It’s not uncommon for restaurateurs who have succeeded at fine dining to turn their ambitions toward the fast-casual market. Everyone knows that running a restaurant is a surefire way to lose a lot of money; if you want to get rich, you’ve got to run a lot of restaurants. Take Shake Shack, for example, which started out as Danny Meyer’s single, nostalgia-driven hot-dog stand, and now anchors pedestrian malls and highway rest areas worldwide. New York is haunted by the ghosts of chainglorious restaurants of ages past—remember Tom Colicchio’s terrific ’wichcraft? Anita Lo’s kicky Rickshaw Dumpling Bar? Mark Ladner’s somewhat baffling Pasta Flyer? Plenty of others are still alive and well, some more promising than others: Rowdy Rooster, purveyor of hot chicken sandwiches from the Unapologetic Foods crew, is viciously spectacular; Esse Taco, from the superchef Enrique Olvera, is blah and kind of tragic.

Mommy Pai’s, the latest venture from the masterminds behind Thai Diner and the late Uncle Boons, seems to follow this road map—on paper, at least. Open since August, just around the corner from Thai Diner, it’s a chicken-finger joint, takeout only, with a clear culinary point of view (punchy, high-octane Thai flavors) and striking aesthetics. The concept grew out of practical constraints. The restaurant is situated in a tiny storefront that the owners of Thai Diner, the husband-and-wife team Ann Redding and Matt Danzer, have occupied for nearly a decade. Over the years, it’s served variously as an Americana-inflected luncheonette; a spinoff of Uncle Boons; and, most recently, a commissary kitchen for desserts. The space is both narrow and shallow, with comically limited dining-room capacity, and with Mommy Pai’s, Redding and Danzer have landed on a solution both pragmatic and poetic: they got rid of the dining room altogether. Mommy Pai’s is all storefront, with a window for ordering and a door hatch for picking up meals once they’re ready. A wood-framed dining shed set into the street, with a dozen or so stools and a countertop along the perimeter, offers customers something approximating eating in, at least while the weather holds.

What Mommy Pai’s lacks in square footage, though, it makes up for in sheer visual intensity. The façade, designed by Redding’s sister, May Redding, is a riot of textures, details, and in-jokes in the same Thai-meets-rococo style that makes Thai Diner feel so immersive and fun. The storefront features wooden framing, a glass-brick wall, and hammered-metal clouds (smithed by artisans at the Silver Temple in Chiang Mai) shooting off from a gabled decorative rooftop. The menu, displayed on an LCD screen set into the façade, is as mesmerizing as an art installation. As a functional menu, it is slightly less inviting. The lineup of dishes and sauces and combos verges on overwhelming; they’re presented in a mix of typefaces and colors, and punctuated by herky-jerky photo animations—a waving hand holding a soft-serve twist, spidery fingers with brass nail extensions used in the traditional Thai dance Fawn Leb. Mommy Pai herself—Redding’s mother, Ampai Redding, a winning mascot—appears wearing vivid red lipstick, smiling warmly, her head nodding in a perpetual gesture of invitation.

I’m not entirely sure that I succeeded in optimizing the various combo-meal options, but, as at Thai Diner, the chaos is part of the fun. If you find yourself lost, there are marginally less confusing paper menus available near the register. I will try to break down the offerings. The chicken fingers, cut from thigh meat, come either fried or grilled, in a variety of marinades. Eight dipping sauces are available on the side. There are a few sandwiches, including a chicken burger, all served on squishy potato buns. There are also a whole bunch of sides, some of which maybe feel like appetizers, but who ever heard of a fast-casual takeout spot having appetizers, and what’s the difference anyway?

One upshot of the menu’s byzantine sprawl is that every visit offers something new to discover. There are sides good enough to anchor their own restaurants, like the chewy garlic-chive-and-tapioca dumplings, which are Elphaba green and served with a fiery hot soy-chile dipping sauce. The Filet O’Tofu sandwich is enough to make a fast-food-recipe developer weep. Featuring an impossibly fluffy and crispy slab of tofu dressed kaleidoscopically with nam prik noom (pounded shallots, garlic, and green chiles), mayo, pickled cucumbers, and herbs, it comes under a narcotic blanket of melted American cheese. The Singha soda water, made by the Thai beer giant, is packaged in cute rounded bottles. A side order of tiny quail eggs are dyed a rich, royal magenta with hibiscus and soy. The only dish that I perhaps wish I hadn’t noticed was the curry-puff-inspired mozzarella sticks, which were a tepid, under-flavored anomaly.

The chicken, by the way, is terrific. My favorites are the coconut fried fingers, which are rough and ultra-crunchy, with a ghostly coconut sweetness, and the Muay Thai—marinated grilled fingers, which are tender and garlicky, with a sulfuric hint of white pepper. But the thing I found myself going most wild for were the sauces, especially the Noom Spicy Green Sauce, a play on nam prik noom that’s thick as marmalade and lime-juice sour; the creamy-dreamy Phuket Island Sauce, a play on Thousand Island with notes of pickled green peppercorn and galangal; and the tamarind-tart Crying Tiger, which I loved despite the menu’s overpromising that it’s SPICY. (It’s merely spicy.) I think I could be perfectly happy with just an order of fries, a couple plastic cups of sauce for dipping, and a tropical-fruit-punch slushy. One of a quartet of slushy tropical drinks on offer, it’s fresh and sweet but also strikingly salty, like a piece of fruit dipped into the ocean. Swing back by the window for a Thai-tea-and-condensed-milk soft-serve swirl to keep you occupied on the walk back to the subway.

Everything about Mommy Pai’s comes off as so personal, so hand-tooled and high-touch, that the possibility of fast-food expansion seems ridiculously far-fetched. Redding and Danzer have, for now, expressed only modest plans for growth—local delivery just launched, expanded hours are coming soon—and, in a moment when so many businesses seem to expand and expand until there’s hardly any blood left in the operation, their restraint seems almost radical. Still, I can’t shake visions of Mommy Pai’s going global: Thai-inflected chicken fingers in every airport terminal and baseball stadium in America! Salty pineapple-basil slushies and green-cabbage som tum slaw from the drive-thru! Should the couple someday take their chicken fingers to the moon, making Mommy Pai’s smiling face as recognizable worldwide as Wendy’s or the Colonel’s, we’ll look upon this tiny Mott Street storefront with the same nostalgia that we reserve for the original Shake Shack, sitting modestly amid the greenery of Madison Square Park: a relic of both intimacy and ambition, a monument to the slightly disquieting notion that, done right, fast food can be art. ♦