After a rough start — her cook quit the day before she officially opened — Tuyen Le now has Tuyen’s Asian Bistro under control and that’s good, because it is full of customers.

First, her sister, also named Tuyen Le but pronounced differently, is not here yet and plans for her coming from Vietnam aren’t firm. But Le is in the kitchen of her restaurant, the food is great, and she manages to find time to get to the dining room to visit when the crowds die down.

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Quick reminder: This is the Le family of the former Saigon Le restaurant, which operated down the street for more than 25 years before closing after a 2016 fire.

My best tip for you when it comes to Tuyen’s is to eat early or late if you can. The restaurant is small, roughly 10 tables, and sometimes small ones are pushed together for larger parties. Turnover is fast enough, but chances are good you’ll have to wait if you go around noon or after 6:30 p.m. The restaurant is open 11 a.m.-8 p.m., Monday through Saturday, so take advantage of off-peak hours and make it easier on everyone.

The two most popular items on the menu are the house egg rolls and the lemongrass tofu, both for good reason.

The egg rolls come 10 to an order, $13.95 with shrimp, pork and crabmeat and $11.95 for the vegetarian version. My initial visit was on Le’s first official day open, and she only had vegetarian rolls left, so we ordered those.

When I returned a couple of weeks later, we ordered the egg rolls with meat and they really are more flavorful, so unless you’re avoiding meat, get ‘em. Whichever you order will come with a little bowl of sweetened fish sauce for dipping, so take note if you’re vegan or vegetarian. These are small, half the size of, say, the egg rolls at Pho Saigon and closer to one-third the size of a big fat egg roll in a Chinese restaurant.

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Still, you’ll have leftovers with two people, maybe not with three. With four, you’ll find out who the givers and the takers are in your group. The egg rolls are crunchy and savory; wrap them in crisp lettuce leaves with a medley of whatever herbs are on hand, dip in the fish sauce, and you get a flavor bomb that sets off all your taste buds.

Also on the appetizer list but substantial enough for a meal is the lotus salad, which is perfect for this heat. Served on a bed of curly green leaf lettuce, there’s shrimp, slivers of crab stick, cucumber and pickled lotus root, topped with crushed peanuts and served with cups made of rice puffs.

You can ignore the puffs, which have roughly the texture of Styrofoam, or you can eat as intended: Take a forkful of salad and place it in the cup, add a spoonful of fish sauce dressing and take a bite. If Le comes by and stirs a big dollop of chili sauce in your fish sauce, well, so be it. It happened to me and it turns out she knows best, despite how big the dollop looked.

I love lotus root, which is actually a rhizome (like ginger or irises). Here, it’s pickled and is tangy and lightly sweetened. The rhizome itself has a mild, slightly nutty flavor similar to a sunchoke, and the whole thing has but one drawback. It’s fibrous, though once cooked and pickled the only remnants of that are very, very thin strings that seem like hair here and there. But they’re not — it’s completely normal — and just knowing that should set your mind at ease. There’s no hair in your food.

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The menu is large but other than the tiny bit of pork in the egg rolls, our meal was pescatarian. We had seafood in the salad, and, for our entrees, we stayed with tofu. The house special stir fry is tofu with lemongrass and curry, which we liked, but the tofu was served in strips and cooked until it was spongy in the middle, which is how some people prefer it.

But I like tofu like I like meat; give me the equivalent of rare or medium rare. The tofu with lemongrass is made with cubes that are tender in the middle, and the salt and pepper tofu, which is lightly battered and fried, is crisp on the outside and silky inside.

I had the advantage of being able to try smaller samples of the food, so I’m sharing that experience with you. When I saw a friend eating the salt and pepper tofu and asked about it, a small serving was sent to me. It was excellent, strewn with bits of fried onions and ginger and chopped fresh jalapeno (it reminds me of an appetizer I like at Asian Eatery in Germantown). The lemongrass tofu was our second favorite, because of the texture. It was coated with lemongrass, onion, pepper and soy sauce cooked down to a slightly thick, decadently fragrant brown sauce.

But the house special won’t do you wrong either; the curry makes it stand apart from the lemongrass tofu. We liked the sauce, but for me, the texture wasn’t ideal. Just ask, if you like your tofu softer.

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Besides being crowded (and be prepared to run into people you know, because you likely will), the small restaurant is on the warm side right now. It’s August and this summer is the hottest one we’ve had since 1980, so there’s not much you can do about it.

The window air conditioner is on and blowing, but the door is opening as people come and go. Your comfort is another reason to consider dining off hours, and keep in mind that the restaurant does not take reservations. While you wouldn’t expect it to, a friend told me that her NextDoor group was recently abuzz about whether it does or doesn’t. This should clear it up: No reservations. It’s equal waiting for everyone.

Tuyen’s Asian Bistro, 288 N. Cleveland, is open 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday through Saturday; call 901-567-5008. (Google says the restaurant opens at 10 a.m., but Le is opening at 11 a.m.)