I feel lightheaded, short of breath and the room has started to spin. Intense waves of heat radiate from my mouth throughout my entire body. The pain is searing, like someone is holding an open flame to my tongue. After a couple of bites my throat starts to swell, my lips are raw, my face has turned a reddish-purple, I am sweating profusely and my eyes are streaming. This is what happens when you eat the hottest chilli pepper money can buy.
In the borderlands where Chinatown meets Theatreland, close to the money-laundering sweet shops and fridge magnet emporiums of Piccadilly, you will find Dave’s Hot Chicken. It has some 250 branches across North America, a smattering of outlets in the Middle East and, as of December, a solitary European venue on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Rupert Street.
Partly thanks to London’s Tiktok community, round-the-block queues have become so ubiquitous that Dave’s Hot Chicken now has a permanent nylon rope outside to keep people in line. The draw? The world’s spiciest chicken tenders.
At just before 11am on a grey Friday morning, however, only three builders loiter outside, all clad in high-viz vests, paint spattered boots and jumpers straining to cover vast, round beer bellies. After a few minutes we’re invited into a nondescript food hall that contains fire-engine red furniture and garish, graffitied walls. I’m not here to judge the decor, though. I’m here to beat the record for eating tenders made using the infamous Carolina Reaper chilli. Someone managed two and a half. My goal is three. How hard can it be?
You probably have a picture in your mind’s eye of who might order these absurdly hot creations: lads, lads, lads. And you’d be right. “Yeah, it’s mostly groups of blokes,” says Dave’s Hot Chicken manager Oliver Southworth. “They want to take on something spicy and there’s a buzz around the Reaper Tenders. At 4pm, schools and colleges finish and you see hordes of mates come in, egging each other on.” He says he sells 10 to 15 Reaper Tenders an hour, far more than the two or three an hour they sell in an average US restaurant.
Before I’m allowed near one, Southworth says I have to sign “a little waiver”. According to this (apparently legally binding) document, which unfurls like a little scroll, the side effects of what I’m about to eat could include “sweating, indigestion, shortness of breath, allergic reactions, vomiting and/or diarrhoea… chest pain, heart palpitations, heart attack and stroke.” Nothing serious, then.
I ask Southworth the worst reaction he’s seen. “There was one poor lad who ended up in the toilet area with his head over the sink. We were really worried about him. His eyes were going. He only ate a bite…”
I sign the waiver – one copy for me, one for them – and Southworth hands me a pair of black rubber gloves so I don’t burn my fingers on the chilli (or, worse, rub it in my eyes). What on earth is it going to do to the delicate membranes of my organs? It’s too late to ponder this now: a waiter is en route with a tray piled with three tenders, a vanilla milkshake and several sachets of honey, which I’m told will help to diffuse the heat (spoilers: they do not).
In the late 1990s, FHM asked to photograph Britney Spears biting into a cherry, a traditional symbol of virginity. Her team refused but offered to have her pose with a chilli pepper instead
The tenders are far bigger than I had expected, each one six inches long and a troubling shade of crimson. They’re made by frying chicken and dipping it in a “wet rub” of spices and oil, which is then left to drain. Next it’s tossed in Dave’s Hot Chicken’s proprietary seasoning mix containing the Carolina Reaper chilli (the exact recipe is a secret). The resulting tenders have a subtle but faintly astringent smell; bringing one to my face triggers millions of years of carefully coded instinct: DO NOT EAT. I take a bite.
I have always enjoyed spicy food. As a child of 10 or 11, I remember probing the boundaries of how much I could handle by ordering vindaloos and phaals from our local Mancunian curry houses. The staff, more used to selling these dishes to grown men, seemed to find this strange, bespectacled kid sitting with his parents and shovelling down the hottest curry on the menu hilarious. “You’re invincible,” one waiter laughed as I mopped up the remnants of vindaloo with a naan. “Nothing can kill you, you can do anything!”
I’m not sure I enjoyed eating those curries – I haven’t attempted one that hot in decades – but my fascination with spicy food persisted into adulthood. I’ve travelled through northern China to try dishes made from numbing Sichuan peppercorns and love the intense, farmyard kick of a proper Caribbean goat curry. At home I’m never without a selection of hot sauces and I’ll often cook a sliced chilli pepper separately from whatever I’m preparing so I can load up on extra heat without melting my guests.
Fellow chilli nerds speculate that spicy food might be addictive. In response to the burning sensation, your body releases endorphins, giving you a feeling similar to a post-gym buzz. Neurologically speaking, the pathways for pleasure and pain also happen to overlap; in low doses, the heat of a chilli pepper could be interpreted as enjoyable.
Steve during the Dave’s Hot Chicken Carolina Reaper eating challenge
This perhaps explains why the chilli has become a symbol for passion and desire. I remember reading an interview in men’s magazine FHM in the late 1990s in which they’d asked to photograph Britney Spears biting into a cherry, a traditional symbol of virginity. Her team refused but offered to have her pose with a chilli pepper instead, the carnal implications of this fiery fruit clearly not lost upon them. One thing I know for sure is that there’s nothing sexy about the sight of me biting into a Carolina Reaper.
As I finish the first tender, I curse myself for agreeing to this miserable, mindlessly macho pursuit. The only person who looks impressed is a boy of nine or 10 eating at a nearby table, who has spotted the bloke melting under the heat of a thousand suns. The kid looks genuinely starstruck, like he’s witnessed an incredible act of physical fortitude, rather than a man doggedly shovelling down red hot embers so he doesn’t lose face in front of a restaurant manager.
Perhaps I have numbed my pain receptors, but the second tender goes down fairly quickly. Somewhere on the periphery of my sense of taste I can make out a green freshness to the chilli that, were it uncoupled from the heat, might actually be pleasant. While the fire still rages in my mouth, I’m now more concerned about the burning in my stomach. It feels like someone has filled my belly with petrol and tossed in a lit match.
To put my chilli-challenge into perspective, the world record for eating the most raw Carolina Reaper chillies – far hotter than these tenders – was set last year by Canadian Mike Jack, who gobbled down 25 of the things in less than five minutes. Jack is at the spicy tip of a huge wave of chilli-based content. There are hundreds of YouTube and TikTok channels dedicated to people consuming implausible amounts of spicy food, and millions of amateur imitators. The current king of Chilli Content is Sean Evans: his show Hot Ones sees the YouTuber interview A-list celebrities as they eat various hot sauces and spicy wings. Basketball player Shaquille O’Neal proved to be a bit of a wimp, actor Jennifer Lawrence sobbed through the experience while Bill Murray barely flinched.
Dave’s Hot Chicken uses the Carolina Reaper, the hottest chilli available to buy
The chilli pepper is a fascinating plant, one whose extremely successful defence mechanism has led to it being cultivated across the world for the very thing that was supposed to stop people eating it. It conquered the world, by mistake. The burning sensation, which prevents mammals from grazing on the fruit, is caused by a compound called capsaicin, found in the white pith surrounding the seeds. Capsaicin is an agonist of the TRPV1 receptor in mammals – but not in birds, which can eat as many chilli seeds as they like. Fortuitously, birds also lack damaging mammalian molars and can spread the seeds across a far wider area than land animals. A perfect little eco system, then, until the Aztecs and Mayans started using them in food and medicine some time around 7,000BC.
The UK is not the natural habitat for these hot-climate plants but between Bristol and Bath, on the edge of the Cotswolds, Louise Duck grows a wide range of chilli peppers inside five long polytunnels at Upton Cheyney Chilli Farm. Cultivating chillies here is tricky – Duck has to grow her plants from scratch each year because it’s too expensive to heat the tunnels to keep them alive throughout the winter. She says there’s not much to see at this time of year but come October the farm will be alive with reds, greens and oranges.
Duck says the UK chilli industry has exploded over the last decade but she thinks the macho culture surrounding them – which I’m now guilty of encouraging – is beginning to fizzle out. The regular tours she hosts at her farm are fairly evenly split along gender lines. “People want to enjoy their food,” she says. “They don’t want something so hot it’s inedible.”
The Carolina Reaper, on the other hand, was deliberately cultivated for its extreme heat. Created in 2012 by Ed Currie, the owner of the PuckerButt Pepper Company, it’s a cross between a Pakistani Naga Viper and a sweet red habanero. The dry climate of South Carolina causes its natural oils to thicken, intensifying its heat.
The incredibly toxic resiniferatoxin, found in the euphorbia resinifera cactus, has a mind-bending 15 billion scovilles. It would seriously damage or even kill you
In 1912, pharmacologist Wilbur Scoville invented a system of rating the hotness of chillies. It’s a fairly scientific endeavour: you dissolve chilli into a solution and then progressively dilute it until human test subjects can no longer feel the sensation of heat. The Carolina Reaper stands at 1.6 million scovilles, making it the hottest chilli you can buy. The only things above it on the scale are Pepper X, another chilli developed by Currie in 2023, whose seeds and pods are not currently for sale, at 2.6 million scovilles; pepper spray at 5.3 million scovilles, pure capsaicin at 15 million scovilles, and the incredibly toxic resiniferatoxin, found in the euphorbia resinifera cactus, whose mind-bending 15 billion scovilles would seriously damage or even kill you.
During my Reaper eating challenge, I’m reminded of a different rating system: the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Devised by Justin O Schmidt, it involved the American entomologist deliberately subjecting himself to various insect stings and categorising the resulting pain on a scale of one to four. The fourth and highest category included the warrior wasp, whose sting he described as “like being chained in the flow of an active volcano”.
I can relate. As I throw the remains of the final tender into the inflamed hole in my face, the people sitting at an adjacent table offer a half-hearted round of applause. But this is a senseless, pyrrhic victory. I lay my forehead on the cold wood of the table and pray for the pain in my guts to abate. It takes 10 minutes before I can muster the strength to stand, my legs still wobbling as I stagger into the harsh daylight of a Soho afternoon.
The worst is yet to come. Over the next 12 hours, I feel the exact path the chilli follows through my body. Its slow, inexorable slalom through my small and large intestines causes a constant, dull burn. It all culminates later that night in a blindingly painful visit to the bathroom. “Never again,” I whimper into the echoey darkness. “Never again”.