If you listened carefully, almost two years ago, on the day that the Carroll Gardens Thai restaurant Ugly Baby announced that it would be closing, you could almost hear a wail of anguish rising up over Brooklyn. The chef, Sirichai Sreparplarn, a Bangkok native, opened Ugly Baby, in 2017, as a place to show off the fruits of years of gastronomic research into Thai cuisine: the fermented, spiced, herbaceous, sour, complex cuisine of the north; the turmeric-stained, shrimp-funked, chili-loaded cooking of the country’s south. Sreparplarn’s menu was expansive, but diners crammed into the narrow, color-saturated dining room for a few dishes especially, chief among them a duck laab and a kua kling (a beef dry curry), both obliteratingly spicy. The restaurant became known as not just one of the best Thai restaurants in town but the most reliable for nuclear detonation—the thinking person’s place to go get your face blasted off.
At the time, Sreparplarn said that he closed Ugly Baby because he just needed a break. The crowds had been relentless, the dining room packed and chaotic at all hours, and he wanted some time and space to regroup, and maybe to write a cookbook. He signed the lease for the space over to some former Ugly Baby employees who, with Sreparplan’s blessing, flipped it into Hungry Thirsty, a very good not-quite-tribute restaurant that specialized in Thai street food, and then he slipped off the stage. And now, almost as suddenly, he’s back: Ugly Baby is born again, in Williamsburg this time, in a window-lined, B.Q.E.-adjacent space more than twice the size of its former digs.
As before, Sreparplarn is in the kitchen, putting together dazzling dishes both familiar and unfamiliar; as before, Ugly Baby is a restaurant in which everything is amplified, not just the Scoville count. The room is again bright and brash, now with a long mirrored bar filling one wall, its bottles glittering in the maximalist space like a Marilyn Minter painting. The music is thumpy, up-tempo, and loud. While there’s more space between tables now—and a lower-level dining room for overspill—this is still not a restaurant built for quietude, or connection. You don’t come to Ugly Baby for conversation, any more than you would a night club; like a night club, it’s a place for (if you’re in the mood) pleasurable overwhelm, or (if you’re not—but then, why are you here?) unbearable sensory chaos.
Dining and Cooking