Ugly Baby, the Carroll Gardens Thai restaurant that closed about two years ago to an audible wail of anguish over Brooklyn, has reopened in Williamsburg — window-lined, next to the B.Q.E., more than twice the size of the original. Chef Sirichai Sreparplarn is back in the kitchen, with a new menu that carries over almost none of the old dishes. Helen Rosner’s review in The New Yorker’s Food Scene is less service journalism than an argument about what happens when a cuisine gets reduced by its own hype.

The restaurant’s reputation rests on heat:

  • Ugly Baby 1.0 (2017) built its name on northern Thai cooking and two “obliteratingly spicy” dishes — a duck laab and a kua kling, a beef dry curry
  • It became known as the thinking person’s place to get your face blasted off, which is precisely the reputation Rosner wants to complicate
  • The new menu leans in anyway, tiered in ascending order of smolder: the Laughs, the Cries, and the Ugly
  • New York is in what she calls a Thai-spiciness rapture — Hungry Thirsty’s owners opened Hungry Spicy in Chelsea this summer, a restaurant themed around chilies down to the flame-shaped Mylar balloons
  • Her cautionary example is Jitlada in Los Angeles, which became internationally famous on one scorching dish; the rest of Jonathan Gold’s rave about a menu “subtle and adventurous and spiky and soft” was eclipsed by all the talk of spice

The best dishes in the review are the ones off that axis: a mild omelette-and-pork-meatball soup, a whole fried pompano with a tarry relish of seemingly every herb and spice except chilies, pumpkin fries, a vegan coconut-milk curry of pineapple and eggplant with only a whisper of heat. Dining as heat-seeking, Rosner suggests, is reductive — it turns a menu into a dare and a room full of first-timers into contestants.

Where the heat is used seriously, she argues, it deepens rather than substitutes for flavor. In a kang prik of pork leg and pork rinds the burn “morphs from bite to swallow,” a distant crackle becoming a tear-inducing electrocution, while galangal, lemongrass, garlic and makrut lime dip and twirl in the seconds between. The heat ruins you, opens you, and readies you for more — it never steals the spotlight.