Burn your ass....

The Calif. restaurant where a real-life version of 'Hot Ones' plays out daily

SFGATE's Karen Palmer talks to customers eating scorching-hot chicken at Howlin' Ray's in Los Angeles

By Karen Palmer

Spicy foods have been around for centuries. But shows like the popular online series “Hot Ones” — in which celebrities like Sydney Sweeney and athletes like Steph Curry attempt to work their way through wings coated in ascending levels of heat — have made the challenge of eating spicy foods that much more popular in recent years.

In Los Angeles, the pinnacle of adventure for heat-seekers might be the Howlin’ level of Nashville-style hot chicken at Howlin’ Ray’s, whose two local outposts always have a line for buttermilk-brined, spice-doused fried chicken sold in pieces or served on slaw-stacked sandwiches.

The Howlin’ level is so spicy, in fact, that the restaurant requires anyone who orders it to sign a waiver. SFGATE recently stopped by the company’s Pasadena location to see who was crazy, er, ambitious enough to order a piece of fried chicken coated in some of the hottest peppers in the world — and how they reacted after their first couple of bites.

Howlin’ Ray’s has been a wildly popular sensation since it launched as a food truck in 2015. Founders Johnny Ray Zone and his wife Amanda Chapman were the first to open a Nashville-style hot chicken truck on the West Coast, capitalizing on the growing popularity of what was then mostly a regional specialty. When they opened a tiny brick-and-mortar counter in Chinatown in 2016, wait times reached into the hours; a much larger Pasadena shop with indoor and outdoor seating debuted in 2022.

Like many hot chicken joints, Howlin’ Ray’s offers a cascade of heat levels to satisfy a variety of palates, starting with Country (plain fried chicken) and working up the scale from Mild to Medium, Hot, X-Hot, and ultimately the mouth-scorching Howlin’. All of the chicken goes into the fryer sans spice; once it’s fully cooked, each piece is generously coated in a powdered blend of hot peppers based on the requested heat level.

“The Howlin’ has Carolina reapers and scorpion peppers, which are some of the hottest peppers in the world,” Howlin’ Ray’s general manager and longtime employee Mario Aguilar says. “Plus, with the amount of dried peppers that we put on each piece, it’s like eating a raw pepper.”