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Secret Thai Spiciness

Posted on | September 29, 2008 | No Comments

Yesterday, me and two of my friends went to a Thai restaurant because one of my friends who is a waitress there had been bugging for me to go for a very long time. I had been to that restaurant a long time ago before I knew her, but not since I had met her at school(college). I had lived quite a long ways away before but now I’m close and within range, and have been for the past 6 months or so but haven’t had a chance to stop by.

Anyway, we got there and started flipping through the menu and I got the same old meal I normally get as my “main dish”. I got “Chicken Thai Spicy”. It’s just a dish that contains chicken(obviously) with vegetables in a thin really hot sauce and a bowl of steamed rice on the side. When you order though, they ask you a number of 1 to 10, which is the level of spiciness you would like your meal to be. This is quite common at many Thai, Vietnamese, etc restaurants.

The waitress I know there, knows I like my food spicy and so I just told her “Make it as spicy as you like” and she quickly replied with a smirk, “Okay, a 30 it is”. That’s right, she said a “30″. I’ve eaten at many places like this before so I know sometimes they will put it a bit hotter then they normally do, but a “30″!?

Finally, when the food was brought out, she leaned over and said “Yeah….we added some peppers we don’t normally add to the food, JUST to be able to get it hotter..” I could do nothing but laugh, as I prepared myself for the intense meal ahead of me. I can only guess that what she meant by “peppers we don’t normally add to the food”, is that these are usually either too hot for the average customers or they were peppers that were turned into a sauce of some sort where the peppers were diluted somehow. As my eyes scanned over my meal, I noticed these peppers she added happened to still contain their seeds. Hey, I asked for it, and she left me have it. That was one hell of a hot meal and I loved every bit of it.

The Result

I thought I’d share this experience because the fact is, that what is advertised on the menu isn’t always everything they will offer. Be sure to ask for a higher level of spiciness or whatever you may be interested in that isn’t shown on the menu. A lot of these more “family” restaurants like a lot of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, etc restaurants happen to be, where family and friends tend to be the only one’s working there. These places tend me to be more likely to “customize” your food to how you like it because believe it or not, what you eat at these restaurants and what the “locals” tend to eat are usually two different things. They learn to accommodate for different kinds of customer tastes.

Author: Zyaga

I'm a Computer Programmer / Web Developer, though I have quite a lot of other hobbies and interests. You can usually find me studying Japanese, Blogging, watching Anime(for hours at a time), or possibly even practicing some Martial Arts. My brain runs rampant so I have to fuel it's fire by having many hobbies to switch back and forth from.

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