Ahhh..spicy Korean food. Every time you eat it, you crave it even more. One should never pass up a chance to have spicy Korean food.

One night earlier this month at a 낙지볶음 restaurant in downtown Daegu, a online group of spicy Korean aficionados met up to do a tour of various dining spots famed for serving intense heat in their fare. The 4 online restaurant reviewers are of the hardcore variety when it comes to their love affair with Korean spiciness. The types who can be seen chowing down on 낙지볶음 cooked with 5-alarm Cheongyang Gochu pepper powder, while gleefully wiping their incessantly sweaty foreheads.

Among the group is a married couple from Bangchon-dong, who share the same craze over this kind of food. When the wife makes banchan , she tends to spike everything with heaps of Cheongyang Gochu. “When I was in high school, I often ate spicy ddeokbokki. And when the heat started coming on, I always told myself to stop, but I would just keep on eating.”, she says. The couple tends to eat far more gochujang than most families, so much that she usually buys the 18 liter jars of gochujang which are usually only bought by restaurants. The husband reminisced about eating spicy food during his military service days. “When I was doing my military training, my mother used to come visit me and bring anchovies and gochujang for me to snack on. My mother always lectured me to make sure that I eat rice with it, to make sure the heat doesn’t give me cramps, but I didn’t bother with the rice.”, he recalls. The husband has a reputation for reading other Korean’s online reviews of spicy restaurants, going to the place and trying it, then coming back online to retort to the review and indicating that the place is not so hot.

Another spice addict at the get-together, from Geomdan-dong in northern Daegu, reveals that when the weather isn’t good or when he is feeling down, he tends to eat spicy food. And when he is hungover from the night before, his favorite remedy to curb his ailing stomach is to guzzle down the spicy broth leftover from eating 짬뽕. But he concedes that he’s not necessarily as hardcore as the others. “Whether the meal is spicy or not, any good food is good enough for me.”, he adds.

The last member of the group is a young woman from the outskirts of west Daegu, who once complained of some ongoing indigestion problems, so she went to a doctor. He gave her a clean bill of health and said that it didn’t appear to be anything serious. But rather than allowing time for her stomach to sort itself out, she went straight back to eating hardcore, spicy Korean food. “To give up eating spicy Korean would be the same as giving up being a Korean.”, she maintains. She’s so caught by its spell, that when she went to Europe to travel, she brought along a tub of gochujang and mixed it with virtually everything that she ate over there.

The group of addicts swap stories on how to maximize the potency of the meal. The husband of the couple suggested that the intensity can be increased, if you were to eat patbingsu, while eating the spicy food. The young woman from the countryside says that she drinks water to help prolong the sensation.

One of the men concludes the night by stating that he hopes to try spicy food everywhere in Korea and to one day cook up some of his hottest recipes for his peers.