Vide the spice bros. You notice them as soon as you walk in. Full tables — a foursome here, a sextet there — egging each other on, dapping each other up. They ratchet their bites from spicy to spicier to spiciest. Their mecca is Ugly Baby, the longtime Carroll Gardens Thai spot that reopened this year in a bigger space off the BQE in that other bro paradise, Williamsburg. Here, spice is a bragging right and a promise. A server described the menu’s three sections — “The Laughs,” “The Cries,” “The Ugly” — as progressing from mild to incinerating. “You enjoy and are happy,” he explained, gesturing from top to bottom, “or you have fun and die.” This is a joke, barely.
Spice chauvinism has a long history, but it has never been as present as it is in today’s era of Hot Ones, the digital wings-and-chat show that launched just before the original Ugly Baby opened in 2017, has grown to become an $80 million enterprise and is now a required stop on the A-list celebrity press tour. The time was ripe for Ugly Baby, which closed in 2024, to return, refreshed, in a larger space in Williamsburg. Its old space, in Carroll Gardens, is now in the hands of former staffers who opened Hungry Thirsty last year. Hungry Thirsty birthed Manhattan’s Hungry Spicy, an even hotter sibling in Chelsea, in July, where dishes are rated on a four-flame scale: one wisp for “lowkey spicy,” ascending to “real spicy,” “burning hot,” and “no mercy.” To judge from the lines for a table, recreational spice chasing is now big enough to support all three.
“I had to call the ambulance two times,” a server at Hungry Spicy warned us about the menu’s hottest dish, kua kling, a four-flame southern-Thai specialty of ground beef and curry paste topped with a fried egg. Two tables over, a couple of guys were perspiring madly, one of them slumped backward in the booth, while a woman at their table filmed their demise on her phone.
I enjoyed the dishes I tried at Hungry Spicy and am happy to report no ambulance was necessary. For balancing flavor with heat, though, there’s no beating the original. I made for Ugly Baby, where, aware of my own limitations, I brought the biggest spice bro I know, a blonde woman from the Midwest whose bona fides are sometimes doubted and who has a long history proving her opps wrong. (Spice bro is a gender-neutral term.) She once won a prize for finishing a fried rice at UnTable, another high-heat Thai standout in Carroll Gardens.
Some dishes at Ugly Baby look spicier than they are (like the catfish, top-left). Most, however, are just as hot as you’d hope. Hugo Yu.
Some dishes at Ugly Baby look spicier than they are (like the catfish, top-left). Most, however, are just as hot as you’d hope. Hugo Yu.
The good news is that Ugly Baby, despite the long shadow of its reputation, does not require a living will or a DNR. Chef Sirichai Sreparplarn, once again at the helm, calibrates pleasure with pain, his dishes radiating the superfecta of herb, lime, garlic, and fishiness alongside brute-force spice, even in the most perilous. You can ease in with no spice at all, a plate of battered pumpkin fries ready to be dragged through tamarind sauce and to unseat the sweet-potato fry’s diner supremacy. From there, pick your way through the mid-tier spice of the “Cries” section, which is generally tolerable for all but the most cautious, though that varies dish by dish. A vegan option, a ruddy, massaman-ish coconut curry with eggplant and Malay-style pineapple, is a true medium. Crispy catfish in dry red curry, which arrives in glistening hunks scattered with fried basil leaves, looks more dangerous than it is: Despite the fire-red chiles lurking throughout, it’s more sweet than hot, like a Thai take on General Tso’s. (This is a compliment.) And don’t miss, but also don’t underestimate, a seemingly surprising combination of hulled strawberries with dried shrimp, tiny red buttons of sliced chile, and fish sauce. They look innocent, these berries, until the heat hits you, after the sweet and the funk, a secret agent, a hot betrayal.
My bro was making her way through these happy mediums without a hair out of place; we summited to the “Ugly” with eagerness (her) and trepidation (me). I was heating up inside and out: Under the bright lights of the dining room, bouncing off the lurid Technicolor walls, the heat seemed amplified. Spice accrues, and the saucy dregs of starters on the plate were infusing even manageable dishes such as ground pork belly with shrimp paste, its caramel sweetness turning live and electric. A kang prik curry of pork leg and pork rinds had a sour, herbal perfume and unfolding layers of funk, though the meat itself was tough. (It has since been replaced by a combo of oxtail and beef tongue.) Then the menu’s spiciest dish, a red-curry stir-fry known as pad ped, arrived.
“This one builds,” the bro said approvingly. “It’s a grower, not a shower.” A platter of tiny cubes of skirt steak mixed with thin slips of what the menu calls “honeycomb” (as in tripe) was absolutely spattered with chile seeds. I’ve now had it two times, once when it came out as the first dish and once as the last. (The restaurant was still working through some early jitters.) Last is best: When eaten before other dishes, the pad ped effectively blows out your palate for anything else. But as the pinnacle, it manages to dance between sultriness and outright fire. The experience — I can think of no other word for it — unfolds. True daredevils may wish for more: “I want to feel scared, even just for a moment, and I never did,” my bro said. I was proud not only to endure but to enjoy it alongside my 14th glass of water. (Servers know to make these cooling rounds; plain white rice, another sop, is regularly replenished.)
We’d been hazed and survived. The bill arrived without request or ceremony. There is no dessert.
