The other day, I combed my memory for traces of after-school snacks. What had I eaten after bouncing off the school bus and flinging my backpack by the door? The best I could recall, with a hint of horror (but also amusement, and even longing), was a tried-and-true ritual, invented by my best friend, that involved melting a Kraft Single on top of a Snyder’s of Hanover hard pretzel in the microwave. Visions of Maruchan ramen noodles danced in my head.
The inspiration for the reverie was Tong, a superlative new Thai restaurant in Bushwick, where the menu identifies two of its dishes as favorite after-school treats. Oh, to be a fourth grader in Thailand! To look forward, during lessons, to deep-fried shredded-banana-blossom pancakes, as intricately woven as birds’ nests; to dip them in sweet, tart cucumber relish and feel their oily, salty crunch between your teeth. To buy, from a street vender, a wooden skewer of tender charred octopus seasoned with chili, cilantro, and lime.
In fact, adults are the target demographic at Tong, and specifically adults who drink alcohol. Kub klaem, or small plates, including the banana-blossom pancakes and the octopus, are “good with a drink or three.” The more substantial kub khao are “good for after drinking.” That the restaurant, which opened in August, does not have a liquor license yet is only a small hitch. There’s an inviting wine store on the block (which is more verdant than you might expect in Bushwick), and Tong packages its takeout as carefully and appealingly as I’ve seen. Eating it at home with a cold beer from my refrigerator was an undiluted pleasure.
“A drink or three” is right, especially if you’re sensitive to spice, in which case you may want to keep drinking even after you’ve finished the small plates. Several dishes are of the hurts-so-good variety. A bowl of Laotian crispy rice with agreeably pink fermented pork sausage, roasted peanuts, lime leaf, and chili was so electrifying one night that it made me skittery, and so exceptionally delicious that I reached for it for breakfast the next morning. Drunken noodles, tossed with slivers of long red chilis and whole stalks of pickled green peppercorns, were flecked with ground green bird’s eye chili for good measure. A wonderful southern-style, creamy crab curry set my palate aflame, though it also contained its own relief: cool halves of hard-boiled egg, a mound of vermicelli, frills of sweet-and-sour preserved mustard greens, and crunchy crescents of raw bitter melon.
The milder options were no less thrilling, only quieter. For another pancake, head-on whiteleg shrimp were fanned in a circle and encased, fossil-like, in a puffy, slightly sweet batter made with flour, chili paste, fish sauce, sugar, and limewater, then fried to a deep russet. Mum, an Isan-style dry-cured sausage, marries ground beef and beef liver, which puts its texture somewhere between crumbly and pâté velvety, with a distinct iodine tang. I won’t soon forget a deceptively simple, astonishingly flavorful salad for which cucumbers were so heavily salted that the dish almost doubled as a cold soup, the refreshingly vegetal water released by the cucumbers punched up with just the right proportions of anchovy paste, lime zest, and coarsely chopped raw garlic.
It’s pretty rare in New York to find Thai food this good outside Elmhurst, Queens, which for years has seemed to have a monopoly on the best Thai chefs. It’s unsurprising, then, to learn that some dishes are literally imported from that neighborhood: the mum is made by Sunisa Nitmai, the chef and owner of Elmhurst’s beloved Pata Cafe, and the recipe for pad mhee ko rad, an Isan-style wok-fried noodle dish similar to pad Thai, made with soybean paste and sweet pickled radish, comes from her as well. Nitmai is the mother of one of Tong’s owners; everyone in the kitchen calls her Mom. May her progeny proliferate far and wide. (Dishes $8-$25.) ♦
