Stopover at Don Muang Airport, The New Thai Restaurant at Baby’s All Right
As far as layovers go, you could do a lot worse than cooling your heels at Don Muang Airport, the authentic Thai restaurant inside of Baby’s All Right.
Having long existed as an also-ran to the Williamsburg venue’s live music shows and frozen “Pink Baby” cocktails, the food program was recently given considerably more legroom, evolving beyond bar bites to exist as a fully realized, Southeast Asian-inspired eatery.
Conceptualized by Bangkok-based chef Jarrett Wrisley (who first met and befriended co-owner Zachary Mexico 14 years ago, at the titular airport) and executed by Michael Sablan (a vet of Northeast Kingdom and Mission Chinese) the menu riffs on classic Thai dishes and traditional street foods, reimagining them as modern saloon snacks. There’s Mieng Kham—lettuce cups cradling smoked pork or tofu, topped with toasted coconut, fried garlic, trout roe and tamarind jam—and sticky, peanut-encrusted ribs taking the place of wings. Then there’s green curry-infused atolls of fried brown rice, pebbled with braised beef cheeks, pumpkin and mushrooms; a bone-in, fish-sauce-marinated pork chop, strewn with seasonal vegetation such as slivered breakfast radishes and corkscrewed fiddlehead ferns; and a requisite fried chicken sandwich, capped with papaya salad in lieu of slaw.
Wrisley has also retooled the beverage program (not to worry, the grapefruit-hued Pink Baby remains untouched) to include Long Thaisland Ice Teas with bourbon and condensed milk, the Coco Ortiz (featuring rum, coconut, lemongrass and ginger) and various large format libations encircled with straws and amassed in plastic buckets, including the Thai Island Classic (a malty concoction of rum), Coca-Cola and Red Bull, and the Under the Armchairs, comprised of tequila, Pacifico, chili, almond, and lime.
Find your way to the bottom of a couple of those, and you’ll be in no hurry at all to get to your next destination.
146 Broadway, Williamsburg
All photos by Jane Bruce.