KRU – Brooklyn's archive of century-old Thai recipes

KRU opened on North 14th Street in North Williamsburg in September 2022, and has spent the years since rewriting what Thai food in Brooklyn can look like. Chef Ohm Suansilphong built the menu around a chance find in a secondhand bookshop: a Thai memorial cookbook, the kind royal and aristocratic families once commissioned to honour their dead, filled with century-old recipes that folded in grapes, anchovies and ham long before anyone called it fusion. He runs the dining room with his wife, pastry chef Kiki Supap. The restaurant's name, which means guru or mentor in Thai, honours the teachers and books that shaped his cooking. It was named a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best New Restaurant and, in that same run of attention, introduced to the MICHELIN Guide. Today KRU is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide, a Brooklyn address built as much around its wine and sake programmes as its kitchen.

01The room and the setting

Behind an unmarked storefront on North 14th Street, the dining room reads industrial rather than exotic: exposed brick walls and ductwork, cement-tiled floors, and a sleek, of-the-moment restraint that lets the cooking do the talking.

KRU can seat groups from eight guests up to a full buyout of seventy, and for larger gatherings the restaurant's next-door space extends capacity to 250 — as workable for a corporate reception as for a quiet dinner for two. Up front, Laab Bar runs as a lighter, livelier companion: a pop-up built on Thai drinking food and street-inspired snacks, with $9 house drinks and $49 bottles all night.

02The chef

Ohm Suansilphong was born in Sukhothai and raised in Bangkok, inside a family restaurant where he began cooking as a child. His formal education came later and elsewhere: training at Sala Rim Naam inside Bangkok's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, then cooking at Nahm under David Thompson and Executive Chef Prin Polsuk — an apprenticeship he still considers his true education in Thai cooking.

Insider tip

Closed Wednesdays; dinner served Mon-Sun evenings, with Laab Bar pop-up out front.

A stage in Australia followed before he arrived in New York in 2016 and, with his brother Chat, opened Fish Cheeks in NoHo. The restaurant earned a star from the New York Times' Pete Wells and a place on Eater's list of the city's essential restaurants. Two years later he opened Chicks Isan inside Brooklyn's DeKalb Market Hall, where his grilled chicken drew its own Times recommendation. KRU, opened with his wife and third-generation dessert maker Kiki Supap, is where those strands — royal Thai history, seafood technique, street-food ease — finally sit on one menu.

03The cooking

The project began, by Suansilphong's own account, with a secondhand bookshop find: a Thai memorial cookbook, the sort once printed by wealthy families to mark a death, its recipes casually mixing in grapes, anchovies and ham long before anyone called it fusion.

That discovery still shapes the menu's furthest-reaching dishes, among them a kaeng pa jungle curry built on beef tongue — a cut Suansilphong slow-cooks for two hours and separates into three sections to make the most of its different textures, rather than the straight boil the dish would get in Thailand. Elsewhere the kitchen plates pork jowl with prawns, coconut cream, fish sauce, Thai chillies and raw vegetables, and a version of pla goong mang gorn — lobster tartare folded with peak-season tomatoes under a crisp of house-made nori. A braised beef shank and tripe, finished with pork cracklings, bean sprouts and Chinese broccoli, balances sour against spice in the kitchen's own idiom.

04Wine and drinks

KRU serves organic and sustainable wine, a programme built from the start to meet Thai spice rather than sit politely beside it. The bottle list runs deep into Riesling — Mosel, Nahe, Wachau, Alsace and the Finger Lakes all represented across sparkling, skin-contact, dry, off-dry and dessert styles — alongside grower Champagne and reds and whites that favour small, terroir-driven producers.

The sake side came later: partner Kiss Sookcharoen has said the restaurant always envisioned a sake programme but focused first on wine, where the team had more in-house expertise, until Dean Fuerth — beverage director at Sushi Nakazawa and a regular at KRU — proposed a nine-course sake pairing dinner in 2023. Pairings now run dish by dish: a junmai daiginjo from Yamaguchi alongside the lobster tartare, a full-bodied muroka genshu from Nara alongside branzino steamed in banana leaf.

05The neighbourhood

KRU sits in North Williamsburg, on the Greenpoint border, within walking distance of The William Vale, Wythe Hotel, Arlo Williamsburg and The Hoxton, and a short stroll from the green of McCarren Park. The L train stops at Bedford Avenue and the G at Nassau Avenue, making it an easy detour from Manhattan or elsewhere in Brooklyn.

06When to go and booking

KRU serves dinner Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday from 5.30pm to 9pm, and Friday and Saturday from 5.30pm to 10pm; the restaurant is closed on Wednesdays. For catering, private events and large groups, requests go by email rather than through a booking platform.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.