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Comment by t1o5 | Hacker News Reader

You will have a hard time balancing the spice levels. You can't satisfy both Indian and non-Indian demographic or you will have to have a spicy, less spicy type of each item. As an Indian, I cant stand the westernized non spicy versions of the supposedly authentic Indian foods. So I wouldn't buy them nor eat in those type of Indian restaurants. Its the same case vice versa. Non Indians may not like the spicy versions.

Another thing to note that though its called "Indian food", there is no thing as an "Indian food", just like not everyone from India knows Hindi.

Indian food varies drastically as you travel from North to South, East to West. But for westerners, its mainly butter chicken/daal/Vindaloo/Paratha/Chapathi. For someone from South India, it will be Dosa/Appam/Idly/Idiappam/Pongal/Avial/Sambhar/Rasam or Fish curry. One of your challenges lies in catering to the Indian & Non Indians palettes alike. Greetings from Canada.

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In my experience non-westerners tend to underestimate the level of spiciness that westerners can handle (particularly westerners who are culinarily adventurous), and overestimate the average spiciness of their cuisine.

If it's too spicy for me, it's too spicy for 99% of the population of any country, but it's damn near impossible to convince servers of that.

This is true for me too, although I will say that Indian and Thai places are at least the most likely to take me seriously when I beg them to add spice.

Probably one of the least spicy curries I've ever had was at an Indian wedding. They put all the white people on a big table together and I'm thinking they gave us a different dish to everyone else. They even came over and asked if it was too spicy.

It seems many cultures think their culture is the spiciest! I've heard similar boasts from friends of mine who are Mexican, Chinese, Korean, and Indian among others.

I've been reading about cuisines and it seems that Korean can be pretty spicy. Not got a chance to try it, except a dish or two (bibimbap, IIRC, and that was not hot). I like the fact that they use a fair amount of sesame seeds and sesame oil, based on what I've read. Got to try it more some day.

I've had some spicy kimchee before, and that was really good.

Oh yes, I forgot about kimchee. I had it at the same place where I had the bibimbap. It is good alright. And recently I read up in Wikipedia and other sites on how they make it. Very interesting. There are many different varieties. They store them to ferment in large jars which are made of earthenware or ceramic or something like that. Traditionally, some kinds of pickles in South India (e.g. green mango pickle) are made in similar looking jars, but not as large.

Find a good Korean fried chicken place. Most of them will have a pretty spicy option.

I'm not in a place where I can try that, right now. Let's see, later.

Seriously, I've been to an Indian restraunt where I've ordered something spicy, and the server asks "are you sure". After responding yes, he asked "are you really sure". This whole thing goes on a third time before he finally goes back into the kitchen.

About five minutes later his manager comes out "so I heard you ordered it spicy, now I'm not sure you know what that means".

I went to school in New Mexico, we used to throw a little ground capsaicin crystals into the green chile. I can handle whatever the health department will let them put in their damn vindaloo.

Had the exact same thing happen a few months ago at an Indian restaurant. The server just flat out refused to let me order bullet naan. I had to insist 3 times before he gave in. Unless you're stuffing those things with Carolina Reapers, I can handle it (even if you are, I still probably want to try it :)

Another time I grabbed a bottle of the house hot sauce at a Jamaican restaurant, and the older lady behind the counter actually laughed at me and told me it was too hot. When I tried it, it was about the level of a medium hot wing sauce. I could have drank the whole bottle and not even asked for water.

People only know what they have experienced. You have to just forgive.

That's good advice for any situation.

That is the part where I tell them I buy cumin and chili powder by the pound and that I know turmeric is a root and cinnamon is tree bark.

>I went to school in New Mexico

I generally think of myself as liking spicy food. I tend to favor Szechuan Chinese and I lived in New Orleans for a few years. When I was in the Santa Fe area last summer, I came to the realization after the first night's dinner that I really needed to order the Hatch chile [corrected] sauce on the side or it was going to be completely overwhelming.

> Hatch chili sauce

It's just called chile.

There is often a red sauce option :-) But I wanted to get the Hatch chiles while I had an opportunity to as you don't really see them most other places.

The difference between red and green chile is whether it has been dried, but nobody here calls it sauce (even though it almost always is). Hatch is a town that produces it, but they're technically Anaheim peppers. However, if you walk into any restaurant in New Mexico and say "I'd like the Hatch chili sauce on the side" you're going to get a raised eyebrow. The state question is "red or green?"

The spelling of the pepper and the sauce both vary by region.

We're talking specifically about the region in New Mexico in which I live.

I love driving through Hatch with the windows down in 110F weather. The smell is amazing!

Did you pause to think about why you were asked that series of questions so often? Your experience suggests that the case of a guest overestimating their own tolerance is vastly more common than the case of the restaurant underestimating the tolerance of a guest.

Edit: my mother, for example, is constantly enamored of the idea of spicy food, orders it "medium" or even "spicy," and then struggles to eat it.

Warning customers that your food is spicy is one thing. Refusing to accept that your culture isn't the only one on the planet that enjoys spicy food is something else entirely.

There are white people who don't like spicy food, and there are Indians who don't like spicy food. There are probably more white people who don't like spicy food than Indians who don't (percentage wise).

But if you use this heuristic instead of listening to your customers, you'll be wrong more often than you're right.

>my mother, for example, is constantly enamored of the idea of spicy food, orders it "medium" or even "spicy," and then struggles to eat it

There's really nothing you can do about this unless you plan on just flat out refusing to listen to your customer's stated preferences.

Roughly 10 years ago, I briefly worked as a waiter in an Indian restaurant in the midwest.

Easily, more than 90% of the white people who wanted things "spicy" on the Indian spicy scale could _not_ handle it.

So the heuristic of interpreting the definition of spicy in the context of their background more often than not works out. (If it didn't, Indian restaurants who have been established for decades would have learned and changed their ways)

On a separately interesting note, I'm a brown person... I love spicy Indian food, but I have trouble handling it. Invariably I get all snotty, but I keep eating it. I have to keep a ton of tissues nearby to keep wiping snot, but my god food without the spicy kick is just too bland for me.

I wish so bad that I didn't get snotty every time I ate spicy.

It's kind of embarrassing and disgusting that when I'm eating out with folks, they have to see me constantly wiping my nose.

Only two times in my life have I been brought to weep because of how spicy something was, and both times, it was the F'ing Cajuns. I have no idea what they did, but oh my god.

They showed up one time at an Octoberfest (!!!) with their damned salsa. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get something that will cut heat at a German festival? I had to eat a cream puff the size of my head to stop the pain.

And yes, every time, my nose runs like a sieve. I feel your pain.

One word of advice, capsaicin is an oil. Trying to dull the pain with milk, etc is a waste of time. You need to dissolve the oil off your tongue and for that alcohol is the best solution (no pun intended). Pure spirits work well to remove the capsaicin and then you can follow up with something that will soothe your raw nerve endings. So, German beer may have been the right answer for you at the time.

> One word of advice, capsaicin is an oil. Trying to dull the pain with milk, etc is a waste of time.

No, it's not; cold milk, largely because of casein, which is lipophilic, is one of the most effective remedies (sugar solution in water is also effective, though somewhat less so.)

> You need to dissolve the oil off your tongue and for that alcohol is the best solution (no pun intended). Pure spirits work well to remove the capsaicin and then you can follow up with something that will soothe your raw nerve endings. So, German beer may have been the right answer for you at the time.

Pure alcohol is effective, and recommended for cleaning things that have been contaminated with capsaicin, but is not a great idea to ingest. Mixtures of alcohol and water that are far more of the latter than the former are not particularly useful.

Beer consistently raises the pain temporarily, and does nothing longer-term, in my experience. Milk and sugar soothe for the short term, but nothing long term. Haven’t tried spirits, but given how beer goes, I dont have much hopes

My nose runs, but I also get the hiccups. I met Mario Batali a couple times (we happened to vacation next door to each other a couple years in a row), and he told me that happens to him too. Never noticed it happening to anyone else, though!

I think you're looking at this from the wrong direction. Instead of starting from "what is my ideal experience, and why are people failing to deliver that to me," try thinking "what does the existing equilibrium have to teach me about this situation?"

If you stop and think, you'll realize that the ubiquity of this "problem" for you is proof that your intuition is wrong, that you are an outlier, that the vast majority of incidents in which the spiciness doesn't suit the patron goes in the opposite direction.

The fact that you get so much pushback is proof that they are right to do so far more often than they are wrong. There's no reason to think that so many people at so many restaurants would be all be mistaken in the same direction and with such an extreme degree of conviction.

And there is something you can do—offer a lot of resistance without refusing so that all but the most stubborn customers who've tied their self esteem to their ability to eat spicy foods don't make the mistake of ordering food that's too spicy for them.

That's not proof at all. Stereotypes and confirmation bias are well documented phenomena.

It's very easy for people to take a few examples of behaviors by people from a certain group and apply that behavior to the entire group when they aren't members of that group--despite what the actual statistics show.

An example that happens all of the time in food service is assigning racial heuristics to tipping. A waitress has 2 customers who leave small tips, customer A is the same race as the waitress, customer B isn’t. The waitress dismisses customer A as a generic asshole, but she uses the example of customer B to reinforce her belief about customer B’s race’s tipping habits. The waitresses behavior (even multiple waitresses across multiple restaurants) certainly isn’t proof of anything about any group’s tipping behaviors.

People from hundreds of different cultures will insist that their cuisine is the spiciest and that no one else from any other culture could possibly handle their food--they can’t all be right. Clearly there are a lot of people overestimating their cuisine’s relative spiciness.

Have you had much experience working in food service? The iteration happens incredibly quickly. Any kind of cultural factor (like, say, a predisposition to underestimate the tolerances of white people) will quickly be erased by dozens and dozens of experiences.

When you are waiting tables all day, you're optimizing for two things: tips, and, even more so, limiting annoying situations. A hypothetical server who carries the bias you describe will learn quickly, like, within a night or two, that haranguing their customers about spiciness will result in both worse tips and a lot of extra hassles. In your example, you were so agitated about the spiciness that you even got their boss involved—that's a huge hassle for a server, a big waste of time and something that probably annoys their boss.

I can say from experience that servers do not have the luxury of making decisions based on arbitrary cultural factors. The data is being drilled into them all day, every day, and in all but the most unusual cases, servers will take the path of least resistance to quick turnover and tips. And if you want to deal in stereotypes, don't underestimate the practicality of immigrants.

>In your example, you were so agitated about the spiciness that you even got their boss involved

I don't think you're really interested in a debate here. First you confused me with someone else, I never said anything about anyone's boss. Second you altered the story to make the person who did tell that story look bad.

They didn't say anything about being agitated or getting the boss involved. They said the waiter asked and they confirmed 3 times and then the boss came out to ask a 4th time.

As to the rest of your point, I think you really underestimate the power of confirmation bias, and I dont buy the servers are just too busy to sterotype schtick.

Apologies for confusing you with the other person. I don't know if reading between the lines is the same as changing the story—maybe it's "cultural" but I would never push a server about a food preference to such a strong degree that there need to be multiple conversations about it. I tend to be more deferential in cases like this. I'm sure you're right that I shouldn't assume the person was agitated. I think I'm reading too much into the fixation on demonstrating a capacity for spicy foods. There's something deeper bound up in that, but it's not my place to speculate about something I don't have first hand experience with.

You can buy it or not, but my broader point is that people who have not been servers probably shouldn't express confident opinions about what it's like to be a server. The fact that a wide variety of cultures treat white people ordering spicy food the same way, and that this happens with so much reliability and to such a strong degree, makes it very unlikely that a kind of mass anti-white hysteria is forcing many thousands of people who otherwise have little in common with each other to behave starkly against their own interests, over and over again, day in and day out.

Stereotypes exist, and people have irrational confidence in the relative spiciness of their culture's cuisine. Unless you have some kind of spice challenge, your food isn't that hot. Just about every wing place in America sells wings that you can order that are just as hot as food you can find at your average Indian restaurant, or Jamaican restaurant, or Sichuan restaurant.

Every job has folk wisdom and heuristics. I worked retail and then retail tech support for years. I've had to deal with plenty of employees who wouldn't listen to customer's preferences because that preference didnt match some heuristic they were using.

They had the same justifications--"They don't really want it, they'll just end up returning it."

Those employees who insited on treating all of their customers like children because of a few bad experiences were consistently poor performers.

Their heuristics were detrimental, but they kept using them because people are very vulnerable to confirmation bias. No mass hysteria required.

Listen to your customer. Give them advice, warn them if necessary, but don't treat them like a child because you once interacted with an asshole who looked a bit like them.

The key is in your last sentence—you're extrapolating outward from "once interacted," but I think if you actually spoke to people who work in these restaurants, you'd learn that, in fact, the situation is "constantly interacted," albeit maybe "asshole" isn't as accurate as "person who overestimated their own tolerance."

If it was "constantly" happening, given the thousands of times I've eaten at restaurants that serve spicy foods over my lifetime, I should have seen this fairly regularly.

My theory is that servers are the same as retail employees--a small difference in behaviors between groups reinforces preconceived stereotypes, which causes them to overestimate the differences between groups.

Also, you're saying things like "in fact" based on what you think that other people think the frequency is.

> Warning customers that your food is spicy is one thing. Refusing to accept that your culture isn't the only one on the planet that enjoys spicy food is something else entirely.

When I was waiting in a Thai restaurant (in Australia) I too started do the "are you really sure" thing after a couple of customers ordered the hottest dishes on the menu, then complained they couldn't eat them and wanted a refund.

People would often ask for a "mild" version of, say, Tom Yum soup, which is not really possible without thinning it down with water and losing all the flavour.

This. When they ask you "are you sure" they are just wary of getting jerked around by people who really have no idea, and who can't abide having to live with their decisions. They get those people all the time.

As an aside, I remember somebody returning a standard grilled chicken sandwich at McDonalds for being unbearably spicy.

>As an aside, I remember somebody returning a standard grilled chicken sandwich at McDonalds for being unbearably spicy.

Maybe it was secretly a McSpicy? https://www.mcdonalds.com.sg/food-menu/mcspicy/

Well, why can't you just make the food less spicy, but advertise it as more? I don't mean you should lie- just slide your spiciness scale down a bit so that what you call "hot" is actually mild and what you call extra super hot is just sorta-hot, for you, but not for the customers.

I don't reckon anyone has ever requested a refund because they could actually eat what they ordered.

As to those customers who only order hot food to brag to their friends, they can pretend their food is really hot and nobody has to know the truth.

> Well, why can't you just make the food less spicy, but advertise it as more? I don't mean you should lie- just slide your spiciness scale down a bit so that what you call "hot" is actually mild and what you call extra super hot is just sorta-hot, for you, but not for the customers.

Some dishes like Thai Green Curry are based on green chillies (and Red curry on red chillies). Adding less chilli just dilutes the flavour an makes it weak (but still hot). You cannot really substitute the chilli with another milder ingredient like capsicum (bell pepper) because the flavour will change completely.

> Warning customers that your food is spicy is one thing. Refusing to accept that your culture isn't the only one on the planet that enjoys spicy food is something else entirely

Different peppers contain various combinations of different capsaicinoids, and spicy dishes fun different cultures also have different non-capsaicinoids as best components. It's very common for someone used to spicy dishes of one culture to not be able to handle those of a different culture, and I'm not at all surprised that people working in food have developed a fair skepticism of people who think (often not inaccurately, for some particular cultural cuisine) they can handle spice (and often food-culture-specific codes that bypass this skepticism by signaling familiarity with the food culture in question.)

Why do you think the people who would not want to eat spicy food would order Indian food advertised as spicy and authentic when they have lots of other options already? Whereas people who want spicy food are underserved by current options, so selling to them seems like a smart move.

> Why do you think the people who would not want to eat spicy food would order Indian food advertised as spicy and authentic when they have lots of other options already?

Regardless of whether it makes logical sense, in practical reality, they do.

One thing I feel is missing in the world is a standardized way to talk about chili levels, like a more accessible Scoville scale that includes things like black pepper.

The lack of standardization makes it hard to know what you'll get.

Even in India, from region to region what is considered mild or spicy varies, e.g. a spicy dish in Pune can be less hot than a "mild" dish in Hyderabad.

Might make sense to have a card or phone app that basically says "This user has a tolerance of blahblah, and is fully qualified to eat spicy food"

There is a hot-sauce shop in Austin Texas that makes you sign a legal release waiver before purchasing some of the sauces they keep in a locked case. Apparently there is a real risk of airway collapse -- a fine line between "hot sauce" and "military grade chemical weapon / bear deterrent spray."

A bunch of us Westerner looking types went to a Thai restaurant in Mountain View. This was many years ago and I don't recall the restaurant. We ordered some shared dish and were asked how spicy we wanted it, 1-10. We said 10. The whole "are you sure?" thing a few times. They brought the dish out. We said "this really isn't 10 spicy." The server said, "next time say you want it 10 on the Thai scale". Sigh.

I live in NC now. There's an ice cream place here that has you sign a release form before they'll let you try their "Cold Sweat"[0] made with habanaro, ghost pepper oil, etc, ice cream. I tried it. It was pretty amazingly hot, but while eating it I noticed they had a flavor called "Exit Wound." I asked what it was. "Oh, that's even hotter." Didn't try it... the Cold Sweat was really hot.

There's something wrong with an America where the spiciest food I can get is ice cream. :-)

[0] Cheesy food network video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8oy_zYRTZ0

I think this may be a thing with Thai restaurants in general; it's not just spiciness but also level of fish sauce and even the way the dish is prepared. There's a thing in Chicago about "secret menu" Thai restaurants, which are often written in Thai language (food nerds in Chicago have translated and published them). It might be possible to order things "Thai style" in any good Thai restaurant and get a different, better dish.

Anecdote: Had a (caucasian) friend who spent a four-month co-op term as a student in India, and when they came back they also had to insist to the local Indian restaurants "yes, I want it extra spicy, like you would serve to an Indian person".

(Like, I realize this is frustrating, but how is the waiter going to know -- from your appearance -- that you spent four months eating Indian food in India?)

Several of my colleagues find buffalo wing sauce to be unbearably spicy...

Most white people in the US aren’t as adventurous as those on HN.

Indians are caucasian, too.

More to the point, "caucasian" is an obsolete and ill-defined term that was interpreted in various ways throughout its history:

The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid[1] or Europid)[2] is a grouping of human beings historically regarded as a biological taxon, which, depending on which of the historical race classifications used, have usually included some or all of the ancient and modern populations of Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.[3]

Since the second half of the 20th century, physical anthropologists have moved away from a typological understanding of human biological diversity towards a genomic and population-based perspective, and have tended to understand race as a social classification of humans based on phenotype and ancestry as well as cultural factors, as the concept is also understood in the social sciences.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

Sure, I forgot the quotes, thank you. The whole "race" thing is ridiculous, in my opinion.

My photo is on the wall of a Chicago Thai restaurant for their spicy food challenge. They had a scale of: mild, medium, hot. From there they had a second scale of: Thai hot 1x-10x.

If you cleared your plate at Thai hot 7x or higher you got your meal comped and your photo on the wall.

My friend and I did it one day. He ordered a curry and had no problem. I ordered pad thai that was the biggest plate of noodles I'd ever seen and failed because my stomach wasn't large enough vs it being from the heat. Went back and did the curry no problem.

The thing with very spicy foods is at a certain point your tongue checks out and flavors just get muted. Personally I love the Sichuan approach since the peppercorns numb your tongue to the heat a little which for me lets me more fully experience the flavors of the chiles.

I've found at Thai restaurants I have better luck telling them how many chilies I want added. I learned this trick when in Thailand. I would order something "very spicy" or "Thai spicy" and I would always be questioned. One waitress asked me how many chilies and I've been using that ever since.

I've settled on 4-5 chilies for Som Tam.

I went through the same experience once; instead of 1-10 I told them I wanted the "Thai spicy" maximum. I thought being an Indian it should be something I could handle; I couldn't have been more wrong. That thing burnt my intestines and "exit wound" was literally true. Took two days to feel completely alright.

"Indian spicy" is not really that hot - it's more about the strong flavor that comes with mixing spices of multiple varieties.

Was it Amron Thai On Castro Street ?

No. My recollection is that it was a block or two off Castro on either Villa or Dana. This is over 5 years ago though.

Same experience here. Learned to order "Thai-hot" while working in Frankfurt (Germany) and frequenting a Thai food truck. Nearby was "Best Worscht in Town". Try it when in Germany - http://bestworschtintown.com They sell sausages and fries. You have to choose a flavour and the level of spiciness for the sauce/relish. Latter ranges from A to F. I can manage D (333,000 SCU according to web site). For F (short for FBI or Fking Burning Injection, 1,200,000 SCU) I heard that they require to sign an indemnification agreement.

I’d take that to the extreme and say that many cultures view their cuisine as the ultimate in spiciness while assuming others don’t come close. My anecdote is three South Asian/Indian men being refused the “spiciest” option at a Sichuan restaurant in Palo Alto. Of course, we took this as a challenge and definitely could see why some people might not enjoy it but it wasn’t exactly sign-a-waiver level spice.

Also, lots of Indians find Indian food spicy. My mom and aunts and brother are spice nuts. My grandmother will literally eat raw chilis, but my dad, my uncle, myself, and my grandfather, when he was alive, aren't super into spicy food. My uncle turns read and gets sweaty whenever he eats my mother's food, and my dad and i cope by consuming copious amounts of yogurt.

Like, years and years of practice have made me able to ignore the pain and eat what my mother cooks when we visit, but that's not to say I'm a fan of the spice. My wife often asks how I handle my mother's spice, and the answer is -- I ate it as a hungry teenage boy when I was too hungry to stop for water, so I just grit my teeth and power through.

Mor milagai with curd rice is a great way to acquire a taste for chili. From there you can seamlessly move on to raw chilis :)

It's really not a question of not having a taste for it, or not being able to develop it. I'm 100% certain I could develop it, as my grandmother has -- due to seemingly inherent interest -- consumed ever spicier dishes.

My father, uncle, and I have no interest in developing our taste buds to consume ever spicier foods in the way my mother's family does. I simply am happy to eat whatever. So many things taste good, there is no reason to eat incredibly spicy food. That being said, half of my spice tolerance (which is incredibly incredibly high) is due to being forced to consume it by my mother.

I used to have a roommate who used to cook a kilo of uncut green chillies in a pan; adding crushed red chillies & other spices. Then he would eat it with Roti & pickle.

I, for one, can not eat chopped green chillies as a spice in a dish unless it is fried well in Tadka to kill its hotness.

The hottest generally available hot sauces are the ones available at McDonald's, PopEyes, KFC, Taco Bell in the US... In fact, the same stores in Asia don't even offer hot sauces (usually some sweet and sour sauce or just ketchup).

I think it has more to do with how the westeners behave when things are too spicy; I've had a russian girl break down crying from a mildly spicy dish (lost half a gallon of milk and a ton of sugar for that one...), and while others are less extreme, whenever they can't handle their spice, they'll surely let you know it. I know maybe 2 people who both can't handle a high level of spices, and will behave themselves when its too hot.

Personally, I find worst-case behavior rude, offensive and downright childish; and more annoyingly, it's generally acceptable behavior. It's sufficiently annoying to stop me from serving spicy foods by default, if its to a non-asian. And worst of all, they always think they can handle a decent level of spices, so theres no warning before they start huffing and dying at the table.

I imagine most restaurants aren't as annoyed by it as I am, but I'm pretty sure its primarily that worst-case behavior that stops them from serving properly spicy food to westeners. At least with an indian, if they can't handle their spices, they'll drink their water and shut the hell up.

No one enjoys seeing someone huffing and puffing at the dinner table

Your experience is not universal or even typical. I have never seen anything like this in the thousands of times I've eaten spicy foods with hundreds of family members, friends, and business associates. I have literally never seen someone insist that they can handle spicy food, and then start behaving like a child. In my experience, they try to hide it because they are embarrassed they can't handle it.

The only thing that even came close was someone who was challenged to do a shot of Carolina Reaper sauce and he started hiccuping then had to excuse himself to go to the bathroom.

Hottest thing I've ever tasted was undiluted The Man sauce from Dixie's BBQ [1]. Years ago when I interned at Microsoft, they had the interns try the sauce, since we were all from out of town. Whoever had the most would get tickets for the Seahawks game the next evening.

I figured I'd like it, because at the time I was super into hot foods. At least, I was by my own benighted standards. But my adviser told me to take the smallest amount I could, on a toothpick. I said fine, and boy were they right. It didn't feel hot. It felt like I was cutting my tongue with a knife. It only started feeling hot as an inferno after it had spread out through my mouth.

One of the other guys took a spoonful and put it on a bun and ate it in one bite. Then he proceeded to guzzle several cups of milk, before retiring later to the WC. He won the tickets, but apparently was unable to go because he was still feeling digestively sensitive the next day.

These days I don't really fuck around with super hot food any more.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie%27s_BBQ

I was at a restaurant with my Indian friends, we all ordered the same dish and spiciness however my food came from a different container...

> In my experience non-westerners tend to underestimate the level of spiciness that westerners can handle

As someone who owned a restaurant; that is not it most likely. The problem is that people say ‘super spicy!!!’ (or bloody if it is a steak) and then send it back because they find it inedible. And you do not want to cause a scene nor can you bite back too hard, so you just replace it with bland and overcooked. It is a shame but many places just want to prevent that issue.

If by "westerner" you mean U.S. American or Mexican, you might be right.

However, here down in South America, we can't handle spicy at all (our food is considered bland by people from spicy countries). I almost died eating Mexican food that was rated a 3 on the 1 to 10 scale.

That's a good point -- customers definitely react to our spice levels differently. We use authentic, family recipes so people not used to spice sometimes have a hard time. We're exploring adding a lower spice option for each product, so hopefully soon!

I would also say that food from any region of India is Indian food, and you can further specify what type of Indian food by direction (i.e. South/North) or region (i.e. Gujurati/Rajastani/Tamil).

Assuming you use water-based sauces and mostly pre-ground spices, the easiest way to fix the spice issue would be just to put all of the spicy ingredients in a separate container and let customers add those in at their discretion. For most dishes there's just a few ingredients that are really spicy, and the recipe would probably survive without them.

This way it's a continuum instead of just a binary choice.

The tricky problem with spice levels is there's a weird masculine/masochism vibe to it all, along with a highly subjective scale. So we end up with some way overestimating their tolerance, and some way underestimating. Both of these leave your customers with negative impressions, rendering them less likely to come back.

Really want to help your customers decide? Bring out a little bit of each sauce; and a bit of bread to try it with. Have them move from the non-spicy to the spicier -- let the server know which one they liked best. Not only is this an inexpensive course of action, it lets restaurants avoid disappointing experiences and allows for an inexpensive teaser at the start of a meal.

I think this is a pretty tractable problem: plenty of non-Indians love Indian food for the spice, and anecdotally, I've had plenty of food like "thai hot" pad thai that's too hot for my Indian coworkers.

Palates will vary, but I'd expect the typical 1-4 pepper scale would give most people a good option. If carrying four variants of every item is too much of a challenge, the meals could include optional spice sub-packets.

Ordered takeout from a little Indian place in one of the more heavily Indian populated sides of Houston. They asked me what spice level I wanted, I said medium. They then asked, "Indian medium or American medium"?

Yeah, that's a pretty common thing.

There are two types of spicy:

  Actual Spicy

  White People Spicy

You go into any restaurant in NYC, as a white person, and they ask you if you want it spicy, and you only say "yes, please" get ready to be disappointed.

Most restaurants have been burned by random tourists sending back full plates of food by white tourists from other parts of the country, that they lower their spiciness, if you look like non-foodie white people.

They don't even ask or mention what they're doing. You say: yes, spicy, please. Then you get Ohio Spicy.

They don't even call it "white people spicy" but that's what it is. You have to emphatically say, "Yes, VERY spicy, please." in order to get actual chilies, and real spice oils.

Try it with a friend, who doesn't look like white people. Both of you order the same dish, both spicy, then trade. The only route around this situation is to look like New York Foodie White People.

Half of my Indian-American (first generation born in America) can barely handle any spice. That's just an anecdote, but I'm not so sure you can draw the spice line on whether or not someone is Indian.

Mnyeah. That sort of attitude has definitely turned out to be good advertisement for "Indian" cuisine in the UK. All the lads here will compete with each other to be the one to eat the spiciest curry, just to show how tough they are, presumably. One place I visited once even handed out certificates for the "Flaming Rectum Society" to my friends who ordered their Vindaloo.

To be honest, I find all this posturing a bit naff. Where I come from (Greece), when we say that a food is "spicy" we mean it's fragrant - not hot. I personally use at least half a dozen spices when I cook- cumin, cardamom, nutmeg, white and black pepper, paprika, kayenne pepper, cinnamon, allspice, clove, ginger, turmeric and even a bit of fennel. Those are all "spices", only one of them is hot and they're all meant to make your food a pleasure to eat, not a competition for who has the biggest ...

... tolerance to pain?

Well, I guess now we have learned that non-westerners are tougher than westerners. I'm sure that must be useful information, somehow. One day I may even understand how.

Btw, hot dishes go great with yoghurt, beause it takes away the burning feeling.

My guess is that they are not trying target typical westerners. There already is a lot of westernized pre-made Indian food you can buy at the supermarket.

Yeah, and it's all awful because they eliminate my favorite part of Indian cuisine -- the spices. It's almost as bad as Greek gyros or Persian food without sumac.

As a typical white guy who doesn't handle spice well (two different attributes - put away your pitchforks lol), I'm disappointed by my options at the supermarket. A lot of it is either flavorless tomato sauce or super-spicy, without the rich curry flavor I'd like. I prefer good Indian takeout, and if I had a way of dialing back the spice level maybe 25%, it would be perfect.

Basically italian spaghetti sauce with turmeric.

Just make the mix non-spicy and let the customer add chili oil or whatever to taste.

I wonder if they could do something like include a capsaicin dropper and guidelines?

When Midwesterners complain about how spicy something is, they're not talking about the pain from the capsaicin. They're referring to the unusual flavors from backing spices like cinnamon, coriander, cumin, turmeric, clove, cardamom, paprika, fenugreek, bay, et. al.. These are not "hot" spices, but people still have issues with them.

I don't know what Midwesterners you talk to, but everyone in my neck of the woods uses spicy to mean hot-spicy.

You know I would think so, but I had a roommate who compplained when I cooked with red bell peppers. I would make Italian food with garlic and onions and he would leave the apartment. Some people--and Midwesterners stereotypically--truly have a flat palate.

I think we need to get a map out if we're going to come to any kind of agreement on this.

I'm sorry, this is contrary to every experience I've had. 'Spiciness' refers to heat, not to combination of spices.

It's a common misconception.

As an Indian, for me it refers to both. "Spiciness" may bring heat to the tongue (chillies) or may be easy on the tongue but hell in your stomach (Andhra spicy). the latter is less likely to be taken as "heat" but it is more of a combination of spices.

Right, but they are not going to be the target audience for this. There are plenty of Americans who aren't Midwesterners from Northern European meat-and-potatoes cultures, and Hungry Man already exists for the rest of them.

Been eating and making curry for years. From scratch, not powders. I cannot stand when someone tones down a dish because of my skin colour.

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