By Kaori Furue

Rainbow Chicken at Salad King, from left to right: three chillies, ten chillies, twenty chillies.

How many Salad King chillies are you? Fans of this long-standing, popular Thai restaurant next to Ryerson campus know exactly how hot they like it. All dishes on the menu can be customized according to their “Spicy Scale” that starts with Mild, Medium, and then progresses through one to twenty chillies. Three chillies is called Thai Medium, at ten they ask “Are you sure?” and for twenty they proudly state it can cause an upset stomach. How hot is twenty chillies, really? We had to try.

Just in case things got out of hand, we brought a couple of cartons of milk and some white bread—a trick learned from a passionate hot-sauce enthusiast. He said the milk cools the tongue while the bread soaks up and carries away the chilli oil.

Emergency first aid supplies.

Different dishes on the menu absorb heat at varying levels. Dry dishes like noodles tend to be the hottest while anything with coconut milk dampens the chilli effect. We wanted to make a fair comparison, so we asked for three orders of Rainbow Chicken (chicken breast with vegetables in basil lemongrass sauce), each with a different number of chillies (three, ten, and the dreaded twenty). Our server Simon’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline. He quickly crossed himself before wishing us good luck.
To add spiciness, Salad King just adds more crushed red chillies, so the difference in heat is visually evident. The twenty actually looked weighted down by all the additional seeds.
We started with the three. It definitely had a pleasant kick and the flavour of the tender chicken and crisp vegetables shone through along with the sweetness of the sauce.
The ten was hot, but no steam came out of our ears. No watering of eyes or blowing of noses. We did notice that the dish tasted different because the heat masks the sweetness of the red peppers and sauce.

Twenty chillies up close.

And the twenty…hot? For sure, and thank goodness for that third bowl of white rice, but the milk and bread remained untouched. It was a latent heat that grew to a considerable glow, but our stomachs remained calm. Twenty chillies at Salad King is nothing to fear, but Thai food is about the balance of hot, sour, salty, and sweet. With twenty, all flavours are eradicated and you could be eating anything. For a happy Thai medium, three to five does just fine.
All photos by Kaori Furue/Torontoist.