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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   417 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.

A big problem is there are a lot of people who are just assholes. They'll order the highest spice level to try to show off in front of their friends, then they'll throw a fit if it's too hot.

Ya this feels right. Especially paired with person above. Maybe 5-10% of population likes some real heat. Which is 100% a big enough market to serve, but then you would have a lot of people complaining and/or not coming back because they ordered ultra hot and ultra hot was actually designed for a person with a palette that likes spice.

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