Re:Ever been served something to "hot" (spicy) in a restaurant?
Thu, 12/2/10 1:40 PM
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Two different experiences on two different continents.
I was a sushi novitiate; taken to a Chicago sushi house by a business associate who was well versed in raw fish. I asked about the green smear on my plate. My sushi guide casually said, "Oh, that's wasabi. It's just like Japanese horseradish." Hearing that, and seeing the tiny dollop of green paste, I quickly called the waiter over and asked for another portion, thinking I would use up the initial serving with my first couple of bites.
Before the waiter could even return with the extra wasabi I had mixed the entire glob on my plate with a tablespoon or so of soy sauce and dunked in a hunk of sushi, coating it thoroughly so as not to miss a single grain of rice. As the waiter approached our table I popped the entire piece of sushi into my yap and started to chew. The wasabi popped off the back of my head. I was rendered speechless, unable to even tell the waiter, "No thanks, I've made a horrible miscalculation. Please keep your wasabi and have a nice day." So, now I had twice as much wasabi that I wouldn't use.
It took a couple of minutes to recover. Once I was ready for a second bite, I used a near microscopic dot of wasabi/soy mixture, and then made sure there was a healthy slice of pickled ginger to blunt its effects. Since then, I've built up a slight tolerance to wasabi, but I still use it cautiously.
The other run in with overly hot food was in Armenia. I was there back in the old Soviet Union days, when Armenia was still part of the "Dark Empire". I and a companion had broken with the tour group for an evening and were dining with another American couple who were driving, on their own, across the USSR. We were in a small restaurant (PECTOPAH in Cyrillic) adjoining our hotel.
Back then ( I was only 19 or 20) I wasn't a very adventurous eater. I fared well on the trip, but usually stuck with safe choices. That night I had a shashlik (we'd call it "shish kabob" here in the states. Oddly enough, over there, shish kabob was something else entirely) platter. The food arrived looking much the way you'd expect. Two skewers with chunks of beef, alternating with onions, mushroom, and, what appeared to be green bell peppers.
I wanted to get the total taste experience, so I cut of a piece of the beef, a layer of onion, some mushroom, and, to top it all off, a generous hunk of the pepper. Dear God in Heaven, that first bite was so hot I thought I was the victim of a Communist plot to kill Americans one plate at a time. I swear, if you looked at that pepper, it looked exactly like a regular old green bell pepper, but it sure didn't taste like one.
The worst part was, I couldn't spit the damn thing out. I was in polite company in a foreign land. I couldn't just hang my head over my plate and let the offending morsel fall out onto my plate, and I wasn't thinking clearly enough to spit it into my napkin. I suffered through the entire mouthful (to make matters worse, the beef was kind of tough, prolonging the amount of time everything spent in my mouth) until I could finally swallow.
Once again it took several minutes to regain composure. Once I was back on planet Earth I proceeded with caution and stuck to the tough beef, onions and mushrooms.
To this day, I have no idea what kind of peppers I was served. But I'm convinced that somewhere in Armenia, there's a retired chef who enjoys recounting his career to young kitchen workers, taking particular delight in telling a story that always starts out the same way, "It was back in the late 70s, and there was this stupid American boy who ordered the shashlik..."
Buddy
