A meal at the Carroll Gardens restaurant Ugly Baby is atomic, especially when the duck salad or kua kling are on the table. Opened in late 2017 by the chef Sirichai Sreparplarn, the destination for blast-your-face-off Thai food stood out in a neighborhood mostly known for New American brunches and Italian American time warps. Yet Ugly Baby quickly became regarded as Brooklyn’s, if not the whole city’s, best Thai restaurant, a place where, New York once wrote, “everything feels like a pure manifestation of its chef-owner’s taste and personality.” But before the end of this month, the owners will manifest the end of Ugly Baby: Via social media, they announced that they’re shutting it down for good.
“We’re closing because chef Sirichai is just really tired and needs a long, long break,” one of the business’s partners writes. “While we’ll miss the restaurant and all the great things that come with it, the upside is that this will give chef Sirichai the chance to work on a cookbook, which he’s long been wanting to do.”
Born in Bangkok, Sreparplarn moved to New York in his late 20s to study journalism. He worked at his aunt’s Thai restaurant in the East Village, and the curry pastes came calling. In the mid-2010s, he established himself with Kanlaya Supachana as one of the conspirators behind Red Hook’s thrilling Chiang Mai and Kao Soy. At the latter, he told the New York Times, their goal was to expose New Yorkers to “the real food from the north” of Thailand. Those restaurants received acclaim, but neither lasted. On Smith Street, Sreparplarn went solo, and his career took off. Bon Appétit ranked Ugly Baby No. 3 on its list of the country’s “Best New Restaurants,” then-Times critic Pete Wells rhapsodized about the fried coconut cakes called tue ka ko, and here at New York we praised a deep-fried whole sea bream that was so compulsively edible it made “the evil food-science technicians” come across “like amateurs.” Most importantly, it — along with a few other spots — helped expose a generation of Brooklyn white guys to the thrill of incredibly spicy food and allowed other operators to tap into the previously nonexistent market.
As Tammie Teclemariam wrote a few months ago, “Excellent Thai restaurants — spots that promote regionally inspired menus filtered through individual chefs’ experiences and sensibilities — are becoming the norm” in New York. This new norm was established by a wave of Thai restaurants that, during the 2010s, brought the cuisine to new regions of the city, and included Sreparplarn’s businesses. Before, Thai food outside Queens mostly meant gloopy green curries, and if you wanted quality papaya salad, you had to head to Sunnyside’s SriPraPhai (est. 1990) or Elmhurst’s Thaitown. But Isaan mania began to spread around Manhattan a decade and a half ago through places like Somtum Der as well as restaurants opened by Ratchanee Sumpatboon of Elmhurst’s Chao Thai and Astoria’s Podam. These included Larb Ubol, which spawned the mini-chain Lan Larb, and the East Village location of Zabb Elee, which crowds mobbed right after a J. Kenji López-Alt review. In 2012, Andy Ricker opened a branch of his Portland restaurant Pok Pok Ny in the “Columbia Street Waterfront District.” Ann Redding and Matt Danzer opened Uncle Boon’s the following year, and it stayed mobbed until it closed during the pandemic. Thai Diner, Uncle Boon’s spiritual successor, is still one of the city’s most popular spots.
More recently, Zaab Zaab has become the latest Thaitown success story and is on an expansion tear across downtown Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Flushing. There are scene-y successors to Uncle Boon’s like Bangkok Supper Club, and its predecessor Fish Cheeks, as well as a handful more of Brooklyn spots like Sukh.
Ugly Baby isn’t a victim of its own success; its popularity hasn’t waned as newer options have proliferated. In fact, it seems to be as buzzing as ever. In 2022, the restaurant stopped taking reservations in order to, the explanation went, serve more people. Last year, Zach Schiffman found it was the rare “impossible table” restaurant that was actually as busy as it claimed. The closing news has, of course, brought crowds who don’t want to spring for tickets to Bangkok: On Monday, Eater NY’s Emma Orlow reported the restaurant was quoting “two-hour waits” over the weekend. It’s good to go out on top.
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