HELL’S KITCHEN — The next hot sauce craze could be heating up in Hell’s Kitchen.
Ron Menin, who cooks up small batches of “Hell’s Kitchen Hot Sauce” in a commercial kitchen in Queens, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to manufacture his line of spicy sauces on a larger scale.
“Like many others, I’ve worked my whole life to help someone else’s dream become a reality. On my 40th birthday, I asked myself, ‘What do I have to show for it?’” he wrote on his Kickstarter page.
“I didn’t like the answer I gave myself,” added the Hell's Kitchen resident of more than a decade.
His solution was "Hell's Kitchen Hot Sauce," which he started making after quitting his job in June 2014.
The longtime hot sauce aficionado started out testing his creations on friends and family, and trademarked the brand name as soon as it came to him, he told DNAinfo.
“I knew it would be a great name for a hot sauce company,” he said. “[And] what better way to honor one of the best neighborhoods in the country… than to name my sauce for the place I’ve lived for over a decade?”
Since 2014, he has developed six different hot sauces, including "West Side Red," “Rockin' Rasta” and “Cinammon Ghost Punch."
“Whenever I would go out, all I could ever find was Tabasco or Cholula. I figured, ‘Why not do something that is a really nice balance between heat and flavor, and complements the food instead of covering up?" he said.
"You put Tabasco on something, all you taste is Tabasco,” he added.
Menin, who works as a manager and bartender at Barcade in Jersey City and Chelsea to support himself as his business grows, hopes to raise a total of $19,560. The money would go toward hiring a large-scale production company to scale his sauce production and to develop and manufacture two new sauces. He had raised $709 of his goal as of Wednesday afternoon, with 26 days left in the campaign.
His sauces are already available at neighborhood sites like Amy’s Bread on Ninth Avenue and As Is NYC on 10th Avenue — as well as at more than 100 retail locations in Canada — but he hopes to expand distribution throughout the city and beyond.
“I just really want to… share my sauces with everybody,” he said. “I want to have fun and make people happy, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”
