Sauce Up NYC Garlic Chip Chili Sauce Review

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Sauce Up NYC Garlic Chip Review — Original

Sauce Up NYC makes a solid chili crisp and one of my favorite salsa machas. So when I saw they had a garlic chip line, I grabbed it. The label calls it “chili sauce,” which tracks with the Sauce Up branding — but I want to be upfront: the chili part of this sauce is almost invisible. What you’re getting is fried garlic chips held together with honey. It’s closer to garlic granola than anything in the chili crisp category.

That’s not a complaint. It’s a category clarification. And once you stop expecting chili heat and start treating this as a garlic crunch condiment, it gets a lot more interesting.

Quick Facts

Serving size is one tablespoon, 90 calories, about a gram of added sugar. I like the tablespoon serving size — it’s honest. You’re going to use at least that much.

Ingredient Quality

Ten ingredients: grape seed oil, fried garlic chip, fried shallot, roasted peanut, East Coast wildflower honey, dried red chilies, white sesame seed, Himalayan pink salt, organic coconut sugar, soy sauce powder. Contains peanuts, soy, and sesame.

The ingredient list is short, which I appreciate. No mystery fillers. What jumps out is the specificity of the honey — “East Coast wildflower honey” instead of just “honey.” That’s a detail most brands skip. It tells me someone thought about this ingredient, not just dumped in a generic sweetener. Compare that to generic label reading where you see “sugar” and learn nothing.

Fried garlic chip is second on the list and it shows. This jar is garlic-first by design. The dried red chilies sit sixth — below peanuts, below honey — and they perform exactly how that position predicts: barely detectable. It’s not that the chilies are bad. They’re just not doing any work here. The grapeseed oil is a neutral base that stays out of the way — cleaner than soybean, less flavor than sesame. It lets the garlic and honey run the show.

Appearance and Settlement

This jar is packed. Crispy bits go all the way to the top. You can tip it over and the oil barely moves — it just seeps through the huge garlic chips and peanuts. There’s hardly any oil layer at all. I’d put this at the top of the oil-to-solids scale — we’re talking maybe 5–10% oil. The rest is all stuff.

I couldn’t even do a proper fork-sit test. The jar was too packed for the fork to rest on anything — it just sat on top of garlic chips. That’s a feature, not a limitation. You’re getting what you paid for here: a jar full of ingredients, not a jar full of flavored oil with some bits at the bottom.

Aroma

It smells like garlic granola. That’s really the only way to describe it — big garlicky, toasted, slightly sweet. The wildflower honey comes through on the nose immediately. Thick, sticky, warm. This doesn’t smell like any chili crisp I’ve opened. It smells like something from a bakery or a fancy trail mix situation. Which is kind of fun.

Texture and Crunch

This is where the jar earns its keep. Big chunks. Huge garlic chips, visible shallot pieces, sesame seeds scattered throughout. The honey acts like a binder — everything clumps together in thick, granola-like clusters rather than scattering loose like most crispy bit products. It’s packed to the brim. All the way to the top.

The crunch is really good. Immediate fried crunch that holds up. Not chewy, not soggy, not the kind of bits that fade away after two seconds. The honey gives the bits a cohesion that most chili crisps don’t have — you’re biting into a cluster, not picking at crumbs. It’s a different texture experience entirely. More like eating garlic brittle than spooning out chili crisp.

Flavor Complexity

First thing you taste: garlic. True to its name. Nice fried crunch, and then the garlic just fills up the space. The sweetness follows — honey and coconut sugar working together to balance out the bitterness that this much raw garlic would normally bring. They’ve done a nice job using the sugars to mild out the intense garlic without turning it into candy.

When you dig underneath the top layer of crunchy bits, the oil is noticeably sweeter than the garlic pieces on top. Take the oil and the bits together and you get the whole picture — garlic crunch up front, sweet undertone, and then a salty tail from the soy sauce powder that lingers with the garlic after you swallow. That soy sauce powder is last on the ingredient list, but it’s the thing you taste longest. Classic case of a bottom-of-the-list ingredient punching above its weight.

What you won’t find much of: chili. It’s hard to tell if there’s any chili flavor at all on the first bite. As you keep eating, there’s a very minimal chili presence, but it never announces itself. The dried red chilies are in there by label, but they’re not doing the talking. This jar is a garlic condiment that happens to have “chili” in the name. That’s the contrarian read here — the brand is honest enough to call it “chili sauce” instead of “chili crisp,” but even “chili sauce” overstates the chili’s contribution. If you bought this expecting heat or chili depth, the label set the wrong expectation.

As a whole jar assessment: it’s split. The garlic bits on top and the sweeter oil underneath feel like two distinct layers. You need both together for the full experience, but they don’t integrate the way a true whole-jar product does. It’s more like two good things sharing a container than one designed-together system.

Heat

There isn’t any. No spice whatsoever in terms of heat. No spice indicator on the label — no flame icon, no heat scale, nothing. The dried red chilies are present in the ingredient list but functionally invisible on the palate. I’d rate this a 1 out of 5, and even that feels generous. If you have zero heat tolerance, this is completely safe. It’s a garlic condiment, not a spicy one.

Use Cases

If you’re looking for a really big, crunchy, chippy, garlic situation — this is good. The lack of distinctive chili flavor actually makes it more versatile, not less. This isn’t fighting with anything on the plate. It’s just adding garlic crunch and a touch of sweetness to whatever you’ve got.

I could see this on eggs, pasta, toast, rice bowls, roasted vegetables, soups — basically anything that benefits from garlic and texture. The honey-garlic-salt profile could work across Italian, Mexican, Chinese, or Japanese food contexts without clashing. It’s the kind of condiment that doesn’t commit to one cuisine, which means it can go anywhere. If you’ve had the garlic-forward chili crisps and wanted less heat with more crunch, this is the logical next step.

Versatility and Packaging

At $2.17 per ounce, it’s a reasonable price for a handmade NYC product. The 6-ounce jar is standard for this category. Spoon access is fine — the bits are packed tight but scoop out easily enough. Refrigerate after opening per the label. The jar itself is nothing special, but nothing wrong with it either.

The label has a few typos in the mission statement section and a sentence that doesn’t quite read right. Goes to show nobody reads labels — but I do, and it’s a small quality-control thing I’d tighten up if I were them. Not a deal-breaker. Just noticeable.

Final Verdict