I have a certain … trepidation, when it comes to ethnic restaurants that exceeds what I normally feel for restaurants in general. For any normal American restaurant, I’m required to fork out money in return for food, and so I require the food to be delicious. If I wanted to fork out money for bad food, why, I would stay at home and cook for myself.

But for ethnic restaurants — and maybe it’s just me — I really want to know how authentic the food I’m eating, is. There are two simple reasons for this. The first is that it really allows me to have an opinion that transcends cookbooks (which I’ve never trusted anyway). After traveling through France on our stomachs, I knew without a doubt that the Seastar’s creme brulee burnt sugar topping was the worst thing they could do to their dessert (to their credit, they appear to be working on that), although the child in me certainly appreciated the fact that they had placed the equivalent of a hard toffee on top of their creme.

And of course, the second is that, when you have visitors from another country and you take them to that ethnic restaurant from their origin, it’s always so embarrassing when they roll around the floor laughing at the slop you’re trying to feed them.

Through no fault of my own (well, except for the Turf — that one was totally my fault), I had taken my current set of visitors to what seemed like every lackluster restaurant in town. One night, in self-defense perhaps, they suggested that they take us out and show us how to eat Vietnamese food. I was immediately on my guard. You don’t spend three years living in Vietnam without getting an Opinion on Vietnamese food. And also, I simply couldn’t stand the thought of eating another plate of slop.

The visitors suggested the closest restaurant to the house, so we had our first pick right there, and then I went online and looked for reviews of it and several other places, finally settling on Green Leaf as my second pick. A fairly new arrival to the scene, it had already collected a few notable good reviews, and (better yet) I was reasonably sure I could drive there and not get lost.

We walked into our first place, and immediately knew something was wrong. We really couldn’t put our finger on it. Was it the completely empty restaurant? The fact that it was closing at 7:30 on a Sunday night? Or that medicinal-herbal odor? We flipped through the menu and the visitors looked baffled. And then we turned tail and ran for the door.

Over at the Green Leaf (located near Jackson and 8th in the ID), I found a parking spot on my first try, outside the restaurant, as thought I had been fated to go there. As we wedged ourselves into their tiny space, the fragrant smell of yumminess hit me in the face. During our five minute wait for a table, I was hard pressed not to stare directly at the other tables and help myself to their food.

As someone whose Vietnamese experience was confined to spring rolls (not bad), pho (I generally prefer my noodles and soup separated from each other), and some sort of sticky stir fry with a heavy sauce (awful), I was wary when it came to know what was so good about Vietnamese food. But over the course of the next couple of hours, it was brought to me rather forcefully. The things that are good about Vietnamese food: freshness. Crispy, crunchy, textures. Pungent leafy vegetable smells. Light and tangy tastes. I ate until I was full to the brim, but it was like being full of light, and when the host talked us into splitting a few desserts, no harm done. The tiny desserts were perfectly sized (and priced) to slide into whatever nooks and crannies were left in my digestive system.

The best part of the evening was when my sister leaned over and whispered confidentially to me that this was exactly what I was going to get in Vietnam, with the exception of the red cabbage garnish in my lotus root salad. Well, no, the best part was when they got into a discussion with the host about Vietnam and where the best places to go are. OK, truly, the best part was spending the whole evening trying to work out how to pronounce “pho”. But that’s a completely different story.