The steady, exciting rise of Isan cuisine has been the main storyline in New York City’s Thai restaurant scene for the past decade.
There have been notable exceptions, such as the Northern Thai specialist Lamoon, in Queens, which recently closed its doors after the cost of importing ant eggs and other hard-to-find ingredients skyrocketed, and the pan-regional Ugly Baby, which continues to cheer up the faces of its customers. set fire to Brooklyn. Take a few steps back, however, and you’ll see a clear trend line leaning toward the larbs full of offal, papaya salads full of salted black crabs, and bundles of glutinous rice that are typical of northeastern Thailand’s cooking.
That stretch reached a new high with the arrival of Zaab Zaab in Elmhurst, Queens in April. The chef, Aniwat Khotsopa, grew up in the Isan town of Udon Thani and is a gifted manipulator of the texture depth and contrapuntal flavors of his home region.
His version of larb ped Udon, the beef salad favored in his hometown, is powerful and nuanced at the same time. To the small pebbles of duck meat, he adds crispy strips of fried duck skin and firm, dense slices of duck liver. Roasted chiles are used in abundance, but they don’t outshine the other seasonings as they sometimes can. Instead, they are kept in a tense balance by the freshness of mint and charred galangal, the floral perfume of lime leaves, and the pungent bitterness of sawtooth herb, otherwise known as culantro.
Chefs often talk about the balance between hot, sour, salty and sweet flavors in Thai food; Mr Khotsopa argues convincingly for adding bitterness to the list. Like the other larbs he makes with beef, pork, or chicken, the larb ped Udon can and should be made into mouth-sized bundles of greens from a basket of lettuce and herbs. Along with sprigs of mint, coriander and dill – Zaab Zaab makes great use of dill – is a branch with long, thin green leaves in the shape of a spear’s leaf. This is sadao, and just one leaf adds a melancholic note of bitterness that makes the other herbs even more refreshing.
Pei Wei, who owns the restaurant with Bryan Chunton, stopped by my table one evening to point out the sadao and some other ingredients that she said would take some effort to obtain. Many customers come from Thailand, she said, and this shows that Zaab Zaab is the real deal. After all, there is a lot of competition from other very good Thai spots along Woodside Avenue and Broadway. The amalgamation of a restaurant aisle serving one of the city’s largest Thai communities was almost certainly a prerequisite for the creation of a cuisine as successful as Zaab Zaab’s.
Mr. Khotsopa was working as a line cook at another Mrs. Wei and Mr. Chunton restaurant, Tiger Prawn, in Brooklyn, when a chicken he was cooking for a staff meal caught their eye. The partners built Zaab Zaab for him by quickly furnishing a space where they had recently run a Hainanese chicken restaurant. This explains the predominance of chicken heads in the ceiling painting. (It’s the work of a local Thai-born artist named Sarasin Chatwichitkoon, who has painted several other restaurants on this strip.)
Mr. Khotsopa has been waiting a while for a coach to call him out of the minors; he spent a decade as a wok chef at Jaiya Thai in Manhattan and another decade at a luxury hotel in Bangkok, with shorter stays elsewhere in Bangkok and at a Thai restaurant in State College, Pa. Before Zaab Zaab, however, he had never worked as the chef or cooked a predominantly Isan menu.
You know you are in the hands of a skilled cook when you see how many techniques Mr. Khotsopa employs in his rather small kitchen.
Off the grill comes goong pow, two shrimp the size of Italian sausages, their heads dripping with marigold-colored fat that I’d love to spread on toast and eat for breakfast. They are served with a sharp, herbaceous nam jim, one of the many shimmering, faceted gems in Mr. khotsopa. Nuer yang, the grilled steak dish known as howling tiger, is made with rib-eye and comes with two types of jaew dipping sauce, one sharp and slightly spicy, the other darker, with an espresso-like bitterness.
Inherited from the latest incarnation of the kitchen, the rotisserie produces an intensely aromatic chicken rubbed with a paste of white pepper, lemongrass and coriander root, as well as a remarkable small catfish, perfumed from the inside by a filling of pandan leaves and from the outside by a mixture of cumin and white pepper rubbed into deep cuts in the dense, oily flesh.
In any Isan kitchen, the krok – a mortar of stone, wood or, like the krok at Zaab Zaab, clay – is an essential tool, the place where sticks of unripe papaya are hammered with a wooden pestle until they bend and accept the herbs that the Cook folds them along. Not that the seasonings at Zaab Zaab are particularly shy: an abundance of sliced, cherry-red chiles; maybe some dime-sized black rice crabs, pickled in brine; a shower of fresh lime; and of course a few good snails of fish sauce. There’s regular fish sauce, and then there’s an extra strong variety called pla ra, fermented in Mr. Khotsopa’s kitchen. The first taste of Zaab Zaab’s pla ra may make your head spin, but with the second, you’ll never want a papaya salad made any other way.
From the wok come two of the restaurant’s only non-Isan products. There’s a great rendition of what the menu calls kapow, one of the many names for stir-fried beef with basil. Zaab Zaab’s beef is chopped, not ground, and the spice is the more assertive, almost narcotic purple-stemmed holy basil. And anyone who has given up on finding great pad Thai in New York should really check out Zaab Zaab’s, with unusually deep flavors powered by the tart and fruity taste of tamarind.
Dishes can be ordered in three ways: spicy, Isan spicy or “Zaab Zaab for those who dare” as the menu puts it. On every level, Mr. Khotsopa’s food is so flavorful that the heat is often the third or fourth thing you notice.
The menu invites you to dig deeper, to explore the hor moks, pungent and dill scented bundles of sticky rice flour steamed in banana leaf wrappers; the hot pots, each with its own fragrant broth; the gaeng oms, somewhere between a herbal soup and a curry; the nam prik nom, a puree of green and red chillies served with golden curls of fried pork rind. Those who feast on tripe, spleen, gizzard and chicken legs will find plenty of love at Zaab Zaab. Those who avoid them will too.
There’s even a plate of fries sprinkled with a magical powder that’s salty, spicy, and sour. Can fries be Thai? If you eat them one by one with a bottle of Leo lager, Thailand’s favorite beer, you might be convinced.
