Tucked Down a Shanghai Lane, 85 Kinds of Hot Sauce — and an Owner Who Wants to Spread the Addiction

Both people who can't live without chili and people who say "I don't really eat spicy food, but I can try" are welcome inside.

A small shop called Hot Box is tucked away in Lane 273 on Jiaozhou Road, and it looks a little rough: a fire-red door made of shipping-container metal, tall stools, long strings of red chilies hanging on the wall.

Customers turn up for all sorts of reasons — some saw it on WeChat Moments, some simply walked past — but they fall for it for much the same reasons: lots of hot sauce, and a relaxed room.

Hot Box sells more than 85 kinds of hot sauce, from 16 countries and regions and 17 Chinese provinces. Four of them the shop makes itself; another eight come from hot sauce makers in Shanghai.

The owner, Andrew, lines the bottles up by heat. The top shelf holds his own collection. "Those aren't for sale — you can taste anything else." That is how Andrew greets a first-time customer, in fluent English or halting Chinese, handing over a box of tortilla chips and showing you how to drip the sauce on top.

Monday through Saturday, a little after eleven in the morning, Andrew arrives at Hot Box and starts setting up for the day.

Andrew was born in the United States and grew up in Ecuador. As a boy he often ate at his aunt's place downstairs. "They ate a lot of chili powder. You know, South America is spicy." That was when he found he loved chili.

Later he went back to the United States for school, and during college spent a year studying Chinese at Yunnan Normal University. He has traveled to 38 countries and tasted more than 250 hot sauces; whenever he goes somewhere unfamiliar, he makes a point of buying hot sauce at the local market.

"Everyone who comes to China wants to see the Great Wall. That doesn't interest me — I go find out where the good hot sauce is," Andrew told QDaily.

Andrew has collected more than 150 bottles, from Chinese chili oil to Western vinegar-based sauces. At first he couldn't get used to the Chinese kind, made with meat and a lot of oil. But while seeing in the New Year in Germany in 2008, he tried a fresh sauce a Taiwanese friend had stir-fried by hand. It set off a fierce interest in Chinese hot sauce, and laid the groundwork for his decision to come try his luck in China in 2014.

When Andrew first arrived, he worked at a Spanish restaurant in Shanghai. One day in 2016, at Co Cheese, a grilled-cheese shop he went to often, he ran into Cui Jiajinyuan and Greg. The three had one thing in common: each liked to carry a bottle of hot sauce around. They happened to be in the shop at the same time, and when all three pulled out a bottle and started eating, the conversation followed naturally.

"At first we just talked about hot sauce — which ones were good, tasting each other's — and then we started thinking about opening this place," Cui Jiajinyuan said. They began preparing Hot Box in July 2016, took part in a food festival at M50 along the way, and by the end of that year the shop had opened on Jiaozhou Road.

Cui Jiajinyuan's first thought was that emptying out the treasures in the three of their own refrigerators would already be enough to stock a shop devoted to hot sauce.

They saw an empty market. Andrew says he found only three shops in China that sell hot sauce and nothing else. One, in Yangshuo, carries just three sauces of its own making and offers no tasting. Another, at a Taipei night market, carries a range of Chinese and imported sauces and lets customers taste them, but is open only from 5 to 11 p.m.

The third is Hot Box: plenty of sauces, all of them open for tasting, and steady hours.

Perhaps the founders opened a hot sauce shop because they thought what has caught on in the United States might also work in China.

Pepper Palace, now the largest hot sauce chain in the United States, started in 1989 as a mom-and-pop operation selling handmade sauces, then widened its range to everything chili-related. In 1997 it opened its first street-front store, 3,000 square feet (278 square meters), and in 1999 it launched an online shop at pepperpalace.com. It began building distribution centers and opening branches in 2006. Today it has more than 30 stores across the United States and Canada.

Hot sauce sales in the United States have grown 150% since 2000, more than every other condiment combined (ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, barbecue sauce). Hot sauce is now a billion-dollar industry there. It is moving off the fringes of the grocery store and becoming a staple of it. A 2015 study by the market research firm NPD found that 56% of American households keep hot sauce at home. Last year alone, Americans bought $1.31 billion worth of it.

QDaily has reported before on why Americans keep eating spicier. That explanation comes from Griffin Hammond, an American who once made a documentary about Sriracha: "Americans like eating food that tastes good, and they want to express themselves through what they eat. By eating Sriracha, they can show their friends: 'Look, I'm an interesting person, I've traveled a lot, I understand the world.'"

New York even has its own annual hot sauce gathering, the NYC Hot Sauce Expo. Every April it is held on schedule in Brooklyn, as it has been for five years running. In 2017, more than 40 hot sauce brand sponsors and over 10,000 enthusiasts poured in, eager to show off and taste the newest things on the market, turning the expo into a carnival for chili lovers.

Cui Jiajinyuan's role at Hot Box is to gather the chili lovers around him.

Every day at 5 p.m., Andrew finishes and Cui Jiajinyuan takes over. The three founders — Cui Jiajinyuan, Andrew and Greg — divide the work clearly. Cui Jiajinyuan, who knows both Chinese and American culture well, handles outside contacts, including suppliers and partners. Andrew runs the shop day to day. Greg, who has plenty of experience as the owner of Co Cheese, is the one plotting behind the scenes; he sets the broad direction for how the shop is run, and squeezes out one day a week to come by.

Cui Jiajinyuan is Manchu, from northeast China, and says he took to chili very young. Back then he ate fried eggs every morning and always liked to switch to a different hot sauce.

When he filled in his gaokao university preferences, every school he listed was in Sichuan. "I wanted to eat spicy food! So I wanted to go to Sichuan."

His parents arranged something else: a year of college in the United States first, then a year back in Sichuan. "What my parents meant was, try both sides and go wherever you like better." Having tried both, he decided the United States suited him, and went back there to study.

The summer after he finished high school, Cui Jiajinyuan also took a three-month course at a cooking school. He started by peeling potatoes and trained more than ten hours a day without a break; by the end he was roughly at the level of a nationally certified second-grade chef.

He never took to the cooking-school way of doing things, though. Ask him about cooking and it turns out he does it the same way every time — whatever he is stir-frying, he adds no salt, uses only a little oil, plates it once it is done, and pours hot sauce over the top.

"That way I can pair it with whatever hot sauce I feel like," he says.

"Like smoking or drinking, eating spicy food is addictive," Cui Jiajinyuan says. He thinks a taste for chili counts as a kind of underground culture.

Asked for his strongest chili memory, Cui Jiajinyuan goes back to the age of 13, when he went to Seattle with his mother. Taking communion at a local church, he tasted a hot sauce that opened up his palate, and he carried several bottles home to the northeast.

He thinks Chinese and Western cooking have a great deal in common. During his years studying and living in the United States, he made friends from everywhere and often ate at their homes.

"I'd just talk with my friends' grandmothers. They'd been cooking their whole lives and had a lot to share." Talking with grandmothers from Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Mexico and both American coasts, Cui Jiajinyuan began to learn more about chili.

One Ethiopian grandmother, for instance, liked to cook with a ground chili much like Hungarian paprika. Americans did not put chili powder on turkey, but some people came to like it that way and now add a little.

Cui Jiajinyuan and Andrew's interest in chili does not stop at hot sauce. They also like working things out for themselves.

Behind the bar at Hot Box, besides a simple kitchen, they have built a small lab. They use it to grow Mexican habaneros, Mexican jalapeños, Indian ghost peppers and the Carolina Reaper, the hottest pepper in the world. They develop their own sauces there, testing flavors over and over, and after customer reactions four have survived. The most popular, "Old Ghost Mama," is made with Indian ghost peppers.

Cui Jiajinyuan is good at finding what other things have in common with hot sauce. Hot Box once teamed up with a Shanghai tattoo shop for a chili-eating contest that drew more than 100 entrants. In May, soon after crayfish came into season, it worked with Songpai Craft Beer on a "Crayfish Rampage" event, with a special crayfish-rice-and-beer set. This year Hot Box also became the official hot sauce supplier for the Concrete & Grass Music Festival, and made a yellow mustard sauce just for it.

"Find a small group of people and help them solve a problem they can't solve on their own" — that, Cui Jiajinyuan thinks, is what Hot Box is really for. The problems he means include how to find good chili and like-minded people, and how to spread chili culture.

So Hot Box is not only a shop that sells hot sauce; it is more like a meeting place for people who love chili. The way drinkers like going to bars, Cui Jiajinyuan thinks it should be a space where chili lovers feel free and at ease.

From opening in the morning to closing at night, Hot Box is never quiet. Some people come with friends, others come alone looking for something fun. Along with the hundred-odd hot sauces free to taste, there is a "hidden menu" of craft beer, cocktails and sandwiches made to order. Andrew and Cui Jiajinyuan put out a proper menu at first, then pulled it when it didn't work well. They still ask new customers what they feel like and make suggestions; regulars know the hidden menu by heart.

Edward worked out the hidden menu fast. He only heard about the shop a week ago, and has already been twice in that week. "I really like the Bloody Mary. This is the only place that has it," Edward told QDaily.

A Bloody Mary is a cocktail of vodka, tomato juice, celery root and lemon slices, with chili oil and chili powder making it fiercely hot. The Hot Box version goes further: it adds Worcestershire sauce and pickled chili sauce, and rims the glass with chili powder for a fuller taste. Edward can drink two in a sitting; he says the drink makes him feel good, keyed up.

Like a small community, Hot Box has drawn together a cluster of chili lovers. Cui Jiajinyuan and Andrew usually post the week's events first in the Hot Box WeChat group, which has more than 300 followers, then spread the word further by having people forward it to Moments.

Arianna, who is Italian, belongs to the Hot Box group. She came after hearing that the shop was serving spicy popcorn and cotton candy for a limited time over the weekend. Arianna didn't eat much chili before; she began getting used to it after moving to China four years ago. Sichuan food is now her favorite cuisine, and she comes to Hot Box often. "Everyone here likes spicy food, and I get to try so many different kinds of heat. It's fun," Arianna said, eating spicy popcorn and then picking up a pickled chili Cui Jiajinyuan handed her and eating it on the spot. "Not bad," she said.

Still, "how do you bring a good hot sauce to more people?" remains a question that worries Cui Jiajinyuan.

Like Andrew, Cui Jiajinyuan hunts for hot sauce wherever he goes. If he hears a friend is traveling somewhere, he asks them to bring a bottle of the local sauce back. After opening the shop he registered an Instagram account under the name HotBox, and through it found more chili enthusiasts. Sauce makers often message him offering to mail him samples — that is how Cui Jiajinyuan keeps meeting new flavors.

But to actually put those sauces on the shelf, Hot Box, which has no import-export license yet, has to buy through distributors inside China. That limit keeps a lot of good hot sauce off the shelves.

As for what comes next, Cui Jiajinyuan plans to contact foreign hot sauce makers directly, import more, and put a Hot Box online store up. "I still want to spread this around," he says.

Cover image: Hot Box