Is this very spicy? A guide to the sometimes confusing array of hot sauces on your restaurant table

I can’t imagine my life without chiles. From breakfast, when I douse my avocado toast with hot sauce (I’m a millennial, after all) to a late-night snack of chips and salsa, chiles manage to find their way into most things I eat. Critics could claim that I’m simply covering up the taste of everything I devour, but I believe that chiles are nothing short of miracle drugs.

Sometimes chiles simply add a helpful counterpunch to overly starchy food. But when administered in the right dosage, chiles heighten my senses, allowing me to sit in the moment and worry about nothing else. Food tastes better, and textures sound louder. Wild sensations curl around my body. My nose runs. Sweat collects around my brow. Finally, a warm glow wraps around my body, like an electric blanket set to high.

How can chiles do this?

According to Harold McGee in “On Food and Cooking,” the heat we experience from eating chiles comes from capsaicin, which “appears to be a chemical repellent aimed specifically at mammals.” Birds, which swallow chiles whole, feel no pain when snacking on chiles. But since most mammals chew their food, they disperse the capsaicin chemical around their mouths. As McGee writes, “it’s a wonderfully perverse achievement for our mammal species to have fallen in love with this anti-mammalian weapon.”

No doubt, chile heat is often described in masochistic terms, as if chiles only dish out pain. But that’s not how I see it at all. Chiles have actual flavor, from the bright, tart notes of guajillos to the dark, chocolate aromas contained in pasillas. Chiles are fruits, after all.

But spice is also a personal journey. What I might find mild, others could consider lethal. That’s where table hot sauces come to the rescue. Whether it’s a bottle of hot sauce or a container of spoon-able salsa, they allow each guest to customize the heat experience. Many places treat these condiments as automatic and essential, either leaving them on the table or bringing them over after an order is placed. This makes eating an interactive dance of drizzling different sauces to see how they match with the food. Sometimes the hot sauce clashes, and you have to move on. But more often than not, the sauce opens up a whole new way to experience your meal.

Here’s a condiment-by-condiment breakdown for what to find on the table at some of Chicago’s spiciest restaurants, from Thai and Vietnamese to Peruvian and Mexican.

Few cuisines understand the importance of personal heat customization as Thai cuisine. Sit down at JJ Thai Street Food (1715 W. Chicago Ave.) and a waitress will bring over a green caddy containing five condiments, three of which are spicy. These are called khruang phrung. As chef and cookbook author Andy Ricker writes in “Pok Pok Noodles,” this “isn’t a foreign concept to Westerners — people put mustard and sauerkraut on hot dogs. … Yet it often eludes people who are new to the food of Thailand.” My advice? Sample a little bit of each sauce with some rice. While three of the condiments are spicy, each adds a different profile to the plate. For example, in the top left you’ll see phrik naam som, a vinegar and chile mixture that adds a lively acidity and mild heat. On the bottom right, you’ll find phrik pon khua, a toasted-chile powder that’s smoky and dark.

You’ll find a collection of sauces on the table at most Vietnamese restaurants, too, though one condiment stands supreme. Sriracha, which you can find at all kinds of restaurants these days, actually originated in Thailand. But thanks to Huy Fong Foods, a company based in California, it’s now customary to see the sauce in Vietnamese restaurants. The thick, bright red sauce has a moderate heat followed by a pleasing sweetness. It’s on the table at Pho Viet (4941 N. Broadway), along with chile garlic sauce, pickled shallots, hoisin, fish sauce and soy sauce. By the way, while you could cover a bowl of pho with Sriracha, it’s customary to squirt some on a small plate and then dip meat from the bowl in the sauce with your chopsticks. But you do you.

At some Chinese restaurants you’ll find a small container of chile oil on the table. Made by pouring hot oil over chile flakes and sometimes other seasonings, the sauce is usually blood red, and has a dark roasted chile presence. That’s what you’ll find on the table at Noodle Deli (2 Golf Center) in suburban Hoffman Estates, an exciting new shop that serves complex bowls of beef noodle soup. Just know that you’ll need to stir the contents of the oil, because the chile sediment collects on the bottom, and you’ll want some of those crunchy bits.

Asian restaurants aren’t the only place to look. At D’Candela (3449 W. Irving Park Road), a Peruvian restaurant in Irving Park, a server will bring out a tiny cup of aji verde made with the genuinely spicy aji amarillo chiles. But thanks to the addition of mayonnaise, it comes off as only moderately spicy. The sauce is especially great with the restaurant’s pollo a la brasa.

Of course, it’s not unusual to find a bottle of Tabasco on the table of every American diner, but often this feels like an afterthought, instead of an integral part of the eating process. That’s certainly not the case at Heaven on Seven (111 N. Wabash Ave., floor 7) in the Loop, which cares about bottled hot sauce more than any other place in town. I counted 26 kinds of hot sauces on my table, from multiple varieties of Tabasco and Crystal to brands I’d never heard of before (Melinda’s?). While it’s a fun gimmick, the restaurant’s Cajun and Creole food also benefits from a drizzle of at least one of these vinegar-heavy hot sauces.

Chile sauces of Mexico

But no cuisine puts as much effort into making sure you can customize the spice level of your meal like the food at Mexican restaurants. That’s because no cuisine uses chiles as extensively or as creatively. This makes sense considering the current theory is that chiles were domesticated in the area of current-day Mexico more than 9,000 years ago. The word “chile” even comes from Nahuatl, the language spoken in the Aztec empire (also called the Triple Alliance).

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Essentially every Mexican restaurant in the Chicago region dishes out salsa when you sit down. But my favorite places don’t just bring one salsa; they bring loads. Place your order at the tiny Guapo Taco (2430 W. 47th St.) in Brighton Park and the waiter will bring out a lovely red and green ceramic vessel with pickled jalapenos and three salsas, each of which brings the heat.

Restaurante y Taqueria Guerrero (1922 W. 47th St.) in Back of the Yards also serves three salsas, including a salsa roja so incendiary I had to chug a whole glass of water after sampling it.

All three salsas at La Chaparrita, one of my favorite places to eat in all of Chicago, mean business. An avocado and green chile salsa lends creaminess and a fair amount of fresh heat, while a complex salsa roja pulls your tongue in all directions. But my favorite is the hilariously spicy habanero salsa, which adds a rush of citrus notes before an all-encompassing heat floods your senses.

With its mix of wild fruity aromas and intense heat, it’s hard to beat the habanero. I’m not the only person who feels this way. I share an affection for the chile with New York chef Alex Stupak, who called the habanero in his cookbook “Tacos: Recipes and Provocations” a “tricky little siren.” He describes the initial aroma of a habanero as “all passion fruit, guava, and fresh-cut grass," before the heat “locks its jaws around your tongue.” As he writes, “nothing in the world tastes so beautiful and is so ephemeral. ... To love the habanero is to be in constant pursuit of those opiate moments just before the capsaicin rolls in.”

At La Chaparrita and plenty of other chile-friendly establishments around the city, this federally legal way to experience sensory overload is available to all who want it.

nkindelsperger@chicagotribune.com

Note: This article has been updated to correct the origin of Sriracha hot sauce.