I ate the doggie bag.

Well, not the bag itself, but the stuff in it. You know how you take your leftovers from a restaurant and they sit in the fridge for days and then you toss them?

With my leftovers from Phuket Thai's new Kaka'ako location, I ate 'em. I didn't even tell my husband they were in the refrigerator. I ate the basil stir-fry. Actually, as I write this, I'm still eating the masamun curry and the sticky rice. Don't tell him.

I don't know enough about Thai food to set myself up as an expert. But I can say this: The day I picked up takeout from there — the basil stir-fry and a really great noodle salad — I could not wait to get to the office. The smell was killing me; I wanted to stop the car and just start eating.

When I got to the office, the flavors popped all around in my mouth, the richness of the coconut milk greased the wheels, the sticky rice did its middle-of-the-plate thing.

And on top of that, it's a really pleasant place. If you can find it.

First off: It's NOT in the old On Jin location, which is what everyone tells you and then you get lost. It's around the corner, makai and diamondhead, toward Ala Moana Center on that new, curving part of the street that goes past the ritzy condos. The address is on Kamake'e, but the door is on Queen Street. The good news is they'll have a more noticeable sign soon, according to general manager Edwin Ohta.

Second: Although the restaurant opened in December, they're still a work in progress. A new patio area — about 15 umbrella'd tables — opened last week. And they're still forming an identity — one that is different from other Thai restaurants in town, and even from their 10-year-old parent restaurant in McCully. Not folksy but contemporary, with none of the typical Thai textiles.

The large room is decorated in warm tones of cinnamon and chocolate and cream, and there's dark wood and granite. There's a full bar. The servers wear French-style calf-length aprons. The service aspires to upscale. When I went in for takeout, they offered me a place to sit and water to drink. In a glass. I was impressed.

Not all my experiences at Phuket Thai were orgasmic. There was a seafood dish that, in my opinion, didn't work, and they assigned a trainee to my table, which got a bit confusing. (There were two waiters — the experienced one and the learning one — and the learning one would say something and then the experienced one would correct him ... and, you know what? Customers are not there to help you train your personnel. Train 'em on your own time. Although I must say I'm glad to see a restaurant actually spending the time and money to use a mentoring system to teach someone their job. And he didn't do a bad job; it was just a little clunky.)

On the very plus side: My philosophy is that I don't expect restaurants never to make mistakes, I just expect them to correct those mistakes gracefully. Phuket gets that. We ordered a mixed sateh appetizer (chicken, beef, pork $8.75) that came out at an odd temperature, neither hot nor cold. It still tasted very good. When we asked our novice waiter whether it was supposed to be hot or cold, he wasn't quite sure, but because we were dissatisfied, he took it off the check. Right on.

But let's talk about the best thing about Phuket Kamake'e: The food. Yum, yum, yum. And that's actually a kind of pun because "yum" in Thai means delicious, delectable or tasty, at least according to an online ThaiEnglish dictionary.

Here's what I loved: