A highly anticipated $10 burger arrives in Bed-Stuy

Marian Bull is a writer, potter and editor living in Brooklyn. She writes a weekly cooking newsletter called Mess Hall. In our new series called Dishing, Marian will get the story behind a tasty dish at a local restaurant.

There is a linguistic tic you can often observe in restaurant people, both chefs and servers. Watch them take a bite of something delicious, and they’ll offer a quick nod toward the plate and say, "that’s nice." If the dish is truly exquisite, they’ll maybe raise their eyebrows. It’s a lack of effusion not brought on by snobbery but by the professional nature of their eating: they assess a plate of fried porgy or a quivering scoop of tres leches cake like someone with an office job might assess a spreadsheet.

But at Little Grenjai, a new Thai-American cafe in Bedford-Stuyvesant, this rule doesn’t seem to apply. On a recent Friday morning, with a flooded apartment and a flooded basement at the restaurant, chef Trevor Lombaer bit into one of his own krapow burgers after frying up a plate of them for a photo, then leaned back in his green floral apron and said emphatically: “Oh man.” It was an appropriate response to a dish that could impress even the most jaded New York burger eater.

Lombaer and his wife Sutathip Aiemsaard soft-opened Little Grenjai in September. They began with two cautious weekends, then expanded to five days a week, offering a menu consisting of only a burger, a bowl of congee, a Thai tea cake and coffee service.

The space, a former Chinese takeout spot, is small: just a six-seat counter, a few tables, and a gleaming, glittering red vinyl booth in the corner. An open kitchen and a wall full of merch, designed by Aiemsaard, complete the space.

The café is the nimble result of the couple’s trajectory. The two met on Tinder, in Bangkok, in 2016, where Aiemsaard was working as an interior and graphic designer and Lombaer was visiting in hopes of learning about Thai cuisine. They spent the next six months traveling through Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Japan together, with their curious stomachs serving as their compasses.

“It’s a love story,” Aiemsaard says, interrupting herself with a happy laugh. “A love-food story.”

By 2017, they were married and living in New York. They bought a hot dog truck, and then a food truck, which they operated under the name Warung Roadside. During the height of the pandemic in summer 2020, they moved out to Lombaer’s aunt’s place in the Hamptons, where he fed everyone daily. “Every night, he cooked these gorgeous dinners,” Aiemsaard said. “We were like, 'oh God, I wish other people could experience this.'”

So they began serving to-go food out of the aunt’s kitchen, offering up something different each night. When they outgrew her kitchen, they launched a pop-up in the Old Stove Pub in Sagaponack and got a taste of what having their own restaurant might feel like.

That fall, they began cooking out of a ghost kitchen in Brooklyn, offering a to-go dinner series called Tender Bits, named after the parts of their friends’ bodies that their dog would too often bite, like the backs of knees, calves, thighs. They began honing the idea of a Thai-American menu. That's when the burger appeared, inspired by Aiemsaard’s favorite Thai dish, pad krapow, or holy basil stir fry.

“When I’m in Thailand, I eat it every day,” she says.

The burger patty is a mix of pork and beef, laced with garlic and chile. “The pork almost gives it a breakfast sausage quality,” Lombaer says. It has none of the ho-hum beefiness of your standard burger.

Lombaer has recently been frying the burgers on a pair of griddles, sourced from Amazon, that they had at home. They hope to upgrade their cookware but worry the basic equipment makes a better burger than something higher-end would.

On top of the patties lie a friendly slice of American cheese and a pile of “Thai giardiniera” — pickled chiles that offer acid, heat and a nod to Lombaer’s hometown of Chicago. A subtle swipe of mayo, turned red and fishy from the addition of shrimp-head XO sauce, hides beneath. Instead of the usual smash burger lettuce leaf, Lombaer tops the krapow burgers with a sprig of Thai basil. It pokes out of the maw of the potato bun at an angle evoking the flowery edges of a wreath.

The burger is bountiful but not messy, presented on a small plate with a branded slice of butcher paper.

“I was intent on making something clean, and simple, and iconic,” Lombaer says.

You can blame Shake Shack, worrisome economic conditions or post-pandemic aversion — but smash burgers have become ubiquitous on New York restaurant menus. And while it’s rare for a burger to make such a convincing case for itself, Lombaer and Aiemsaard's does just that. And for $10, it still feels like an affordable lunch for a wide swath of New Yorkers.

Last summer, the couple finally found space available in their neighborhood on Gates Avenue. Aiemsaard began planning the restaurant's design, sourcing red and white tiles and the booth from Los Angeles. They let go of the ghost kitchen and, when they weren't busy planning out the restaurant, began hosting pop-ups at restaurants like Mắm in Chinatown and Honey’s in Bushwick.

In September, the couple quietly began service, announcing their restaurant's soft open on Instagram. A welcome flood of business and a dash of hype followed: a write-up in New York Magazine with a hero shot of their Chiang Mai Chi Dog, and mentions in Eater and the Infatuation. I kept seeing the photogenic burger popping up on Instagram.

When I spoke to Lombaer and Aiemsaard that day, they had just decided to temporarily shut down the restaurant. They had “soft-opened” because they didn’t have gas yet, and they didn’t have gas because the fire department still had to come out for an inspection. Without it, they wouldn’t pass a health department inspection. So they could only wait — or maybe plan a pop-up or two in the meantime.

The couple expressed concerns that the timing would hurt them in the long run.

“People’s memories are very short,” Aiemsaard said.

“But maybe it’ll just make everyone want it more, if they can’t get it right now,” Lombaer said, laughing.

They hope to reopen in early November. The burger will still be on the menu, bright and proud, cooking with gas.

Update: Little Grenjai will officially open on January 26, 2024.

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Little Grenjai is located at 477 Gates Ave in Brooklyn.