Once seated, Mr. Huynh hardly glanced at the 300 or so items on the menu before spitting out a long order for our waiter. Meanwhile, the sound of shattering pots rang throughout the restaurant. The reason wasn’t clumsiness. It turned out that the house specialty, rice cooked in a clay pot, is served after a ritual you aren’t likely to find in New York: before serving, waiters break the clay pots and then scrape out the crispy patties of rice that remain.

To ensure there are no lingering shards of clay, glove-clad waiters toss the rice patties across the room to each other before depositing them on diners’ tables and sprinkling them with a scallion-spiked sauce. (According to Richard Sterling, a friend who lives in Ho Chi Minh City and wrote Lonely Planet’s “World Food: Vietnam,” this is an ancient tradition in Southeast Asia, but one that is rarely performed these days.) As the baked rice landed on our table, a waiter showed me a scar on his thumb from breaking a pot, a hazard of the job.

A few minutes later, a procession of dishes began arriving: Japanese eggplant, sautéed with enough garlic to take out a vampire; steamed blood cockles; caramelized fish hatchlings cooked in a clay pot; and lotus root salad. All were washed down with a bia da, beer with ice, a time-honored southern Vietnam tradition.

Image Red chilies play a prominent role in Vietnamese food. Credit... Arantxa Cedillo for The New York Times

But Mr. Huynh, I would quickly learn, never settles for just one meal. Every time we met, whether for breakfast, lunch or dinner, we’d make several stops, snacking our way down the street. Sometimes we’d slurp up a bowl of pho before he’d guide me down alleyways for one of the many variations on the theme of bun (pronounced “boon”), a vermicelli noodle bowl filled with pork and veggies.

Then we’d stop at a cart for sticky rice or a pork-crammed banh mi sandwich and then, finally, sit down on a sidewalk stool for a dosa-like shrimp-and-pork-stuffed banh xeo. (Whether we were eating street food or at a restaurant, the meal for two, plus a couple of beers, rarely exceeded $20.) “The most authentic food in Saigon is at street carts and simple restaurants,” he said during one of our multi-stop extravaganzas.

One day, while Mr. Huynh had a business meeting, I stopped into the Black Cat, a restaurant owned by a friend of a friend, Geoffrey Deetz, originally from the Bay Area. Over cold bottles of Vietnamese beer, he took my guide’s comments a step further: “It’s more about style than substance at the new trendy restaurants,” he said, explaining that most Vietnamese chefs have yet to successfully elevate traditional cuisine. As Vietnam’s robust economy continues to grow and newly built skyscrapers devour blocks that once offered no-frills food options, finding decent dining in the central District 1 is becoming a challenge.