Many people conceive of a favorite restaurant as a place of comfort. You walk in and they remember your order. Maybe they make you feel “at home,” let you go off-menu, indulge you with a free glass of wine or piece of cake. Sounds nice, but I went to my favorite restaurant to be bullied—all my senses battered and burnt out, before I was handed the check and hustled unceremoniously out the door. That was the beauty of Ugly Baby.
From the moment you push aside the heavy orange curtain and enter this Thai restaurant, which is located in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens and will close for good on Dec. 22, you are ceding control. Nothing about Ugly Baby suggests rest or respite. The ambiance is intentionally set to acid trip. The walls are a mayhem of bright swirling color. The brusque and charming staff is also dressed in similarly anarchic hues. The bowls and plates are—you guessed it—a colorful mishmash of fiestaware. If you’re lucky enough to sift through the long waits and earn a table, you will sit down and be handed menus printed on neon construction paper, spattered with curry, the line items sprinkled with freeform emojis and the chef’s editorial annotations. Some dishes proudly announce their own awfulness: “Worst Food In The World,” “Brutal,” “Stay Away,” “Stinky AF.”
Enjoy your time with the menu but don’t take it too seriously, because your order is, at best, a proposal. Throw out the name of a few dishes, almost in supplication, and watch the eyes of your server, who offers a cold reality check. If your party was not melanated enough—or sometimes, it seemed, specifically Thai enough—you would be barred from ordering certain intense dishes. The presence of one white Brooklynite in your group could embargo entire swathes of the Ugly Baby menu. Sometimes you wouldn’t even get exactly what you’d ordered, but what they thought would suit you better. Admittedly, this gatekeeping was part of the joy, because I deeply respected their game. It’s the one establishment in this borough where if the server told me I couldn’t handle something—that this was a suicidally spicy nam prik intended for a whole table to share, not for one idiot to try and eat by himself—I would accept the verdict, because I knew the enormity of their flavors.
Those warnings on the menu were not for nothing. It is possible to order conservatively at Ugly Baby, to pick out a careful path through their handful of spicy-but-not-quite-mind-altering dishes, as if picking out stable stones while traversing a lava floe. But I went specifically to inflict significant burn damage on myself, so I sought out the dishes best suited to that purpose. Oftentimes, I left the restaurant looking like I’d just been jumped: hair disheveled, glasses fogged, panting and stumbling. They give you a single colorful napkin, and you will do things with that napkin that you did not think were ever necessary in a restaurant context. The food can make you sweat in ways that wouldn't be possible from Zone 4 cardio: the skin behind your ears, your eyelids, your wrists. Ask for more napkins, and more white rice, but you can't quite stop the hurt.
It isn't just about the spice, though. Across the whole meal, and often in a single well-mixed bite, these dishes were dialing every flavor up to full intensity: the tang of a lime or a pickled mustard green, the bitterness of a fistful of herbs, the sweetness of pomelo pulp or palm sugar, the chthonic funk of fish sauce or shrimp paste. Growing up with South Indian food meant that lots of these flavors were foundational for me—turmeric, chilis, cumin, coriander, tamarind, coconut, shallots, garlic—but here they were brought into riotous communion with ingredients well outside my usual range.
Each bowl at Ugly Baby could teach me something. On one visit, it might be a braid of green peppercorns. On another, a dried-up dark citrus rind, mysteriously firm to the touch, for which no one on staff could provide the English name. While poking through a bowl of fried rice, I might find the unexpected cameo of betel nut. I love to learn while eating, and I consider it a welcome cognitive challenge to try and absorb new information while the capsaicin is landing a barrage of elbows and knees on my consciousness. Each time I walked into that orange storefront, I was there to set aside my pride and receive a pungent education. I entrusted head chef Sirichai Sreparplarn and his staff with my fate completely. Those who know me can attest that I’m a pretty careful pescatarian 95 percent of my days. In Ugly Baby's strange crucible, all my rules are suspended: I ate brain, and would probably eat human if it were wrapped in a banana leaf and sold to me with deceitful slivers of lemongrass, kra pow, and kaffir lime leaves.
Not everyone I brought to Ugly Baby was into it. For me, though, there was never any other way. My tastes have been set by three decades of eating bird’s eye chilis. I feel visceral anger whenever a recipe asks you to merely “rub bread with garlic,” or, god forbid, “remove garlic” that was previously added. My friend once described me as having the palate of Wario. I want my food to hit my senses like a wall of harsh noise music. I can humor my friends who want to sit down to eat some winky and restrained New American cuisine, and I can even enjoy the various permutations of yogurt sauce and herb oil, but the truth is I would never really want to eat that when I could eat my way through some character-building adversity at Ugly Baby.
Sreparplarn's restaurant opened when I was 26, which, as a friend and fellow devotee pointed out, is a fine phase of life to become obsessed with a restaurant that promises to fuck you up. It was a time when any empty Sunday could be happily given over to pain, with no dependents to care for afterward. You had to sort of build your day around a trip here, not just because of the long waits, but because it could be a night-ender. Your constitution after the meal would depend on how heavy a hand the cooks had with the seasoning that night, and on your powers of self-control. After eating at Ugly Baby, you might be cresting on endorphins and ready to do the Oklahoma drill with your dinner companion, but just as often you might want to loiter in a calm dim room with immediate access to ice cream. (If I didn’t have a GI tract toughened by a lifetime of spicy food, most visits would have involved an extended porcelain postgame, too.)
Which dish will I remember most? The best bowl of khao soi in the world, with a dollop of hot paste, which you could blend into the broth as much or as little as you liked, a choose-your-own-adventure style of masochism. The ginger tamarind soup, a broth that is deep brown with throat-clearing aromatics, full of white chunks of red snapper, crosshatched with julienned ginger and piles of scallion, the closest item to comfort food. Every red or orange curry welcomed you into its dankness. The automatic staple order on every visit was the squid and shrimp blanketed in a grainy, super-umami sauce with salted egg yolk.
The dish responsible for the most damage over the years was a duck salad that the menu urges you to avoid. To me, optimal herb usage obscures the food beneath, so many that every bite can feel like landing face-first in a garden. The duck salad took that concept to an extreme. On top was all the texture: crisped rice, long dried chilis, huge tufts of basil, shingles of crisp duck skin, tottering piles of cucumber, stacks of long beans. Alternate the freshness of the green stuff with the ferocity of the meat and chili underneath; mix in some bites of white rice and sips of a Thai iced tea for the sweet temporary succor of condensed milk; enjoy the ego death. I distinctly remember ordering the duck salad when my parents met my now-wife for the first time. Everyone got along well, and this certainly wasn’t my intent, but it would be a perfect dish to order for anyone looking to incapacitate their dinner participants and limit their engagement with one another. I don’t remember half the conversations I’ve had at this restaurant, mid-delirium; I will always remember the flavors seared into my palate.
Once I learned that Ugly Baby was about to close, I had to make one more pilgrimage. So much of what people line up for in New York City is stupid—private equity-operated streetwear or cross-bred pastry abominations—but for once I was willing to stand in line to pay my dues. I arrived while the lunch service was still winding down, to make absolutely sure that I could get dinner, because my friend had struck out the two previous nights by arriving at sane hours. Inside, I was met with familiar sights and sounds: sweaty brows and reddened faces of diners; surf rock on the speakers; snippets of Thai slung between the staff, its words as curlicued and lively to my ear as its characters look on the page. My happy, spicy place.
Despite my unhinged arrival time, I wasn’t even the first person in line. As I waited, I reminisced with a nearby couple about the most challenging bites they’d had at Ugly Baby, their first experience with the dense seeds of a barely cooked Thai eggplant, or the pebbled surface of chicken feet. As the sun set to pink and the G trains rumbled by, the line extended to the end of the block, then around the corner and all the way down that block, gaggles of Asian-American friend groups arriving at one of the few places in South Brooklyn willing to feed us with this much honesty, complexity, and brutality.
A few hours later, we sat down. The server gave a lightly incomprehensible spiel—were these the items they were out of, or the items he was recommending?—and eventually we ordered, amid a little confusion and light trolling, per tradition. Then we ate and mourned. Another server, one I remembered from my earliest visits, came by the table to say hi to my friends, who were even more frequent visitors than I was. Before getting back to work he left us with a seed of hope: The head chef was taking a break, because he’s burnt out. But he’ll be back with a restaurant, probably in Brooklyn again. With my mouth full of sour, searing pla ra papaya salad, I was about ready to cry.
