Photographer: Ted + Chelsea Cavanaugh for Bloomberg Businessweek; Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero; Prop stylist: Kody Pangburn
Spice Up Your Life With a Hot Ones-Inspired Chicken Wings Party
Celebrity guests, optional.
Who’d have guessed that one of the best ways to make blasé celebrities interesting is to have them consume incendiary hot sauces while they answer questions? On the YouTube web series Hot Ones, host Sean Evans sits down with the likes of Paul Rudd, Post Malone, and Scarlett Johansson while they devour chicken wings doused with increasingly fiery sauces.
The show, which has already led to a spinoff, Hot Ones: The Game Show, on TruTV, is now becoming a popular dinner-party theme. “The reactions, the competitiveness, the torture—it’s all part of enjoying the sauce and the show,” says Krysty Pringle, a partner at hot-sauce specialty store Heatonist in Brooklyn, N.Y. The shop has a section dedicated to Hot Ones sauces, including the show’s most famous bottle, the Last Dab XXX. Powered by three versions of the scorching Pepper X (said to be twice as spicy as the famous Carolina Reaper), it’s usually the final sauce sampled on each episode.