Outside of Thailand, it was rare to find fine-dining-style Thai food a decade ago, let alone menus that explored Thai dishes beyond the comfortable realm of curries, pad Thai, and a few other noodle dishes and salads.

San Francisco got its first taste of Michelin-quality Thai cuisine with Kin Khao, and subsequently with its larger, even fancier sister restaurant Nari. There, chef and owner Pim Techamjuanvivit introduced SF diners to dishes and styles of cooking from her grandmothers and her family's history, ultimately earning Michelin stars for both restaurants.

Hed 11 arrives in Japantown as an even more upscale addition to the scene, offering just a single 11-dish tasting menu — served in six courses — highlighting seasonal ingredients, and shifting each season to highlight different regions and niches of Thai cooking as well. It's a higher-end offshot of Hed Very Thai, restaurateur Billie Wannajaro's Union Square eatery.

The current menu, dubbed "A Taste of the Southern Sea," focuses on seafood and the coastal foods of Southern Thailand. Chef Piriya “Saint” Boonprasan's dishes form an eclectic but thoughtful survey of this regional cuisine, and one that doesn't shy away from the funk and spicy heat that Western diners aren't always accustomed to. Boonprasan previously cooked at Bangkok's Michelin-starred Saawaan, and the skill level at work here is very clear.

The first courses are composed snacks that each offer deep punches of flavor. A Thai coconut pancake comes topped with caviar. Hokkaido uni adds a burst of sea flavor to a Thai grapefruit salad. The richness of beef khao soi, typically a soup, are packed into a fried eggroll. And a delicate Hokkaido scallop is served with light noodle salad with coconut, chiles, and dried shrimp.

The star of the meal, though, is the khao gang course. "Khao gaeng" or khao gang means "curry over rice," and Chef Saint offers a single course with each diner getting a bowl of several rices — jasmine, wild black, and purple rice — and an array of six pungeant dishes, all of which are meant to be eaten with the rice.

There wasn't a single dish that fell flat here. A lingcod soup with taro and mushroom was filled with deep seafood flavor, like the richest, darkest seafood broth you've ever tasted. A dish of fermented cabbage with dried shrimp was foreign to my tastebuds but wholly delicious. And a mango salad with razor clams and cockles, cashew, onion, and peanut sauce was equally memorable.

The winning dish, though, had to be the Southern crab curry — a powerfully crab-rich, mega-spicy red/orange curry that is one of the spiciest curries I've probably consumed, ever. The server warned us properly — mix it well with the rice, try small bites, wait for the heat. It was nevertheless one of the most delicious things, and probably the finest crab curry, I've ever had from a Thai menu, layered with nutty, floral, sweet, sour, and seafood-y notes, beneath a wave of sweat-inducing spice.

You'll want to make sure you set aside a couple cucumbers and some cabbage to cool down your mouth.

The wine pairings at Hed 11 are also thoughtful and complemented the food at each turn. The best pairing may have been a natural-style Gewurtztraminer from Paso Robles winery Union Sacré, which specializes in Alsatian-style wines. A full bar with several season cocktail selections is also available.

Hed 11 opened this spring in the base of the newly remodeled Kimpton Hotel Enso (1800 Sutter Street). The minimalist dining room provides a nice backdrop to the colorful food and creative plating, and the place still feels like a well kept secret. The prix fixe is not cheap at $185 per person, but it certainly rivals similarly priced tasting menus around town and would make for a genuine treat for any lover of Thai food — and spice.

Hed 11 - Open Tuesday to Sunday, 5 pm to 9 pm, prix fixe dinner only. Find reservations here.

For budgetary reasons, SFist editors and contributors occasionally accept complimentary meals from restaurants and their publicists. More often, we pay out of pocket for our meals. While we mostly refrain from writing formal reviews, typically just making recommendations, we make every effort when giving opinions about restaurants to be objective, and to focus more on food and ambiance than service in order to make up for any possible bias.