Answering the Call of Friends

It’s only at the end that the blood is tipped in, just before the bowl of num tok — an opaque, nearly black Thai noodle soup — is brought to the table. This is time enough for the blood to disperse in the broth and lose its drawn-sword tang. What I tasted was more elliptical: salt, minerals, a distinctly animal sweetness.

Num tok is street food, originally sold from sampans plying the waterways of central Thailand (call it canal food). It appears on a few Thai menus around town, but perhaps nowhere as unassuming as Plant Love House, opened in November by Manadsanan Sutipayakul and her two daughters in Elmhurst, Queens.

The restaurant’s Thai name, Baan Pluk Rak, may be better conveyed in English as House Where Love Grows. Once home to a succession of dollar-dumpling shops and a Himalayan spot, the storefront has been cheered up with chintz-seat chairs, perforated Ikea stools and white slat tables that have the air of a garden party.

The furniture comes from Ms. Sutipayakul’s backyard, where, two summers ago, her daughters, Benjaporn Chua and Preawpun Sutipayakul, began hosting informal lunches to show off their mother’s cooking. When they went on hiatus (for winter and college), friends kept calling and pleading for more food.

Their mother is still cooking for the neighborhood: The clientele is mostly Thai, the dishes comforting rather than showy. On an icy evening, everyone had ordered corn fritters, kernels suspended in rice flour strafed with coriander and chile. Classic Thai soups — tom yum, lucid with lime, the sour notes gently triumphing over the sweet; khao soy, whose coconut-milk broth if any thicker would qualify as curry — tasted as if Ms. Sutipayakul made them simply because she loved them.

The menu is refreshingly brief, with eight “signature” dishes designated with hearts and several more that deserve hearts of their own. These include yum khanom jeen, fermented rice noodles doused with little, beyond fish sauce and lime, and heaped with crispy flakes of salmon, like a granola of pure brine; ba mee poo moo dang, caramelized pork and fresh crab over vinegary skinny noodles; and khana mu krop, a Chinese-leaning sauté of pork belly half-buried in kai lan, the thick stems crunchy and tender at once.

Sweetness is celebrated, sometimes a little too much, as with moo toon, a soup insistently wafting star anise. Yen ta fo, a soup described on the menu as pink but closer in shade to hibiscus (from red fermented bean-curd paste), is more interesting in texture than flavor, crowded with squid, spongy tofu and frilly white jelly mushrooms that thwart the teeth.

Only one item on the menu exceeds $10: a tray of papaya salad under siege by pork cracklings; wedges of hard-boiled egg; tiny, perfect chicken wings; and house-made sour sausage cut in slabs, with bull’s-eyes of red chile, seeds still intact.

Elsewhere, chiles are present without being, as one of my companions put it, “punitive.” Except in the case of the excellent larb, which makes punishment feel good.

The house rules, written on the front door, include “Laugh a lot,” “Use kind words” and “Be positive, grateful, truthful.” They’re easy to keep.

Desserts, made by the daughters, show how the young eat in Bangkok now: coconut ice cream with a sunny landslide of egg yolk, tossed into the ice cream raw and left to freeze; a tome of bread, three inches thick, saturated in butter, cut and reconfigured to look whole but ready to collapse under a fork, drizzled with honey and topped with ice cream and chocolate sauce — sundae and French toast in one.

Then there are deep-fried triangles of roti, the crepelike flatbread flipped at Thai street carts, dripping with sweetened condensed milk. They arrive on a hot plate, tilted around a mound of matcha ice cream mohawked with red adzuki beans. The waitress gives it a lashing of green tea, sending up a whoosh of steam. It is designed to make you gasp or giggle. I did both. Two grown men at my table fell upon it, urgently. One marveled, “But I don’t like dessert.” Then there was nothing left, not even ruins.