Currywurst scharf

Order a Currywurst at Curry & Chili, the stand at the tram stop where Osloer Straße meets Prinzenallee in Berlin-Wedding, and the next question is a number. The sauces stand on a small staircase of chili levels, level 1 at the bottom, and the number picked decides which one gets ladled over the sliced sausage. Level 1 is hot and finishable, the kind of heat that makes the nose run and the eater reach for the roll. By level 4 the lips tingle within seconds of the first coin, and the cooks themselves describe what comes after as pain more than flavor. People order it anyway.

The sausage underneath is a plain grilled pork link, cut into coins thick enough to hold a seared edge, and that crisp, savory edge is what the sauce has to get past. The curry powder goes on last as a dry dust, a little bitter on the way down, and the heat arrives a few seconds behind it, climbing the tongue and settling behind the teeth. Fat and dairy calm it; a sweet orange soda such as Fanta makes it worse. The usual rescue is a Brötchen with mayonnaise, and a split roll pressed against the coins soaks up red sauce and turns the whole tray into a hand-held sandwich while the burn fades.

The staircase has grown with the stand. It opened with five heat levels, and the owner's own page now counts twelve, with a choice of four toppings on request. Reports from the late 2010s describe ten steps, so the count has shifted over the years, and the plain classic sauce was placed around level 3 in one of them. A Currywurst here can still be an ordinary warm one with a dusting of curry powder, and the staircase starts where most Imbiss shakers stop. The customer picks a rung, the cook ladles that sauce over the coins, and the number on the wall ends up as the order.

A photo wall turns the staircase into a club. Anyone who eats a sausage with each of the ten sauces within six months gets a picture on the wall, and more than 200 people are up there. A sign over the counter says men are still allowed to cry here, and a smaller warning says to eat at your own risk. Finishing all ten takes a plan, since fat and dairy are the known relief and Fanta is the known mistake, and the wall of finishers is the stand's proof that the plan works.

The sauces climb in character as well as in number. The low rungs lean on fruit and garlic, with names like Tropical and Habanero BBQ, and the upper ones are built around Carolina Reaper and similar peppers, where taste mostly gives way to heat. The top sauce, the Gold Edition, is rated at 7,777,777 Scoville units and sells bottled for 99 euros, while the milder bottles run in the low teens. A regular who finishes a sausage at level 6 can buy bottles from the counter and carry the heat home.

Origin and history

The stand opened in the summer of 2005 at the corner of Osloer Straße and Prinzenallee, built by two friends from Wedding, Frank Spieß and Tarek Yasin, who worked the grill. The first concept was a one-euro Currywurst, and that price held only until costs rose. The stand was then rebuilt around heat and renamed Curry & Chili, with five sauce levels at the start. That change of idea, from the cheapest sausage in the neighborhood to the hottest, is the point where the staircase began.

The hot reputation built up over the following decade. The stand has been named Berlin's hottest Imbiss five times in a row, and it is reported to have taken the title of Germany's hottest Imbiss in 2012 and again in 2015. The hot-eating crowd found it, the numbered scale gave them something to climb, and a Currywurst that cost less than two euros in 2017 became a destination for people chasing the top of the scale.

The turning point came in 2009, when the owner launched the 1. Deutsche Schärfemeisterschaft, a hot-eating championship held at the stand. Contests have run there since, with a paramedic standing by at the events, and Spieß himself has won Germany's hot-eating competition several times. The same corner that started as a one-euro sausage stall in 2005 now hosts a championship that dates from 2009 and a wall of finishers who ate their way up the numbered sauces.