El Guero Canelo, or, the hottest chile I’ve eaten

A staffer at the museum recommended that I have lunch at El Guero Canelo. It has great reviews on Yelp, and Yelp has had a pretty good record for me so far, so I figured it was worth a try.

The specialty there is the Sonoran hot dog, which is essentially a hot dog wrapped in bacon, topped with salsa and other Mexican fixings, and served on torta bread:

I only ordered one, so I’m not sure if you always get two or if I got one for free. Here’s what it looks like on the inside:

The hot dog was good, and I’m going to have to start topping mine with salsa and pinto beans. The bread was alsomuchnicer than a regular hot dog bun, because it was sealed at the ends so that nothing escaped.

There was also an extensive salsa bar with some blackened chile peppers:

I’ve never seen chile peppers at the salsa bar that had been prepared in any way, and they looked really good. There were two types, a yellow one and a green one. I think that the green was a jalapeño, but I’m not very well-versed in my chile peppers.

Now the yellow one was mildly hot and fairly sweet. The green one was a different story. When I first bit into the green one, it actually didn’t seem that hot, so I went ahead and ate the whole thing.

Then I noticed that the top of my mouth was feeling pretty hot. I needed a refill on my drink anyway, so I went up and got one. By the time I sat down, though, the heat had spread further back to my soft palate toward the rear of my mouth.

Now this was some searing heat, but it would have been fine if it had remained there. However, this was a spicy chile pepper like I had never tasted. The heat continued to spread, marching onto the back of my throat. Let me tell you, when that happens, you don’t even want to breathe, for fear of worsening the pain.

I tried taking a bite of the hot dog, but that only worsened things by pushing the capsaicin further down my mouth. I drank the entire drink in about two gulps, and it barely did a thing. I wasn’t about to go up to the counter and ask for a second refill thirty seconds after the first, so I did the only reasonable thing a guy can do: I chewed a couple of ice cubes and tried to make the facial grimacing as natural-looking as possible.

It took at least seven minutes to dissipate enough to the point that I could continue eating, slowly with each bite bringing an aftershock of what I had just experienced.

So congratulations, green chile pepper. You win.