Spicy Aficionados (food, kitchens, best)

[SDPMiami]

Which US city has the most spicy food, the biggest variety of spicy food, and a culture of eating spicy throughout the city and metro?

Just as a note: Spicy to me means both hot (lots of chilly peppers) as well as using many different seasonings that are normally not considered hot (turmeric, cumin, etc).

Obviously, first pic and maybe naively most obvious choice is New Orleans. It's Creole (with Cajun also available) is the only genuine "American" cuisine that is actually spicy (read: hot).

However, many American cities have great samplings of ethnic cuisine. Obviously American and European kitchens are not spicy in anyway, however some Latin (Mexican, Peruvian) and Asian (various South Asian kitchens as well as Thai/Malaysian/Indonesian kitchens but even Hunan features cooking with a lot of peppers).

So that led me to include San Francisco/Bay Area, Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas into this mix.

San Francisco and Los Angeles both have a great combination of some of the best Mexican food in the nation as well as various asian kitchens. Los Angeles known more for Thai while SF/Bay for Indian.

Houston and Dallas have the Mexican, Tex-Mex thing strong throughout their cities but they also have a surprising number of asian cooking options available. Supposedly Dallas has more Indian and Houston more Vietnamese but also various Chinese kitchens in place. Not to mention Houston has a stronger influence from Cajun.

Honorable mentions to some southwest cities like Phoenix, ABQ etc. Don't think I forgot about you.