“We’re fussy about our food,” said Thu Nguyen as she pointed out various menu items that she considers “lost to younger generations” within today’s American-Vietnamese communities. “Our food tastes like Vietnamese food used to taste 20 years ago,” she insisted.

Nguyen and her sister, Thanh N. Hoang, operate Cay Nhan, a quaint new restaurant in City Heights incorporating elements of feng shui with creamy brown walls and original artwork representing nuances of earth, water, fire and air. Various sized tables cloaked in leather coverings are arranged spaciously across a concrete floor. And on almost any given day, the bewitching smell of slow-cooked broth wafts over the room.

Vietnamese cooking focuses on a nexus of ingredients grown in its country’s two great river deltas. The Red River Delta surrounding Hanoi provides much of the nation’s rice, while the fertile Mekong Delta, centered by Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), produces a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Despite the culinary influences from China to the north and Thailand to the west, stir-frying is generally less important than simmering in traditional Vietnamese kitchens – and oil is used minimally.

Made-from-scratch broths form the basis for nearly a dozen different noodle soups available at Cay Nhan (named after the Asian tropical fruit tree). One broth is made of beef and chicken bones, which are simmered for about 10 hours to extract their flavorful marrow. The other caters to vegetarians, using scads of white daikon and roasted onions to achieve a bright and medicinal-tasting outcome. Soup powder, MSG and bouillon find no place in this revival of old-fashioned Vietnamese cooking, which Nguyen adopted from her parents and grandparents long before immigrating to the U.S.

My companion and I started out with two different sweat-busting beverages enjoyed all over Vietnam on oven-hot days – a clear, candy-sweet drink containing gelatinous grains, called Hot E, plus a glass of chilled young coconut milk that Nguyen advised gets refreshingly sweeter when a little salt is added. She was right.

We proceeded to rice paper spring rolls filled with ground beef, crabmeat and ultra-fresh veggies, and another containing plausible mock meat. Although fine on their own, they found their glory when dabbed in the homemade peanut sauce sporting a dark-caramel color with an interesting hint of fermentation deepening its flavor. We also ordered a frisky salad bursting with mint, shaved cucumber, Mexican white shrimp and a highly titillating homemade vinegar derived from rice, banana and coconut.

Among the “lost recipes” Nguyen cited is egg noodle soup (No. 8 on the menu) accompanied by a half Cornish game hen. The bird is stuffed with lemon grass and sits for a few hours before it’s pan-seared and then oven roasted, making it a labor-intensive meal to construct. Both the soup and the crispy-skinned poultry were terrific – and for only $6.95 to boot!

With numerous vegetarian courses available, we also tried a bowl of the non-meat broth stocked with rice noodles and a mix of faux ham, chicken and ground pork, all tasting very close to the real deal. In the olden days of Vietnamese cooking, vegetarian dishes relied solely on fresh bean threads and other legumes. Today’s convincing selection of mock meats, Nguyen adds, “keeps people second guessing.”

Clay pot meals have also gone to the wayside in modern Vietnamese restaurants. But skim down to numbers 31 or 48 on the menu, and behold a recipe packed with jasmine rice, cubed chicken breast, onions, lily flowers and ginger. Another dish is similar sans the poultry. I ordered the former, which tasted as aromatic as it smelled when I lifted the hat-shaped lid. The ginger gains strength from being toasted, and it couples exquisitely with the perfume-like flavor of the lily petals. The rice and chicken duly soaked up the flavors, although they lost all of their moisture – possibly because we allowed the capped dish to linger on our table for a few minutes before diving in.

A variety of traditional rice dishes are also available, paired with beef, barbecued pork, shrimp or “meat/egg loaf,” which I’m curious to try on my next visit, having encountered such “loafs” only in Jewish and Italian renditions. And of the noodle options, the cherished pho is oddly missing – perhaps too pedestrian for this kitchen or because it stacks up as plain compared to the other noodle bowls brimming with heartier combinations of ingredients.

Expectedly, the popular tri-colored dessert known as Che Ba Mau can be found here. Nguyen makes it with red beans, yellow mung beans and agar agar (gelatin from seaweed) tinted green for effect. Layered into a tall glass, it’s finished off with crushed ice and coconut milk. But we couldn’t fathom another iota of food moving down our throats at that point, simply because everything that came before us tasted way too good to cast aside.