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.
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
"Indian spicy" is not really that hot - it's more about the strong flavor that comes with mixing spices of multiple varieties.
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.
(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?)
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]
Most white people in the US aren’t as adventurous as those on HN.
I've settled on 4-5 chilies for Som Tam.
There is no such think as 'hardly racism'. That's an excuse for racist behavior you agree with.
It definitely needs to be called out because it's the same level as suggesting that a black person wants fried chicken despite the fact that they ordered grilled chicken.
"I think you actually want X despite asking for Y because of your skin color."
I'm honestly surprised that you are defending this behavior given your otherwise neutral positions. It's disgusting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Regardless of whether it makes logical sense, in practical reality, they do.
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.
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.
It's just called chile.
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
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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).
This way it's a continuum instead of just a binary choice.
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.
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.
There are two types of spicy:
Actual Spicy
White People Spicy
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.
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.
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.