Food is often localized and it's very difficult to get really hot versions of dishes, because they fear customers will send them back/not get to the restaurant again. Indian dishes are the worst offenders in this matter, I guess they had one two many braggart who came and said "I want the maximum spice version" only to leave the plate untouched...
I thought it was a purely local thing to localize the dishes for local tastes... until I visited Japan and I saw a French restaurant where they served steak "maître d'hôtel" (right with the diacritics), with the parsley butter replaced by a mix of japanese mayonnaise sauce and little crumbs of wasabi.
I thought it was a purely local thing to localize the dishes for local tastes... until I visited Japan and I saw a French restaurant where they served steak "maître d'hôtel" (right with the diacritics), with the parsley butter replaced by a mix of japanese mayonnaise sauce and little crumbs of wasabi.