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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2726 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.

This is my personal average restaurant experience of the spiciness scales in the US.

Rating Thai place example Indian place example BWW example
🌶️🌶️🌶️ Crying while eating (only available if ordered with a majority-brown group) Pray for your butthole Vindaloo (only available if ordered with a majority-brown group) Blazin'® or Wild®
🌶️🌶️ Ordered "spicy" with a majority-white group Madras Mango Habanero™
🌶️ Labeled "spicy" with no waitress warning Tikka Masala Asian Zing®
White people: black pepper is too spicy Not labeled "spicy" Korma Honey BBQ

I skipped a bunch of the BWW spiciness scale, but everything below Asian Zing on that scale is hardly spicy, IMO.

I (a Finn) once made the near-fatal mistake of ordering a "two chili" dish in an Indian restaurant in England. BAD mistake. After a while I was sweating in pain and it looked so bad the waiter asked me several times if I was ok. I finally got some relief when I asked if they had any milk (it was not on the list) and I will never forget the look of pity on his face when he said "Of course, sir, just a moment". Next morning was pretty bad but nowhere near as bad as eating it was.

If you run into this again at an Indian restaurant, order some yogurt or raita. They'll have it for sure, and it will moderate the spice the best.

IIRC they had some (this happened 20 years ago) but that wasn't nearly enough to keep me alive. Back then I had pretty good tolerance for what I thought was "spicy Indian food" (spoiler: It wasn't - just what they serve here in Finland in Indian and Nepalese restaurants) and didn't realize that England had a major subpopulation of actual Indians so the spiciness level calibration was way different.

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