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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   522 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 9, 2026

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Can someone explain US spiciness levels to me?

I recently tried Dave’s Hot Chicken. I have been meaning to try it for a while ever since they went viral. There was a bogo deal on UberEats so I ordered 1 Reaper, 1 ultra hot, 2 Hot, and then I guess a deliver mistake got me 2 mild tenders and later saw on a receipt I got a DoorDash order so I had that for lunch the next day. Here is my spice ranking Reaper - death 10 min of pain Ultra hot - taste nothing Hot - taste nothing Mild - taste nothing

This seems normal for a lot of American joints. A lot of the spiciness levels I can barely taste a difference and then they sometimes I have a crazy level. Why is this? I came up with two models:

  1. They are getting spicier. Medium is 3k Scoville, hot is 10k scoville, ultra hot is 25k scoville. Human variance for tasting spice varies widely so it’s actually very hard to create hot varieties for the customer to agree is hot. And myself personally has built up a tolerance of let’s call it 50k scoville before I taste something (I’m making these numbers up). And then it’s easy to just dial up a 300k scoville reaper like level.

  2. The restaurants lie and most Americans have little spice tolerance so all varieties of hot are generally similar but they do the tight range of spiciness level because customers like thinking they had something spicy.

Only time I’ve seen this broken would be at authentic Chinese spots. Where I could order let’s call it level 3 spicy. Where I remember a waitress warning me that this is Chinese hot and not white boy American hot. I ordered that and loved it.

I often find myself wanting to order something spicy that will have a pleasant pain but it seems fairly rare in American coded restaurants.

As Americans' exposure to Latin American and South Asian spicy food has increased, both customer tastes and restaurant offerings have adjusted at wildly different rates. What you're describing seems particularly common in rural areas without much immigration from spicy foos countries. Most of the population has a weak spice tolerance, so most options are very mild, and the only people who want real heat are the sort of sadists who like to brag about their highest scoville level, so there's one extreme option hardly anyone actually orders.

Meanwhile my local wing place has like 16 sauces/rubs that allow you to pretty meticulously dial in the exact level of spice you want. Most places I've been generally have fairly clear differences between mild, medium, and hot.

This checks out. Dave’s Hot Chicken went from instagram to national roll out fairly quickly so I guess it makes sense for them to offer a menu that fits the majority of Americas low spice tolerance. Though I thought the ultra hot would hit a little bit. Reaper was pure sadists.

Last time I went to a local joint their hog was nothing, but they had a jerk sauce that appropriately hit. 10-20s of pain that could be toned down with some water. It felt like work getting thru 10 but still enjoyable. My sinuses had been cleaned out.

Dave’s being essentially a choice between nothing or sadists isn’t what I’m looking for. I do like to go sadists maybe once every 6 months to a year, but most of the time when I’m looking for spice I just want to taste it and have a good sinus clean up.

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