New restaurants are a dime a dozen these days. However, it takes more than just shiny cutlery to get the city’s discriminating foodies to whip out their phones and start taking photos, especially since most of them—okay, I mean, my friends—already have a set criteria with which they judge a restaurant’s worthiness. The first is by reputation. If an officemate keeps raving about the impossibly soft self-grilled short ribs over at this Japanese restaurant, how can you not go there and gather firsthand evidence? The second is by concept. If somebody tells you that their katsu is made up of 25 one-millimeter layers of pork, how can you just sit there and NOT drool? The third is by, of course, the food itself. Our taste buds are shitty liars.

Thankfully, the new restaurants over at Shangri-La’s East Wing seem to be, too. When they promised us good food, they really did blow us away. Here, we present to you six restaurants that are certainly not your usual.