Hungry City - Ducks Eatery in the East Village - NYTimes.com The feeling at Ducks Eatery is part bayou barbecue joint, part backpacker pipe dream. Right, a nest of oysters. "BE sure to suck out the shrimp heads," the waitress instructed. Always sound advice, particularly so at Ducks Eatery, where a hypodermic needle is poked under the carapace with a solution of vinegar, star anise and house-made ssamjang (a Korean mixture of fermented soybean and chile pastes that is longer on funk than heat). There's more: the liquid is thickened with agar-agar and sealed in with a quick dip of the heads in liquid nitrogen. Only then are the shrimp tossed on the grill and, finally, painted with whipped lardo. Laid on a slate board over wilting arugula ($10), they look roughed up, exhausted. Pry off the armor and they taste like the kind of shrimp you might find at a precarious backwater shack, which is to say glorious. Under the helmet, the juice is brackish and bittersweet. You drain it in one shot. Still, you can't help but wonder if all that fuss was necessary. Wouldn't a little olive oil, salt and pepper have done the trick? This is the conundrum of Ducks Eatery, which opened in the East Village in September. Exciting things are happening in the kitchen, but the dishes that come out don't always show it. A beet salad ($8) adorned with fermented rice, bonito flakes and crispy duck tongue tastes merely of beets. Oysters, lightly smoked with alfalfa straw, are topped with shavings of frozen kaffir-lime-infused country-ham jus, detectable only as a vague saltiness ($8). More synthesized is the yakamein, a kind of bootleg ramen indigenous to New Orleans that is crossbred here with Malaysian laksa ($14). Chewy rice noodles, clams and brisket bob in a super-broth of some 30 ingredients, including house-made dried-shrimp paste, bird's-eye chiles, galangal, lemon grass and calamansi, volumized by coconut milk and coconut cream. Will Horowitz, the chef and an owner, previously ran a beta version of Ducks inside the table-tennis parlor Spin. Here he is freer to experiment. A blowfish-tail and shrimp ceviche ($8), cured in calamansi and lime, arrives in a clouded canning jar surrounded by a chaplet of seaweed. Unhook the lid and smoke pours out. For a moment you think you've stumbled onto a low-rent Atera. But it's the seemingly straightforward dishes that deliver the frankest pleasures: slivers of crispy pig ears and pickled cabbage on lily pads of lettuce ($11); ribs brined in fish sauce, shrimp paste and soy, dry rubbed and smoked over oak and hickory, then quickly charred on a Japanese kamado grill ($12). Tuesday nights belong to brisket, injected with palm sugar and more fish sauce, marinated overnight with apricot preserves and smoked for 17 hours to dissolute splendor. Mr. Horowitz is still finding his way. Flavors do not unfold here: they pop one after another, each obliterating the one before, like a string of firecrackers. Brisket jerky ($7), marinated in fermented squid sauce and Phu Quoc black pepper, kicks off candy-sweet, then swerves into a blistering coda. If only you could skip the first part. And his interpretation of Southeast Asian cuisines prizes sweet at the expense of umami. Nasi ulam rice ($7), plumped up by chicken stock, coconut milk and ghee, was beloved one night and shunned another when it arrived inexplicably confettied with sugary coconut flakes. Ducks is purposefully ill lighted, with a few vertical fluorescents (half of them on the blink) and, above the bar, enormous dusty lamps that suggest Pyrex flasks. Low candles on the tables offer limited visibility. Water is served in Mason jars, thankfully with straws. Cocktails - oversweet save for the Tia Jemima ($11), a slap of fizz and smoke from birch beer and mezcal - are chilled with a lone block of ice. Late in the evening, a fog rolls in, the smoker working overtime. Mr. Horowitz recently moved into the apartment upstairs, the better to watch over it. The feeling is part bayou barbecue joint, part backpacker pipe dream, curiouser and curiouser. You may never get the smoke out of your hair, but that is all right. You wait to see what happens next. Ducks Eatery 351 East 12th Street (First Avenue), East Village, (212) 432-3825, duckseatery.com. RECOMMENDED Charred head-on shrimp; St. Louis ribs; crispy pig ears; yakamein; nasi ulam rice; pipi kaula; chicken wings; beignets. HOURS Monday to Wednesday, 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.; Thursday to Saturday, 5 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance is a step up from the sidewalk. Restroom, although spacious, is not equipped with a handrail.