It’s hot — sticky, sweet — and it’s gaining popularity all around. No, Def Leppard isn’t making a comeback here in Eugene, but hot honey, a sweet heat infusion that brings together honey and different types of chili peppers, is becoming an adventurous complement for various dishes, from fried chicken breakfast sandwiches to pizzas.
Back in 2009, Calen Willis of Hey Neighbor! Pizza House was at a wedding in New York, and of course he was out exploring pizza joints when he discovered a few places in Brooklyn that were drizzling hot honey on slices. One of those places was Paulie Gee’s Pizzeria, where the now-popular Mike’s Hot Honey first caught popularity.
“We started with the Bombo, that was the hot honey first,” Willis says of Hey Neighbor!’s menu. “It wasn’t an immediate hit, but I think within our first year, it quickly became our most popular, like specialty pie because of the hot honey.”
The Bombo pizza at Hey Neighbor! is crushed tomato, mozzarella, ricotta, pepperoni, basil and Mike’s Hot Honey. What makes the pizza pop is the saltiness of the pepperoni along with “a match as old as time” of honey and creaminess of the ricotta, Willis says.
The pizza house drizzles hot honey on its (She’s My) Cherry Pie, which features prosciutto, chèvre and a cherry chutney. The hot honey was the ingredient that tied it all together, Willis says. While creating that pizza, he and his team often wonder what’s missing: Does it need heat, acid, sweetness or creaminess?
“The honey does an interesting job of taming certain flavors while bringing out others,” he says. “Getting a sweet hit with the honey and then getting that lingering spice on the back of it is kind of nice as an option on a pie.”
Shortly before Hey Neighbor! opened, Mikey Lawrence — now co-owner of Hot Honey food cart — was experimenting with hot honey with some friends at a restaurant. When overbearingly spicy hot sauce was in fashion, he and some guys he was hanging out with were getting Carolina reaper peppers shipped overnight from Butch Taylor, a breeder of one of the hottest Carolina peppers called the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper.
“We were making a reaper hot honey. It wasn’t so spicy that you would die, but with the honey, it melded really nicely,” Lawrence says. “We were just a couple young dudes goofing off.”
They decided to bottle the hot honey, calling it Major Dudes Hot Honey (a reference to a Steely Dan song). The honey didn’t catch on like Mike’s Hot Honey, but it may have made it to some gift shops in Montana, Lawrence says.
Hot honey fell into the shadows for Lawrence for a while, until he started his cart, Hot Honey Breakfast, which he opened in March with business partner Andre Marquis. Hot honey is the star of the menu. Whether it’s breakfast sandwiches filled with bacon, egg and cheese in between brioche, or breakfast corn dogs, it gets heavy drizzles of hot honey.
Hot honey takes a subtle approach to heat that can showcase the relationship between spiciness and local organic honey with peppers that have smoke flavor traits, whether it’s chipotle, smoked paprika or pasilla.
“What if we showcase smoke and spice, as opposed to just heat,” Lawrence says. “Because so many companies are dealing with just heat — like, I feel that it kind of turns into like a bro competition of, ‘I dare you to eat this.’”
Lawrence and his staff make their hot honey in house. He keeps mum on what’s in his hot honey, but he says there are about 17 different chili varieties. But with so many peppers, the heat remains mild.
“If there’s habanero in it, it’s to understand the flavor of habanero, not to have your taste buds assaulted,” he says. “We want you to understand these flavors, but without putting your stomach in the dirt.”
When Bill Nave was opening Hey Y’all, a food cart focused on breakfast and lunch, his wife suggested he add hot honey.
“It’s a fun condiment that has such a stark blend of really sweet and a pretty good spicy kick,” Nave says. “It’s a marriage that works well.”
Nave grew up in the Tri Cities area of northeastern Tennessee, seeing how mom and pop restaurants there would dish up simple breakfast and lunch centered around the biscuit, and he wanted to bring that to Eugene.
What goes inside the biscuit — or smothered on top if it’s biscuits and gravy — ranges from country ham to burgers to fried chicken. And it’s the fried chicken where hot honey can shine, ensuring a sweet crunch to it.
“Some people like it when we do the spicy, where we like to coat it like a buffalo wing style sauce, and then put the hot honey on that,” Nave says. “Then you get a few different dimensions of hot, and it kind of breaks the flavors up a bit.”
The biscuits that Nave serves at Hey Y’all aren’t sweet, Nave says. It’s more of a Southern-style buttermilk biscuit that has a rich buttery flavor. Fried chicken, pimento cheese and some hot honey bring it all together, he adds.
“You get a really neat, different experience, because you get this really smooth and creamy from the cheese, and then you get a little bit of the spicy, the sweet from the honey,” Nave says. “If you got it, say on the chicken, you get the crunch, and you get the savory, again, from the chicken. And it’s just a nice little play on flavors.”
The growing popularity in local restaurants isn’t a hard-headed push by restaurant owners, but speaks to more adventurous eaters in the area who want more exciting flavors.
“More restaurants in Eugene are doing different fun things,” Willis says. “All the cool flavor options that Mikey is doing at Hot Honey — I think it all like we’re all working together to just make diners a little more adventurous in their combinations. And I think that’s cool. Yeah, it’s not, not exactly reinventing the wheel, but like bringing it to a different market.”