“What’s our problem with spicy peppers?” a French Redditor going by SerBron asked r/france, in a thread posted in 2022. “Apparently we are a people terrorised by anything remotely spicy … Old El Paso has to label its insipid salsa ‘medium’ for us,” the poster complained.
The post generated hundreds of comments – with some posters agreeing and others pushing back, saying that of course tolerance for capsaicin would be lower, given the absence of hot chilli peppers in traditional French cuisine, and others pointing out that while the French may not traditionally do spice, plenty of foreigners can’t handle strong French cheeses.
I can sympathise with SerBron’s struggle. When I first moved to Paris in 2014 as a graduate student, I quickly found myself insisting, when I ordered a Thai or Indian dish that was supposed to carry significant heat, that I wanted it “actually spicy, not French spicy”.
But I’ve observed a subtle, yet noticeable, shift in the willingness of restaurants to serve up heat where it’s merited. On a recent late night walk home, I stopped for a midnight slice of pizza, randomly picked one with pickled cucumbers, red peppers and red pesto, and was surprised when it had a definite kick. “For some French customers, that slice is still too spicy,” Antoine, the pizzaiolo, told me.“But I kept finding that things weren’t spicy enough for me, and so I wanted to do one spicy slice for real.”
Old El Paso may not have caught on yet, but capsaicin is making the same gradual inroads in France that craft beer has. In Marseille, I was surprised (again) to see more than a dozen different hot sauces for sale in La Meulerie, a cheese shop in the neighbourhood of Malmousque. “Ever since Hot Ones became a thing, we’ve been selling more and more of them,” Driss, working behind the counter, told me, referring to an online series in which celebrity guests consume increasingly hotter sauces. “There are plenty of local hot sauces from Marseille that have popped up in the past year or so.”
“Is there absence of hot sauce [in France] because there’s no market for it, or because it hasn’t been on offer?” Benjamin Martin, co-founder of the French hot sauce brand Maison Martin, wondered when we spoke on the phone. His question was rhetorical: his company started in 2019 with a special order of 300kg of chilli peppers from a farmer in the Loire Valley, and in 2023 it was making enough hot sauce to require 22 tonnes of peppers.
“As a country we’ve overlooked spicy peppers, and people aren’t sure of how to use them and don’t realise they can lift a dish rather than overwhelming it,” Martin says.
Of course, traditional French cuisine, with a few exceptions, isn’t hot or spicy and isn’t necessarily meant to be. (Exceptions involve piment d’espelette, a pepper introduced from Mexico to the Basque region in the 1600s and used in dishes such as piperade and gaxuxa, and the piment de Bresse, reportedly present in the Rhône-Alpes region since the 14th century, which is enjoying a rediscovery.) But that doesn’t mean that contemporary approaches to French food are incompatible with the nuances and layers – from tingle to burn – that chillies can provide.
Zazil Anda Castro, who grew up in Mexico, studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and has been sous-chef at the Paris restaurant Åke for three years, has observed a shift in the way Parisian chefs are approaching the humble chilli. During dinner prep in Åke’s kitchen, she tells me that she has seen more chefs from non-Mexican restaurants shopping at the Mexican market that she goes to for peppers.
For Anda Castro, contemporary French cuisine lies at the intersection of the way she was trained, the approach one takes to ingredients and an opening out towards inspiration found from all over. “French cuisine lives in the balance of flavours,” she says. “Nothing should overwhelm anything else on the plate. Diners really want to taste the ingredients themselves, and so I use chillies in a very subtle way.”
For example, grilled nectarines, heirloom tomatoes, fava beans and mint are joined by house-made gochujang (a Korean chilli paste) adding a light, but not overwhelming, kick. Or fat, pillowy, pan-seared gnocchi garnished with a salsa macha (with ancho and morita chillies, and a twist – almonds in place of peanuts) that Anda Castro made for herself, has become a favourite.
For Martin, that effect is exactly what he is interested in achieving: his sauces sometimes feature French staples such as beaujolais nouveau wine and herbes de Provence. Though Maison Martin produce hot sauces like one based on the Carolina Reaper chilli (which comes in at an average of 2m Scovilles – and yes, you definitely feel it) he and his partners aren’t primarily interested in racing up the Scoville scale (for reference, a jalapeño is only around 8,500 units). “My mission is to democratise chillies and French hot sauces by concentrating on the flavour of various peppers, more than just pure heat,” he says.
Anda Castro struggles to label the frequently changing menu at Åke. “It’s hard to describe exactly what kind of food we cook here,” she tells me. I think she’s on to something profound about the state of French cuisine in France today, which is that rather than the oft-levelled complaint that it is either stuck in a boring rut, or gripped by an identity crisis, it is in fact in a state of constant flux.
French techniques and approaches to food are to global dining what English is to global communication: a lingua franca. And, like the English language, the Paris restaurant scene is increasingly brimming with vocabulary pulled from elsewhere. That doesn’t make it any less French – it just makes it, from time to time, a bit spicier.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
