Soon I was answering พริกที่เหลือในครกจะพอสำหรับผมครับ to “How many peppers do you want in your papaya salad, sir?” (The phrase means “chili left over in the mortar (from last serving) will be enough for me, thanks!”)
There’s a difference too I think between horseradish spice and hot peppers spice.
I’m a wuss when it comes to spicy hot peppers, I find jalapenos too spicy. But I love radishes (some are pepperier than others) and horseradish, onions and even plain black pepper. And too oftern the spice/heat is all there is, I like a tiny touch of heat to accent flavor, not have my skin peeled off my face.
I have found you can ask to make it a little spicier. I have taken to asking my local Indian places to step up the spicy to about “medium”. I don’t want to burn my face off, but I do want it a little hotter.
ETA: I don’t like jalapeno spice either, nor do I like whole chilis in my food. Keep that stuff away from me! The in joke is that vindaloo is “that dish that only crazy white people eat”.
I like heat hot, like wasabi, the sinus clearing stuff (yes, I know the mustard I’m getting here in Florida is most likely not wasabi. But it’s still yummy). However, I don’t like spicy hot. Tijuana Flats, a fast food Mexican place down here, (think Chipotle, not Taco Bell) has a sauce bar, where I can select from a wide variety to splash on my blackened chicken tacos.
If you find yourself in Marigot again, check out Le Marrakech.
With your referenecs to Cajun cuisine I think you’re confused by which “French Quarter” **kayaker **was talking about. Kayaker was referring to the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean, half of which is part of France.