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.

Strawberries get a blast of umami with dried shrimp and fish sauce, plus spice from bird’s-eye chilies.

Sreparplarn’s new menu is divided into three categories, in ascending order of smolder: the Laughs, for the soft-palated; the Cries, for the tenuously brave; and the Ugly, which I suppose is for the self-loathing, or the self-indulgent, or the asbestos-tongued. I think of myself as part of the last group—I’m no chili-head, seeking heat above all else, but I do like a little bit of that dopaminergic thrill, which the psychologist Paul Rozin, studying the human drive to burn ourselves with chilies, has described as “benign masochism.” So I dived right into the deep end, ordering without fear: a soft stir-fry of ground pork belly, umami-charged with shrimp paste and garnished with slivers of tomato-red hot peppers, whose heat crackled and blossomed against a caramel sweetness in the sauce. A salad of whole strawberries and bird’s-eye chilies, in a glaze-like dressing of sugar and fish sauce, was uncannily dessert-like—Would I like this on ice cream? I kept wondering—and yet certainly not a dessert, with all its thunderous layers of sourness and fishy-breathed complexity. I wished that I was in a quieter room when I took a bite of the pad ped, a dry curry of hanger steak and slippery tripe: it was rich and deep as nighttime, with a holy-basil brightness swaddled in some of the most violent heat I’ve ever experienced.

The new Ugly Baby was packed on each of my visits, with hopeful walk-ins circling the bar and clustered on the sidewalk outside. The staff, while friendly, seemed oddly unprepared for the crush. There seemed to be too few servers, too many hovering hosts urging diners into a quick turnaround, and far too many instances (one!) of forgotten, and sorely needed, additional bowls of heat-muffling white rice. It was clear, from the snippets of conversation that I could catch against the clamor of the sound system, that plenty of folks were having their first Ugly Baby experience, perhaps drawn by the challenge of its most ferocious dishes. But dining as heat-seeking can have a reductive effect. Just look at what happened to Jitlada, in L.A., which catapulted to international fame on the strength of a kua kling that the late critic Jonathan Gold declared “may be the spiciest food you can eat in Los Angeles.” Gold wrote that the rest of Jitlada’s menu was marvellous, too, full of dishes subtle and adventurous and spiky and soft, but the rest of his rave was mostly eclipsed by all the talk of spice.

The room, like the food, tends toward sensory assault.

Ugly Baby—both before and now—is more than just a place to show off your oh-so-manly pain tolerance, or to punish your digestive tract. One of my favorite dishes on the new menu (virtually none of which is carried over from Ugly Baby 1.0) is a soup, mild and gentle, in which bob wisps of omelette and soft pork meatballs, and you’d be remiss to breeze past a whole fried fish in the Laughs portion of the menu. A pompano on my visits, it was served with a tarry, sticky relish made up of seemingly every herb and spice and aromatic in the world, except for chilies. There were pumpkin fries, too, crispy and sweet, and a rich vegan curry of pineapple and eggplant thick with coconut milk, threaded with just a whisper of heat.

But we are, as a city, in the throes of a Thai-spiciness rapture. The owners of Hungry Thirsty expanded earlier this summer, with the opening of Hungry Spicy, in Chelsea; the new outpost is themed entirely around chilies and heat, almost to the point of goofiness, with chili-pepper décor and flame-shaped Mylar balloons floating against the fire-hued walls. I’ll admit that all the hype got to me: when I dropped in for dinner recently, I made sure that my purse was stocked with Tums and milky hard candies, to gird myself against flames of a strength I figured I’d never previously known. I shouldn’t have worried so much. The food was good, and plenty spicy—if not eyeball-melting, as one critic’s description of the kua kling as “genuinely unpleasant” had led me to expect—though most dishes felt a little single note, relying on the heat alone to bring the razzle-dazzle.

Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.

At Ugly Baby, even if half the room is there to performatively get their sinuses blown out, Sreparplan’s use of heat never feels like a gimmick. In a furnace-blasting kang prik (a dry red curry) of pork leg and pork rinds, the heat morphs from bite to swallow, blossoming from a distant crackle of fire to a sparking, tear-inducing electrocution. In the intervening seconds, there are other flavors dipping and twirling: the earthy sweetness of galangal and lemongrass, gently sulfuric garlic, vivid slashes of makrut lime. The heat deepens the dish; it doesn’t undermine, it doesn’t steal the spotlight. It ruins you, and opens you, and readies you for more. ♦

Clockwise from left: omelette soup with pork meatballs, ground pork belly with shrimp paste, kang prik curry of pork leg and pork rinds, and crispy catfish with dry red curry.