One of New York’s cult-favorite Thai restaurants is coming back. Ugly Baby is reopening in Williamsburg at 364 Grand Street, between Havemeyer Street and Marcy Avenue, on Thursday, August 27.
Chef Sirichai Sreparplarn is still behind his returning Thai
restaurant. Som Kharazmi, the chef’s business partner, writes to Eater that the chef plans on changing up the menu from what the original Ugly Baby was known for. It’ll have a wider range of dishes and styles. “People that know us are going to be surprised and excited,” he says.
The Williamsburg Ugly Baby is a much larger space at double the capacity of the original Carroll Gardens restaurant, which opened in 2017 and closed in late 2024 (it’s now a different Thai restaurant run by Sreparplarn’s former employees). The newer restaurant can fit around 70 diners across two floors, a bar, and a waiting area where people can drink. (It was previously an Emmy Square Pizza, which closed in 2025.) Sreparplarn is excited about being able to seat larger groups with family-style menus, plus offer private dining and parties.
This revamped Ugly Baby has a full liquor license, which means the team can serve cocktails, along with wine and beer. Ugly Baby’s beer list was phenomenal, so here’s hoping the new restaurant continues that tradition.
When Sreparplarn opened the first Ugly Baby, his small restaurant quickly became one of the best Thai dining destinations in Brooklyn, gaining attention for its regional Thai dishes, such as spicy duck salad and kua kling (dry curried beef), plus that beer list. Ultimately, he closed it because, as Kharazmi writes over email now, the chef needed a “break from the grind and intensity” and that, at the time, “he just didn’t want to run a restaurant anymore. He was sick of it.”
But it was during that break that Sreparplarn realized he missed the restaurant life, so he started working on bringing back Ugly Baby, with the goal of “mak[ing] it better in the ways that he always wanted over the previous seven years but couldn’t due to the circumstances,” per Kharazmi.
