Some Serious Spice

Whilst looking up places to eat in PPC (I’m shortening Puerto Princesa City to this from now on), we came across good reviews for a restaurant called Artisans. Run by a Scottish expat, they serve HUGE (and I mean HUGE) portions from the most random menu you will ever see. There’s Italian pasta dishes, Mexican burritos, Spanish tapas, Asian noddles and rice, steaks, salads, seafood, wraps, paninis and good old fashioned bangers and mash. Each dish is served with a side salad and sometimes bread and the plates are so big they literally struggle to fit them on some of the tables. The quality is excellent and though expensive for the area, is actually cheap if you convert to GBP and extra kind on the wallet if you share. We think the portions are so big sharing one between two will still leave you full, even when your partner is a never satisfied human dustbin * cough * Joe.

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Artisans also has a little secret if you are a bit of chilli head. Both myself and Joe are partial to a bit (or a lot!) of spice in our food and we were both pleased to see the tables had different kinds of hot sauce. We asked the waiter which was the hottest and were slightly surprised when he came back with a teaspoon of liquid so dark red it was almost black on a small saucer. At this point the owner came over to explain that he is a member of a chilli growing club in the area, which he then makes into home made hot sauces for use in the restaurant. This particular sauce- which I can only describe as looking slightly like death incarnate- was a tar, made from ghost peppers (once crowned the hottest chilli in the world). He would take the peppers and soak them in vodka for 9 weeks, crush them and make one kind of sauce before burning off the alcohol and distilling again. The effect was concentrating the spiciness into a potent tar that increased the over 1 million Scoville heat unit score of the original pepper into 3 million Scoville heat units. This stuff was so intense it wasn’t used a condiment and instead was added to large batches food. Obviously this meant Joe took a blob and put it straight on his tongue before he lost sensation in his face and he was wiping beads of sweat from his forehead. We have a saying when we go into Nando’s sometimes which is ‘if you’re face isn’t numb and you’re not crying by the end, you haven’t done it properly’, but this time, as the tears rolled down his cheeks, we both knew he’d reached a peak level of spiciness.

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