Three Dishes at Pok Pok Ny Andy Ricker has been traveling to Thailand since 1987, and at some point he started to fall for the cuisine of the country's north in a way that knocked his life and his career in new directions. Back home in Portland, Ore., he began grilling chickens stuffed with lemon grass in his driveway; customers would carry it over to his picnic table and sit down. This unconventional set-up evolved into Pok Pok, Mr. Ricker's acclaimed Thai restaurant, which he has attempted to recreate on Columbia Street in south Brooklyn. That restaurant, Pok Pok Ny, is the subject of my restaurant review this week; a few days ago, I interviewed Mr. Ricker by phone to get some background on three of the restaurant's best dishes. Da Chom's Laap Meuang ($14) Learning to make a salad from the blood and guts of a pig was not one of Mr. Ricker's goals on his first trip to Thailand. He traveled with a backpack, and while he had been cooking in restaurants by that time, he "wasn't paying as much attention to the food as I was to the girls and the pot," he said. He returned in 1992, but this time he noticed the cooking. In a village near Chiang Mai, he visited a friend's father, a retired school principal named Da Chom who was locally famous for his laap. A kind of salad of minced pork, Da Chom's laap was an all-day process. When they finally ate it, "it tasted unlike anything I would have thought of as Thai," Mr. Ricker said. My experience was beach bungalows and Thai food in America, and this was something completely different. Indeed it was. The dish, as recreated in the Pok Pok kitchen, is made from pork that is minced with big curved knives custom made for laap-chopping. During the chopping, it is mixed with pork blood that has been infused with lemon grass, "to knock back the gamy taste." In the meantime, the liver and other entrails are boiled in salted water seasoned with lemon grass, shrimp paste and galangal - again, to hold the gaminess in check. Shortly before serving, the pork and pork blood mixture is combined with some chopped offal. This is all cooked together with a chile paste, or naam phrik, that contains cinnamon, cardamom, mace, long pepper and the seeds of white prickly ash. As it cooks, the pork is moistened with some of the offal cooking liquid. When it's done, the laap is garnished with cilantro leaves, sawtooth herb (also known as culantro), green onions, fried shallots, and pork cracklings. The result is strikingly different from other pork laaps I've had in New York City. Those tend to be a ghostly gray, heavily run through with dried chile. The pork blood gives Da Chom's laap a wine-red color and a darker flavor. Liver and intestines give it depth. The spices in the naam phrik give it a bottomless aromatic complexity. Hand chopping gives it a smooth, fine grain. It is as rich and creamy and compelling as a long-simmered Florentine chicken-liver ragù, but it has eight or nine additional dimensions. As it would be in Thailand, the laap is served with a table salad of fresh herbs and raw vegetables, including a Thai eggplant that is very crisp and surprisingly sweet when raw. Serious Eats put together an informative slideshow on some of Pok Pok's more unusual ingredients. "Thai people believe that if you're eating a lot of meat you have to balance it by eating vegetables," Mr. Ricker said. When Thai people come in, they eat all the herbs and ask for more. When non-Thai customers have finished eating a plate of laap, "we end up throwing away 80 percent of the herbs." Sai Ua Samun Phrai ($14) Although this dish is sold on the menu as Chiang Mai sausage, its centerpiece is a green chile paste called naam phrik nuum. Naam phriks are a class of dips or spicy relishes that are integral to Thai cuisine. "Nam phriks are one of the most underappreciated, and the least common dishes, in Thai restaurants in America but one of the most common dishes to eat in Thailand," Mr. Ricker said. The naam phrik nuum is one of many dishes at Pok Pok Ny that carries the flavor of charcoal. Green chiles, garlic and shallots are placed over the grill in the outdoor kitchen in the restaurant's backyard, then pounded in a mortar and pestle. The naam phrik is blended with tuanao, a sun-dried fermented soybean paste (also toasted on the grill) and then seasoned with lime juice and shrimp paste. The naam phrik is surrounded by garlic-scented fried pork rinds, steamed kabocha squash, long beans tied into knots for easier dipping, white cabbage, and - oh, right - slices of Chiang Mai sausage. It's a great sausage, seasoned with lime leaf, lime rind, galangal, turmeric, garlic, shallot, cilantro root, black pepper and white pepper, then slowly cooked over the grill. Why does Mr. Ricker give top billing to the sausage, then, if the naam phrik is the star of the dish? "If I emphasize naam phrik on the menu, and I've done that before, you end up selling half as many," he said. My goal is to actually get them to eat it. So I throw away some of the proper way of naming it just to get them to eat it. Khao Soi ($14) There's a long story there. I'll try to keep it short," Mr. Ricker said when I asked him about khao soi, a curried chicken noodle soup found all over Chiang Mai. The short version of the long story still managed to touch on the origins of the dish ("either Burmese or southern Chinese, depending on who you talk to"); the dish's use of coconut milk, rarely seen in Chiang Mai and northern Thailand generally ("that points toward Burma"); the lack of resemblance between khao soi as made in Chiang Mai and khao soi as served in American Thai restaurants; the more subtle differences between khao soi as served in one restaurant in Chiang Mai and khao soi as served in another restaurant in Chiang Mai; and the pickled mustard greens that are served on the side no matter where you go in Chiang Mai ("definitely Chinese in origin, so that speaks to the Chinese theory"). The heart of khao soi is a distinctive curry paste made with dried long chiles, "a ton of shallots," garlic, lemon grass, turmeric, ginger ("which is very unusual for curry paste in Thailand"), coriander, cumin and black cardamom. Also: "a little teeny bit of Burmese curry powder." First, the curry paste is cooked in oil with shrimp paste. Then chicken is added, along with coconut milk (at Pok Pok Ny, they squeeze their own), and cooked until the chicken is tender. At the end, the curried broth is seasoned with soy sauce, fish sauce and palm sugar. Just before serving, boiled noodles are added, along with fried noodles on top, and some extra coconut cream is poured over it for added craziness. The khao soi comes to the table with a condiment plate of pickled mustard greens, roasted chiles, limes and raw shallots. I've eaten a fair number of coconut-milk-based Thai curries, and have even cooked a few, and I've never tasted one as complex as the khao soi at Pok Pok.