It’s been touch and go, but the latest word is that Andy Ricker’s full sit-down northern Thai restaurant, Pok Pok Ny, will open Wednesday. We’ve gotten a look at the menu, and this place seems poised to rock the city’s Thai-food scene, with specialties not found elsewhere in the five boroughs. There’s a pork-bone soup with smoked frog legs; the herbal salad yam samun phrai, teeming with unusual things like sawtooth, parsnip, and white turmeric — not to mention cashews and dried shrimp; plus a khao soi (an egg-noodle dish in a curry broth) that, at least at the original Portland location, is a dead ringer for the stuff you’d slurp in Chiang Mai.
Ricker sources many of his ingredients directly from Thailand on trips he takes several times a year, and if this one is anything like the Portland Pok Pok (or the wing shop he opened on the LES a couple of months ago), prepare for it to be perenially jammed, even if it is in Brooklyn’s out-of-the-way Columbia Waterfront district. In warm times, the space more than doubles, thanks to a sprawling backyard. For starters, the place is open 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, with full seven-days-a-week service coming soon; no reservations. See the menu here and scope photos in our slideshow.
Pok Pok Ny, 127 Columbia St., nr. Kane St., Columbia Waterfront; (no phone yet)