A couple of years ago my coworker’s daughter became a college freshman and brought some curried potatoes that she’d bought at the school cafeteria into the office. She offered them to me, saying it was too hot for her to eat. Later I ate them, and I tasted absolutely no ‘heat’. The curry seasoning was pretty understated as well.
I bought some merguez sausages from Uli’s Famous Sausage at Pike Place Market. After I tried them, and on my next trip over, I told Uli that they were good, but they needed to be twice as hot. He said he’d cut the heat by half after people complained his original recipe was too hot.
My coworker and my boss both have low tolerance for spicy foods, as do all of my other coworkers I’ve asked.
A friend ordered curry at a Thai restaurant and asked for ‘five stars’ on the heat scale. She liked it, but said ‘It’s Farang five.’ She said she’d noticed that spicy food in Seattle isn’t particularly spicy, and that people found much of it too hot.
I like the flavour of various peppers, and I like the heat. I like foods spicy enough to raise a sweat. But the general impression I get is that food that I would find very mild is entirely too hot for the general population of Seattle (and the Pacific Northwest in general). The major ethnic groups up here seem to be Scandinavian.; a much different make-up from Southern California, where I was born and raised. Still, Seattle has a large population of Asians (Vietnam, China, Thailand, India) and I work next door to the Mexican consulate so I assume there’s a good Hispanic population. There have got to be significant numbers of transplants like me and my friends who are used to spicier foods.
How long will it be before the spice temperature gets up to normal levels? This climate seems tailor-made for spicy food!
There’s a joke that they make “Minnesota salsa” by chopping up tomatoes and onions. Hot peppers nowhere to be seen, and lots of Scandinavians living there too.
There’s no pizza in Seattle. It’s not pizza when they use ketchup for sauce, which is apparently the thing out here. So far I haven’t found any pizza better than “pretty good . . . for Seattle.”
Oh, I don’t know. Pagliacci is pretty good. There’s a place around the corner from the Dahlia Lounge (also owned by Dahlia) that has ‘gourmet’ pizzas. Not traditional, but tasty.
But then, the closest pizza places to my house (100+ miles north of Seattle) are Little Seizures and Damnino. Anything is good by comparison. (There’s at least one good place in Bellingham.)
I went there sometime last year, and very briefly met a small amount of The Man. I thought I liked spicy food, but that was enough for me.
On the whole, though- yeah, I had a hard time finding spicy food in Seattle. In Redmond there was a mexican place by the name of El Matador (across from Whole Foods). They had a really good and hot habanero sauce for their enchiladas.
seconding Pagliaccis (or however you spell it) for Pizza, also one of my favs though is Vinces (mostly in the south end)
as for spicy, head south on first ave past Safeco and take a left just before the Starbucks headquarters. (its the light before Lander I believe) right there on the corner is a little run down place called Pecos Pit. since you seem to like liquid fire I would go ahead and order the hot (warning, the medium is hotter than most places would sell as a hot). personal favorite is the pork but whatever.
I was just in Seattle and had some terrible pizza. My husband and I asked at our hotel for something local, good, homemade. What we got was bland sauce and toppings on a bad-tasting crust. They also took breadsticks a little too literally. They were basically half a pizza crust, baked and cut up, with no seasonings whatsoever. We had much better luck in Portland.
