There is a particular silence that falls over a table on a first visit, and we have learned to enjoy it.

A group sits down, opens the menu and stops talking. It is not disappointment. It is the quiet of six people looking at phở, bún and bánh mì at the same time and privately deciding they are going to order wrong. Then the Saigon Platter arrives with four small dishes of sauce and no instructions attached to any of them, and the silence deepens.

So one of us pulls up a chair. This sauce goes with that roll. This one is for the beef, and be careful, it has more chilli in it than it looks. That one you eat with your hands, which is what everybody does at home. It takes about three minutes and it changes the rest of the evening.

We do this often enough that guests have started writing about it. One family ordered the platter and mentioned afterwards that the host had sat down with them and gone through each sauce, one at a time. A group of first timers came in knowing nothing about the food and left having been walked through every plate on the table. In our reviews, the staff get mentioned as often as any single dish, usually with the words helpful and friendly attached, and we take that more seriously than we take compliments about the cooking.

The other kind of guest matters just as much. One diner had lived in Vietnam for years before he ever came through the door, so he knew exactly what everything was, needed no guidance at all, and gave us five stars anyway, calling it amazing food and super friendly staff. That is the review we were most nervous about. Being told the food is authentic by somebody who ate it every day for years is worth more to this kitchen than any award.

Another table left a note we think about often. They ordered the bò né, which arrives spitting on a cast iron skillet with an egg and pâté and a baguette, asked for the beef medium rare, got it exactly as asked, described the pâté as very tasty and marked the evening overall as ten out of ten. That was a Vietnamese guest, judging a Vietnamese kitchen. There is no hiding from that.

If your table cannot agree on anything, order the Saigon Platter and let the kitchen choose. It arrives built for sharing and it settles the argument in about a minute. If somebody is vegetarian, they are not stuck with a side salad. There is a section of the menu for them, including a phở with its own vegetable broth.

You do not need to know a single word on the menu to eat well here. Ask us. For us, that is the good part of the evening too.