when you want, where you want.
Why Are So Many Chefs De-Spicing Their Menus?
Photo: Bobby Doherty/
When the chef Chintan Pandya and his partners decided to name their restaurant group Unapologetic Foods, they made it clear that they wouldn’t water down their vision for Indian cooking in New York. In 2022, when the group opened Rowdy Rooster, specializing in fried-chicken sandwiches marinated in Kashmiri chiles, Pandya found himself in an unexpected position: wondering whether he would have to apologize for the food. The sandwiches were offered at five heat levels. When customers ordered the hottest, the chef would try and talk them out of it. “I would tell them, ‘Listen, even I avoid that,’” he says. Many would order it anyway and suffer through the pain, sniveling in the dining room before leaving one-star reviews online. The sandwiches were simply too hot, and a little over a year after opening, Pandya knew something had to be done. He de-spiced his menu, cutting the top two heat levels entirely. “At the end of the day, we are a business,” he says. “We have to accommodate customer needs.”
Pandya isn’t alone in noticing that, in the era of Hot Ones, someone’s desire for spice can sometimes outweigh their ability to handle it. “People can’t help themselves, and they aren’t well educated on what their spice threshold is,” says chef Eric Huang, who runs his own chicken-sandwich shop, Pecking House. “As much as we would like to say, ‘Hey, we gave you every single warning and we made it clear this was going to be really fucking hot,’ educating customers is really difficult in the restaurant business.”
So some operators and chefs are taking the necessary step of reformulating or removing their too-hot options. But de-spicification doesn’t affect all restaurants the same way. Pandya’s other spots — full-service, sit-down affairs like Dhamaka and Semma — have maintained the blistering heat levels for which they’re known, and the famous hot-pot cauldrons of Flushing’s Chinatown burn as bright red as ever. Pandya says context is crucial, and at more casual restaurants, customers aren’t necessarily ready for head-spinning blasts of heat: “People say, ‘I can handle the McSpicy at McDonald’s.’ They think that is the benchmark.”
“I have seen the desire for intensely spicy food wane in the last year,” says Benjamin Yi, the owner of Pearl Kitchen in Williamsburg. He sells boneless chicken wings at different heat levels. “Cluckin’ Hot” — made with red chiles that Yi’s aunt grows, dries, and grinds into the Korean powder called gochugaru — is straight-up “nuclear,” he says. But he decided to dial down the heat after seeing too many uneaten Cluckin’ Hot wings hit the trash. “It kind of breaks my heart,” he admits. Still, when he cut down on the gochugaru, his sales went up.
This is a good time to remember that restaurants are in the business of serving what people want to buy. “If something isn’t on the menu anymore, that’s usually because people weren’t ordering it,” says Kathy Chen, the head chef for the Taiwanese restaurants Wenwen and 886. When she updated 886’s menu last fall, several items left the menu, including a cake of pig’s blood doused in sambal and bird’s-eye chiles. “It was too spicy for a lot of diners,” she says. “The people who loved it loved it, but there weren’t enough of those people.” (She wouldn’t let the same thing happen to the “numbing” celtuce salad at Wenwen. The celtuce, which is like fibrous lettuce, soaks in a Sichuan-peppercorn marinade that floods the xylem and phloem. It’s perfect for some people — and “fucking intense” for others, Chen said. “There have been people who thought that they were having an allergic reaction.” Still, it remains on the menu.)
It’s not that New Yorkers have wimpy palates; in some cases, chefs had originally cranked heat levels far past anything they would eat back home. When Xian Zhang and Liming Wang opened Birds of a Feather in 2017, their chef, Ziqiang Lu, was clear and direct. “I don’t cook down to foreigners,” he said at the time. “They must eat up to the Sichuanese.” Things have changed. “We gradually toned down the spice level,” Zhang says. “We ourselves don’t particularly enjoy food that is too spicy. Our restaurants go by the owners’ standards.” Dishes that were “overpoweringly spicy” were dropped from the menu over time because the owners didn’t like them, he explains. “We don’t cater to the customers’ palates as much as we can cater to our own philosophy.”
A similar shift recently occurred in Carroll Gardens. Napat “Angie” Ruangphung was a server at Ugly Baby before taking it over with colleagues and renaming it Hungry Thirsty. They changed the spice philosophy, too. At Ugly Baby, the food was indiscriminately hot, while the new approach is to “make food that tastes as similar as possible to what we eat in Thailand,” she says. “If the food is supposed to be spicy, we make it spicy. If it’s not, we make it not spicy.” Customers don’t seem to mind. When the restaurant was Ugly Baby, the most popular item was the laab ped udon. It was so tongue-numbing that the English description on the menu served as a warning: “stay away” spicy duck salad. Now, the top order is fried branzino. The hottest element — a vibrant cilantro-chile fish sauce — is served in a cup on the side.
And then there are those restaurants whose efforts to tone down the menu does raise the ire of at least some customers. Chen, from Wenwen, has watched in dismay as the portion of red chiles on top of a plate of raw shrimp at Somtum Der slowly evaporated over the last few years, looking back at old pictures on her phone to make sure she hadn’t imagined things. “I compared photos recently,” she says. “It’s about a fourth of the amount of chiles.”
Is all hope lost for the city’s chile lovers? Not necessarily. MáLà Project opened in 2015 offering four spice levels for its málà dry pot. Before the pandemic, the restaurant removed its fourth, hottest option; customers loved it, but owner Amelie Kang didn’t think it was the best showcase for her food’s flavors. Plus, the restaurant was running through pitchers of water, and “heat” was the main detail of the cooking that anyone talked about. For now, a “little spicy” level is the restaurant’s best seller, but since the extra-spicy option disappeared, enough guests have been asking about it that Kang tells me she’s planning to bring it back.
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