Feel the Heat

Am I the only person who gets the feeling that restaurants are dark because it makes it harder to get good pictures of the food?

Last week, I went out to dinner. Not for any particular occasion, just because I'd grown weary of my own cooking. I popped into a Thai restaurant not far from the Microsoft campus and ordered a simple noodle dish with beef. (As opposed to my customary chicken.) It was good, but fairly bland. I'd ordered three out of five stars for spiciness, and despite the fact that I could see the spices, I couldn't really taste them.

The standard "five-star" scale that restaurants use tends to be wildly inconsistent. In some venues, "three stars" is noticeably hot, while in others, it's barely there.

I have a hypothesis about this, and it works as follows: Ethnic restaurants that have a larger percentage of customers they understand to have a typical "American" palate tend to make their foods less spicy than those that cater to their "home ethnicity" or people from nearby areas. I've heard rumors that Chinese restaurants, in particular, have both "American" and "Chinese" scales for spicy foods, such that the same rating requested by the Chinese person results in a much spicier dish than one requested by an American.

I grew up in the Midwest, and have really only started to appreciate spice in foods after moving out to Washington. Accordingly, I've been working on acquiring the taste, and the randomness with which restaurants spice their dishes works against that. But I'm getting there. I can comfortably manage three stars at some of the more "authentic" restaurants, and may start working on four soon. I suspect that a genuine five may be forever out of reach. But the experimentation that I've engaged in during the quest has been rewarding on its own.