There’s a great Thai restaurant in Toronto that is known for its pepper scale: you can order your dish mild, medium, or 1 through 20 peppers.
I usually get 4 or 5, which is hotter than most other places’ standard “extra hot.”
This is often the scene of competition, and once you get into the double digits they ask you “are you sure?” a few times. Hottest I’ve seen anyone order is 10, a hot-food fanatic, and he was crying and sweating and his nose was running by about halfway through.
I like the system, because people have such varying tastes for spiciness, and once you’ve been a few times you know exactly what you want. I have a friend that can’t handle barbecue-flavoured potato chips, and my ex-boyfriend couldn’t eat mild Jamaican patties. Another friend can never get his wings hot enough without bringing his own sauce to the restaurant. But we could all go to this place together and all be satisfied.
cowgirl, the system you describe is the sort that I’m used to. But when the heat is fixed, it does allow a good chef to present what he/she feels is the proper level of heat to complement the ingredients.
I like having the opportunity to pick the heat (if I can convince them to make it hot enough. An indian restaurant in Ottawa had delicious food, but their “hot” barely registered on my pepper sensors) at times. Other times I like having the chef choose the heat to suit the dish.
That sounds pretty unreasonable. Suffice it to say that not everyone has a whole lot of knowledge about Indian, Korean, or Thai food, at least not enough knowledge to know what is what. Should I stay away from new eating experiences because I might upset some food snob who doesn’t think I’m ordering it right? Or should I take the plunge and try something new?
I would guess that many of these places accomodate fools who want to show how tough they are by ordering the hottest thing possible. I admit, I like some spicy food, but there comes a point where there isn’t any extra flavor being added just extra heat. Whatever floats your boat, you keep on enjoying looking down at people who don’t like things the way you do.
Actually, I’m thinking of my sister in Thailand now, who had to say “farang” a lot to make sure her mouth didn’t explode everytime she bought some food. “Thai Spicy” in Thailand is *not * the same as “Thai Spicy” in a restaurant.
In India, the people we were staying with thought we’d explode if we got 5 feet within a chilli, and made us our own special completely chilli-free food (boring), but we were there for Independence day, so got some of the communal curry that had been on the fire all day. For us it was spicy, not too spicy, and milder than I would make a curry at home. It was made “bland” so everyone could spice it to their own preference, most people just adding a pinch of chilli or so. We were a little appalled to see one family ladling on the chilli powder- and I mean, this guy put a tablespoon of chilli powder on his toddler’s portion and three on his own, apparently “he’s from Kerala” is sufficient explanation.
I also have Malaysian friends whose “Irish people friendly” not-spicy-at-all version of Nasi Lemak for 4 people calls for 4 jars of Sambal Oelek and 4 fresh birds-eye chillies. It is, without doubt, the hottest thing I have ever eaten-very yummy though, and since the other Irish person couldn’t actually eat theirs, I got a double helping!
So no, spice doesn’t bother me and I’m usually happy enough to get the hottest thing on the menu, while my husband likes milder things, but I’m not there to tell the chef his business.
This is a timely thread. I’m going out to Hunan food today with two of my bosses, having forewarned them that this is a spicy place. I think they may have taken my warning as a challenge (they’re both guys and I’m female), and I hope they don’t order everything uber-hot just to be macho. I like spicy, but at this place, even the “mild” versions of everything will make you sweat in places you didn’t know you had. Bippy, if you’re still reading this thread, have you been to Hunan Taste on N. 4th Street in San Jose?
But still, I’m looking forward to that Hunan ham in spicy gravy and the Hunan chicken. Better stock up on Pepcid.
Long pepper, mainly. Supposedly you can still find it in India, but I didn’t see it. I reckon it would be cool if someone did a history of long pepper being supplanted by chilli peppers. It would be a fascinating economic, social and culinary story (YMMV).
Hunan food is funny, teela brown. I was in Changsha a couple of months ago and it was hard to tell how hot the food really was going to be. Some dishes you were expected to pick morsels out and despite that fact that frequently a good pound of chillis were left in the pot at the end of the meal, the bit you were expected to eat wasn’t that hot. On the other hand, vinegary breakfast noodles with no visible chilli at all was scalp-sweat-in-30-seconds hot. And as for mistaking the table-simmering broth for soup in that frog dish, ow.
In Los Angeles—where there seem to be as many Thai restaurants as there are in Thailand itself—you’re almost always asked how hot you want your dishes. I’ve eaten in something approaching 100 Thai restaurants here (burp), and this is certainly the norm.
That’s the one, in Saskatoon. Such a wonderful place. I took my parents there last Christmas for muttar paneer and tandoori chicken and aloo something-or-other. It was their first time having Indian food in a restaurant, I believe.
The family who owns it are amazingly helpful to the uninitiated. It’s worth feigning complete ignorance about Indian food just to hear the owner rhapsodize about why their homemade yogourt is much better than the “milk jello” found in the grocery store.
