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Ugly Baby Is Back, Sort Of
Photo: Courtesy of Hungry Thirsty
When the owners of Ugly Baby, one of the best Thai restaurants in the city, announced at the end of November that they were closing, it could’ve been the end of an era. On a still pretty desolate stretch of Smith Street, close to but not quite among the bougie hustle and bustle a few blocks north, Ugly Baby had been a beacon for spice hounds looking to short-cut what would otherwise be a trip to Elmhurst. Chef Sirichai Sreparplarn had made so many fans of his Northern Thai cooking that Ugly Baby was the rare restaurant where quoted hour-plus wait times for tables (it took no reservations) actually were hour-plus wait times. New York had raved, the Times had raved, Michelin had Bib’d. And by the end of 2024, Sreparplarn was justifiably exhausted. “We have pounded batches of curry paste every day for 7 years,” the restaurant wrote in a farewell note.
But Sreparplarn offered the space to his current staff, who snapped it up and kept things going. At the end of January, the restaurant reopened under its new management and its new name: Hungry Thirsty is the work of Napat Ruangphung and Thanatharn Kulaptip, former servers at Ugly Baby, and Prasert Kanghae, who undertook a very quick study in Sreparplarn’s kitchen, amounting to about a month.
Is the baby still ugly? Well, the restaurant is still vividly orange, that’s for sure. The Expressionist paint daubs have been rollered over to solid colors, but other than that, the look of the space hasn’t much changed. The kitchen is still wide open with masked cooks at back mastering towers of flame.
But Hungry Thirsty isn’t Ugly Baby, which set an impossibly high standard. The cuisine has migrated to the south, though two holdovers from the previous menu endure in memoriam, listed under the heading “Our Inspired”: khoong muk kai kem (shrimp and squid in a sauce made of salted duck-egg yolk) and panang, tender bits of beef shank in a sweet, coconutty curry. I enjoyed the panang, though I had pangs for some of the great, departed treats that no longer appear, like the coconut-milk tue ka ko with black beans.
Nor is Hungry Thirsty as affordable as Ugly Baby, in its earliest days, was: It used to be that nothing on the menu was over $25, but that was a few New Yorks ago. Now specials like kha moo kaki (stewed pork leg and feet with intestines) ring in at $72, though it’s still very possible to eat well and affordably here, and there’s plenty to recommend the place. A starter salad of preserved sardines in a sour escabeche of vinegar and chiles was meaty and bracing. A mushroom curry — with Thai mushrooms of a pleasing rubberiness, reminiscent of wood ears — was shaggy with a rich curry paste that pooled glistening oil when your spoon dented it, as it should. We gobbled up deep-fried chicken skins, like Thai chicharrones dusted with tangy, Dorito-orange “Tom Yum powder,” which arrived in their own edible fried basket for maximum heart-stoppage.
Is Hungry Thirsty essential, as Ugly Baby was? In its earliest days, probably not. But it’s hard to fault anyone for that. Ugly Baby was one of the restaurants that raised the stakes for Thai cooking across the city, currently in an efflorescence of greatness. Ugly Baby did not introduce Thai to Brooklyn, but it certainly marked a milestone in the dispersion of authentic, fiery, regional Thai, and its baton has been picked up by restaurants as disparate as Sukh, in Fort Greene (a kind of Thai Epcot, scene-setting a train journey through the country, which would be a groaner if the food wasn’t excellent), the sister restaurants Sappe and Soothr in Manhattan, and many others. Hungry Thirsty isn’t quite a victim of Ugly Baby’s success, but it is only one inheritor of the world it ushered in. We’re all the better for that.
Let me note in closing that the only two beverages on offer at present are ice water — kept frequently refilled, thank God — and cutesy, Care Bear mugs of slushie-machine Thai iced tea. You will need them. The menu, and the staff, make very clear what is merely hot and what is hot-hot-hot, but in this particular way, Hungry Thirsty is very much upholding Ugly Baby’s proud tradition of incineration. “This is the feeling I remember,” my husband said, flushing, as he reached for his glass. “I can’t believe we didn’t even get anything over one fire emoji.”
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