Have you ever noticed that when you eat at a Thai restaurant and place your order, the server always asks you how spicy you’d like your food?  And they give you a scale of 0-5?  You would think, logically, that 0 would be totally mild and 1 would be some spice and 5 would be pretty hot, probably more hot than you’d really like, but you know some people order it that way and so 5 must still be at a human tolerance level..

So you order a 1 because you don’t want spicy but you also don’t want your food to be bland.  You think that by ordering a 1, that you’re being safe.  That you’re being conservative.  That’s because you’re not Thai.  Here’s how the scale really works based on my understanding and considerable experience.

This has happened to me many times.  I order the number 1 on the scale- and my thinking is that 1 will have a bit of spice and the 2 will have let’s say a maximum of twice the spice of a number 1.  If you did this, you’d be wrong.  This is not how the scale works- if you’re familiar with the Richter scale, that’s more like how the spicy scale in a Thai establishment works.  This isn’t a step up of one level, this is 10 ten times the level.  A number 2 is like 10 times the spice of a number 1.  You know how an earthquake of 6.0 pretty much knocks a vase off your desk and a 7.0 knock cars off a bridge?  That’s what that’s like.  Who are these freaks that are ordering a spicy number 5?  You’d have to be insane, or you lost a bet.  That’s dare food.  If you’re a smoker with no taste buds fine, but for everyone else that doesn’t just clear out your sinuses, it makes your whole brain slide out.

I’ve redone that scale to help with your ordering the next time you find yourself in a Thai establishment and you should get this little list laminated and keep it in your wallet and use it as a reminder the next time you’re feeling a tad adventurous.  And when the server comes and you ask how spicy is the number 1 and the little prankster says “Oh the spicy number 1 has just and little bit of spice” ; you can remember this:

SPICY THAI SCALE

0 – totally mild

1 – every pepper in the world

2 – eating lava

3 – licking the sun

4 – French kissing death

5 – Swallowing a supernova

That bit of information should keep you in the clear until the next time you find yourself ordering at an Indian restaurant where the spicy scale is less like a Richter scale and more like warp.  Just in case you’re not a giant nerd, warp is cubed.  So in layman’s terms that spicy number 2 I ate last week at Bombay was like noshing on the big bang.  That’s a spicy meatball.

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