Jin Thai Cuisine Restaurant By Chef Jin Roongseang

The city's list of excellent Thai restaurants has long remained unchanged.

For lovers of bright Southeast Asian flavors and dishes that stray from the norm, Edgewater's new Jin Thai Cuisine can be added to that list.

Jin Roongseang runs the kitchen, with her husband manning the six-table dining room. She does an excellent job with the street snacks moo ping ($7), grilled pork skewers with addictively sweet and hot tamarind-chile sauce, and savory khanom buang ($8), a thin, crisp crêpe stuffed with shrimp, tofu, dried coconut and bean sprouts.

Fans of tom yum will like the sweet, spicy and sour broth of Sukhothai noodle soup ($8), packed with ground pork, green beans, peanuts and slippery rice noodles. Hot curry catfish ($14) arrives with a blanket of fried basil leaves, with green-and-white Thai eggplants below.

For a pad Thai alternative that satisfies with similar comfort-food simplicity, there are gai-kua noodles ($8), broad rice noodles stir-fried with egg and chicken and topped with herbs. Dunk them in the accompanying bowl of sweet chile sauce for an added kick, or eat them plain as an antidote to the blazing heat of the mortar-pounded som tum (green papaya salad; $8).

Jin Thai Cuisine, 5458 N. Broadway; 773-681-0555 or jinthaicuisine.com