Cool new place crossed the SmartShanghai radar this week: The Curry Gaeng. A passion project by first-time restaurateur Valantina Tsoi, it's a delivery-only kitchen specializing in one thing: Thai curry ("gaeng" in Thai). As Tsoi told me, the street and market stalls in Thailand generally focus on one category, so she thinks the only way to do it well is to focus on one specific type of dish. She chose curry. That means pounding and blending a lot of curry paste — she does it all from scratch — for the curries, khanom jeen and nam priks on her menu.

"People outside of Thailand don't realize that there are regional cuisines in Thailand and they have different takes on curry, so I want to shed light on that," she told me. To that end, she has curries that are hard or impossible-to-find in Shanghai otherwise, like a southern dry curry with chicken or a southern "aromatic" curry with duck leg and carrots. She also does khanom jeen — lit. "Chinese noodles" — which are fresh rice noodles with curry on the side. Not sure if anyone else does that in Shanghai, especially with a pounded fish curry and krachai, the Chinese keys, a relative of galangal (the picture at the top). Tsoi just began serving on Tuesday but I've already made my way through five of the curries. Tasty, spicy, a little on the mild side in terms of fish sauce, lime and sugar, but nonetheless a great addition to the homogenous and too often boring options out there. Hungry? Find them on Eleme.