Only once or twice at a Thai place have I accidentally gotten something served to me that was too spicy to enjoy
 
I few times at Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi places I’ve gotten food that was too spicy to enjoy, but that was after I asked for it to be really, really hot.  There, I figured I made my own problem.
 
And I’ve done myself in at a few Mexican places, but that’s because in low light I have a lot of trouble telling different salsas apart (I’m pretty badly colorblind).

I never called myself a “chilli head”.  I love Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Indian food and others.   Hot Korean soup is where I learned, pepper will cure a cold; the top of my head would still be sweating an hour after eating.   … I do know now, it would take me a couple of months to get back to the “heat” level I was eating at then.    [8D] …..

At restaurant in Saudi Arabia, the onion in the salad was so hot (mustard & sinuses; not tongue/mouth hot), first bite; I could not breath; I could not speak; my eye sight went black; …. I heard my friend holler …”waiter – water”  … the whole restaurant heard that.     … After recovering, I cautiously eat the salad.  … I like spicy mustard, and horseradish, but I have never since seen anything that even came close to that onion.

Wiping my eyes from laughing so hard, have had a few hot meals at Indian Rest.’s I thought where hot.
We take it for granted for what Hot is. Go to another country. I’ve seen food so hot it WOULD  take the paint off a car. Not Joking.
That is why I am Laughing.

hAhahaha  … it’s funny now  … I like good wasabi, haven’t seen any in years,  but wasabi is a junior cousin to that damn onion.   …  I don’t know if that was characteristic type of onion or just some freak that got on my plate.

Hey, all the other stories are good too.  So I wasn’t the only one that learned the hard way not to open mouth and stuff strange foreign food in!!!   ….….

 
Have been a so called ChiliHead all my life. Have to try it hot.  My wifes favorite story is from here in the states. A few years ago an Indian Family came here and we befriended them. They served me a dish my wife was shaking her head at. Should have known as for the utensil half melted as I dipped into the dish. LOL just joking about meting, but wife swears about the her eyes seeing fumes rising from the stuff. She tried to warn me.
I could not taste anything for days.
We still laugh. I do not want to know what was in it. They downed that dish like no tomorrow.

Yes.. Often.
 I really can not take spicy food, I have been known to develop blisters from even mild hot sauces.
 
 I once had an order of fried calamari in a place in Ithaca NY and the dipping sauce was so spicy I had to stop eating after 1 bite and take my suid home. luckily I hadn’t dipped but the one piece. But the pain was bad enough that I couldn’t eat for hours.
 
In 2001 I tasted some Thai food, a first for me and again was unable to eat  even the first bite.
 
I will never order hot-spicy food ever, and I find it really  a bad experience to taste something that I am reassured “isn’t hot at all” to find I can’t eat it. people who can’t take heat  are much like those with severe allergies.  We need to make informed choices and not get tricked into eating something that can hurt us.

My wife and I had lunch one day last May at a place called Thai Kitchen in Thunder Bay, Ontario.  The menu had a chili or the word “hot” or perhaps “spicy” beside the entre I ordered.  It was called Khao Pad Krapow and consisted of Thai basil fried rice with chicken with fresh chopped Thai basil, green onions and cilantro.  Our waitperson did not ask me if how spicy I wanted it and I did not make any such request.  While it was not so spicy that I could not eat it, it was certainly hotter than what I would have ordered.  And I like spicy food.  This was the first time this had happened to me.
 
Now, one other time, I was eating at a Flat Top Grill in Chicago where you assemble your food, including sauces, and then they stri-fry it for you.  I added three ladles of spicy chili sauce which was hot enough that it was difficult to enjoy.

At restaurant in Saudi Arabia, the onion in the salad was so hot (mustard & sinuses; not tongue/mouth hot), first bite; I could not breath; I could not speak; my eye sight went black; …. I heard my friend holler …”waiter – water”  … the whole restaurant heard that.     … After recovering, I cautiously eat the salad.  … I like spicy mustard, and horseradish, but I have never since seen anything that even came close to that onion.

Wiping my eyes from laughing so hard, have had a few hot meals at Indian Rest.’s I thought where hot.
We take it for granted for what Hot is. Go to another country. I’ve seen food so hot it WOULD  take the paint off a car. Not Joking.
That is why I am Laughing.

hAhahaha  … it’s funny now  … I like good wasabi, haven’t seen any in years,  but wasabi is a junior cousin to that damn onion.   …  I don’t know if that was characteristic type of onion or just some freak that got on my plate.
 
Hey, all the other stories are good too.  So I wasn’t the only one that learned the hard way not to open mouth and stuff strange foreign food in!!!   ….….

It was last year @ La Palapa with the Roadfood gang.
 
They serve some very hot green stuff that I stupidly thought was guacamole. NO!!!

Not ‘spicy’ but ‘peppery’, At one of the Roadhouse Steak places (Logan’s, or Texas ???)  Steak was heavily crusted, and I do mean HEAVILY CRUSTED with Black Peppercorns and coarse grind pepper. Even scraping the crust off, the steak was not edible due to the influx of that pepper into the meat.
I returned it requesting a NON-Peppered version of the same thing.
  I am long past the ‘make it hotter, Please’ stage, and have never been a heavy Black Pepper user.

I’ve had two experiences like this, Bolton’s Hot Chicken in Nashville and Joe Rogers Chili in Springfield IL. The food at both places is delicious and I wouldn’t hesitate to return to either one, but there was a considerable amount of pain involved in both of these meals.

Yeah, a couple times. Just this last weekend I picked a long, thin hot sauteed chile off of a buffet and ate about half of it, including seeds. I didn’t eat the other half. It wasn’t really absurdly hot, just too hot for that day.
 
About 20 years ago, in Jamaica, I had my first encounter with scotch bonnet peppers. I popped a whole one in my mouth, unsuspecting that such a pretty little thing would taste that way.
 
I’ve had wings that were stupid hot, but I don’t remember the where or when.
 
I like hot stuff, but that was h-h-hot.

Like WarToad I have travelled all over the place and sampled many versions of hot.
 
My only downfall was a wing place outside of Nashville, TN. i wish i could remember the name of the place. it was on the SW side of Nashville.
 
The name of the sauce was “Are you REALLY that stupid”.  Up for the challenge I ordered 24 wings.
 
My lips and roof of my mouth blistered, my finger tips tingled for 2 days.  I ate 19 of them but couldnt finish the rest.

I’m a chili-head.  I’ve traveled Mexico, Thailand, India, Indonesia, China, the Carribean… lot of spicey hot food, but never “too hot”.

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

At restaurant in Saudi Arabia, the onion in the salad was so hot (mustard & sinuses; not tongue/mouth hot), first bite; I could not breath; I could not speak; my eye sight went black; …. I heard my friend holler …”waiter – water”  … the whole restaurant heard that.     … After recovering, I cautiously eat the salad.  … I like spicy mustard, and horseradish, but I have never since seen anything that even came close to that onion.

 
Wiping my eyes from laughing so hard, have had a few hot meals at Indian Rest.’s I thought where hot.
We take it for granted for what Hot is. Go to another country. I’ve seen food so hot it WOULD  take the paint off a car. Not Joking.
That is why I am Laughing.