The chicken comes off the grill with a shine. Its skin is stained in late-breaking shades of sunset and mottled with char, little blithe grace notes everywhere.
The rest of the menu at Chicks Isan, a Thai street-food stall at the underground DeKalb Market Hall in Downtown Brooklyn, is almost entirely devoted to pork. But kai yang (grilled chicken) is the marquee dish, the pinup, the one to covet: each bite vivid and forthright, juices running to the bone.
It took three months for Ohm Suansilphong, the chef, to pin down the recipe. We think of street food as fast, but that’s just execution, a twist of the wrist. He tinkered; he brooded. The dish’s very status as a classic was part of the trouble. How can one make it comfortingly familiar but not mundane, thrilling without losing its simplicity?
The secret is no secret. For the marinade, Mr. Suansilphong sticks to the tried and true: smashed garlic, several heads’ worth; soy sauce as thick as paint, brewed with mushrooms for more earthiness; cilantro roots, bearing the fragrance and flavor of twice their weight in leaves and stems; white pepper with its near-vanishing must.
Chicks Isan, a stall at the underground DeKalb Market Hall in Downtown Brooklyn, specializes in Thai street food.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times
Whether it’s the precision of the measurements or the order each ingredient is pounded in, the result is emphatic. The chicken is spatchcocked, flattened, smeared with marinade and then settled in the garlicky bath overnight, where it grows more fervent with each hour.
Come day and it’s roasted until half done, then finished on the grill to order. One last touch: extra marinade, so much it drips.
The chicken may be eaten straight or daubed with an unnecessary sweet chile sauce. Better to dip it in jaew, a beautifully murky conflagration of fish sauce, chile powder, peppery sawtooth and khao khua, sticky rice that’s been dry-roasted and pulverized in a food processor until ultrafine, registering as more taste than texture.
Mr. Suansilphong, a native of Sukhothai, an ancient capital of Thailand, opened Chicks Isan in December with Jennifer Saesue, who grew up in Bangkok and New York. His cooking — declarative, unabashed — will be recognizable to those who have dined at Fish Cheeks, the high-end Thai spot in NoHo that he runs with Ms. Saesue and his brother and fellow chef, Chat.
Borrowed from Fish Cheeks is a recipe for the rightly named zabb (Thai for delicious) wings, the meat anointed in lime, deep-fried, then encrusted in chile powder and khao kua. There’s a little sugar, too, scattered like the mineral gleams in a sidewalk.
After the chicks of the stand’s name comes pork: shoulder, braised for six hours, plush and obliging; riblets in hot-sour tom yum (soup), perfumed with makrut lime and roiling red, of uncompromised firepower. These dishes are rich, a plunder of animal salts, and yet the chicken is what I remember.
Still, I could be tempted away from kai yang by a larb of minced pork, for which khao khua is ground coarse to leave crackly contours. Or by the gleeful disarray of a dish of jasmine rice balls, laced with curry paste and dropped in the fryer, then half crumbled with nubs of naem, fermented pork sausage, so pink it’s almost lavender: crispy against chewy, bite by bite.
Som tam (papaya salad) is a necessary side dish, a bracing equation of palm sugar, fish sauce, chiles and lime, resetting the palate to return to other dishes. For this, chile powder alone isn’t considered strong enough; whole bird’s eye chiles, masters of wringing tears, are crushed and worked in.
The same dressing is reprised with corn, boiled on the cob and sliced off in sheets, tossed with fresh tomatoes and eeriely summer-bright; and long beans clipped and left raw among little clouds of puffed-up pork skin. The heat mounts with each variation.
On one visit, I was asked, with a wary look: “Have you tried our food before? You know it’s spicy?” The question is a kindness, to make sure you know what you’re getting into. Even though this is far from the fire pots of Woodside, Queens, traditionally home to the finest and fiercest Thai food in town, still you might break a sweat; you might weep.
Yes, I said. Please.
