Caliente! How spicy do you like it?

[Jimbo]

You go to your favorite Indian, Chinese, Mexican, whichever cuisine where hot spices are a factor and the waiter, waitress, waitperson, server, whatever we are calling slaves these days asks how hot, what do you say ... punk?

[Quaco]

Just enough to create a slowly building hotness over the course of the dish. I voted two stars. I like the idea of hotness, like distortion on a guitar, but too hot is definitely annoying for me.

[BARON CORNY DOG]

As hot as they feel like making it.

Except for dishes that aren’t necessarily meant to be hot that get sexed up on request. That’s never a good thing.

[The Modernist]

They never ask such a question of course. I don't like very hot food and dislike the macho culture that surrounds it which is very much a bloke thing..you don't get women showing off about how many chillies they used in something. I enjoy spices but not if it's burning my mouth off. Madras is about as far as I'll go and even then that can be too hot to risk ordering in a restaurant.

[Darkness_Fish]

I like my food quite hot, I'm the kind of person who if I'm rummaging through the kitchen to come up with an ad hoc snack will always add a chilli pepper or some hot sauce into the mix. Never normally one to choose a Vindaloo or something in the Indian, because as G says above, that's the kind of meal they normally just pump chillies into to watch grown men cry into their lager.

Having said that, I went for a Tex Mex recently in a new-ish restaurant in Wigan town centre, where I had a starter of chicken wings in a California Reaper sauce. Now, I knew this was stupidly hot, because it had warnings on the menu, and they brought some sauce out to taste. But I thought I'd give it a go, thinking that it would be sparingly used just to give it a blast of fire. The buggers were swamped in the sauce, it was an entire waste of a few wings, just unpleasant to even try to get through.

[naughty boy]

just unpleasant to even try to get through.

that's Wigan for you

[The Red Heifer]

I go medium hot when I go for a Vindaloo, I want the heat/flavour balance to be just right.

Speaking of blokes trying to show off about how hot the stuff they eat is, my dad dared our local Indian house to make his Madras as hot as they possibly could. Of course they blew his head off and he sat on the couch incapacitated and drooling all over the floor.

E: I must spin that yarn a lot, it was in my predictive text

[Deebank]

They never ask such a question of course. I don't like very hot food and dislike the macho culture that surrounds it which is very much a bloke thing..you don't get women showing off about how many chillies they used in something. I enjoy spices but not if it's burning my mouth off. Madras is about as far as I'll go and even then that can be too hot to risk ordering in a restaurant.

My niece who is 15 or so likes her food stupidly hot - and she's not a show-offy kid, very quiet really.
She's half Ghanaian mind you, I suspect that may have something to do with it.I reckon she'd give any macho rugby lads on the piss party a run for their money though.

[Jimbo]

They never ask such a question of course.

They do here. The safe answer is "futsu" which means "normal" and you will get maybe a level three hotness dish.

And when you come here and you go to a ramen shop, which you must, look at the menu and order the pictured red one, that's usually the spiciest version. I love it. I had one once which was so ridiculously hot I couldn't finish it but when I returned to "futsu" all I needed was my handy towel which I always pack in my bag to mop up my sweat. I sweat and my nose runs when I eat hot food. Don't you? My wife calls it Jimbo's "workout."