I first met Charles Phan in 1998. As a fledgling 28-year-old assistant food editor at San Francisco magazine, I had been assigned to profile him as the Rising Star Chef of the Year. He was 36 back then, the chef-owner of the Slanted Door, a very personal expression of his Vietnamese roots and his San Francisco upbringing. Phan died Monday; he had suffered a heart attack at the age of 62 while playing tennis with Michelle Mah, his director of operations.
When I found out, I numbly went down to my garage to dig up the old writing clip, as if it could somehow bring back that amazing time, when the city’s food world felt so fresh and vibrant, in large part because of Phan. In the photo, he confidently looked at the camera, flashing his Cindy Crawford mole, like he knew he was onto something.
The Slanted Door opened on Valencia Street in the Zagat-toting year of 1995, when our “fusion-crazed town,” as I wrote, was deep into “ahi tuna towers and wasabi mashed potatoes.” And if it wasn’t that, we were lining up at Cal-Med-Frenchy places like Bizou or Restaurant Lulu. Back then, restaurants like Mission Chinese Food and Mister Jiu’s and Kin Khao and Four Kings weren’t even a twinkle. We certainly weren’t dining on a farm-to-table menu of daikon rice cakes, crab with cellophane noodles, and shaking beef, made with filet mignon seared in a wok, nestled on a bed of locally grown watercress and paired with a good Riesling from a well-curated wine list.
We didn’t even know we wanted that yet. Nor, for that matter, did the rest of the nation.
Justine Kelly, the former corporate chef de cuisine of the Slanted Door, who cooked with Phan for 18 years, remembers ordering produce from Bolinas-based Star Route Farms and having Allstar Organics grow yellow snap peas specifically for the restaurant. “Charles had the brilliance to take the Alice Waters values — the focus on food and the quality of the ingredients and a clean technique — and apply it to Vietnamese food,” Kelley said.
Waters herself, who counted Phan as a friend, told me the same: “Our nation comes from that fast-food place. But Charles was definitely from a slow-food place. I just loved that he cared.”
Phan’s brilliance came from following his gut rather than anyone else’s Thomas Guide. To this day, no one has been able to replicate what he did because, ultimately, the Slanted Door was all him.
The UC Berkeley architecture drop-out chose to design his own restaurant (“celadon and wood and beautifully spare,” I wrote) and opened it in the Mission three-plus years before the other heavy hitters — Delfina, Bi-Rite, and Tartine — set up on 18th. The neighborhood made sense to Charles because it was his stomping ground. It was where some of his relatives, who had escaped Vietnam in 1975, just before the fall of Saigon, had started a garment business. It was where he attended Mission High School.
In fact, all of the Slanted Door was a direct extension of Charles, who — like a good, first-born son of Chinese parents — famously employed his entire family and then some at the restaurant. “He ran it like an immigrant pho start-up with oversize ambitions,” said Olle Lundberg, an old friend and the architect for the first Slanted Door and many successive restaurants Phan built over time.
Christina Betondo worked as head chef of the 18th Street commissary space in the Mission district that Phan used to feed his growing number of restaurants with stocks, steamed buns, and more. “When I got hired, they made it clear that a lot of Charles’ family worked there — his aunt and uncle, his brother-in-law did the maintenance. His mother, who we called Mama Charles, came every day and did her own ‘shopping’ in the walk-in. I was like, ‘How can I control the inventory?’ But Charles said, ‘It doesn’t matter, she can take whatever she wants.’”
Christine Farren, executive director of Foodwise, said of Phan, “How many chefs can believe in themselves and also take a whole group of people along with them?”
A scholar of fake-it-till-you-make-it, Phan had self-confidence in spades. He wasn’t a trained chef, but his chutzpah got him everywhere. “I remember our first invitation to the Masters of Food & Wine,” Kelley said. “We were surrounded by all these famous chefs, and Charles was like, ‘Why the fuck are we here?’ He seemed overwhelmed at first, but then he charmed the pants off of everyone.”
“Rising star” turned out to be an understatement. Eventually, the national coverage of the Slanted Door meant Phan was luring in the stars himself. At the Valencia location, the Clintons popped by for brunch in 2000, when Bill was president and Chelsea was at Stanford. “I was there that day, and who shone brighter, Bill Clinton or Charles? I don’t know,” said Kelley.
Once the Slanted Door moved into the vast Ferry Building space in 2004 (the same year he won a James Beard award for best chef in California), Phan started serving up to 1,200 people on a busy day, including the likes of Tom Waits, Reese Witherspoon, and Quentin Tarantino. “I remember keeping the kitchen open late to serve the Rolling Stones,” said Kelley. “It was crab season, and we made them wood-fired Dungeness. It was so good they came back twice. We always joked that we gave the Stones crabs.”
The massive success of the Ferry Building location — the top-grossing independently owned restaurant in California in 2014 — spurred Phan to open more concepts over the next 30 years, from Out the Door in the mall and on Bush Street (he lived above that location with his family until he put it on the market last August) to Heaven’s Dog, Hard Water, Wing Ho General Store — a tribute to his father — and the Moss Room. These restaurants all closed, but at his death, he still had Chuck’s Takeaway, as well as Slanted Door locations in San Ramon, Napa, and Beaune, France. A Slanted Door in Las Vegas opened in March 2020 at Caesars Palace but, due to the pandemic, closed in a nanosecond — a huge hit for Phan financially, he admitted to me not long ago. However, despite his significant losses, his smashing success with the original Slanted Door eclipsed everything.
“I think he ultimately wanted to be known for more than the Slanted Door,” said Kelley. And he was, in spades. Those closest to him said they will always remember Phan for his avalanche of generosity — the kind that isn’t in-memorium lip service.
Whether he was donating his cooking to a Foodwise auction (he raised more than $100,000 for the nonprofit over time) or allowing Delfina’s Annie and Craig Stoll to use his commissary test kitchen to test out recipes for their former restaurant Locanda, he was always giving. “We spent a lot of time together,” Jessica Battilana said of her time as co-author of the first Slanted Door cookbook, scribbling down notes because she realized Phan wasn’t going to physically write a thing. “I would drive with him in his old truck, and I remember so many of those errands were in service of other chefs. He seemed happy to drop everything to do these mundane errands for friends.”
As for me, Phan invited me to have my first cookbook signing in 2001 at the original Slanted Door location. I remember feeling very cool by association, and also being so pregnant that I could sign books on my belly. And when I had my son, Phan showed up at my house with pints of freshly made chicken broth. This was clearly his love language.
“He had plenty of flaws, but he was so kind and generous at heart that we forgave him all those flaws,” Lundberg said. “I saw him a week ago. We had a tradition: We’d go to Sea Star, a great bar in Dogpatch, and we’d drink mezcal — his drink of choice after he weaned himself off bourbon. He always had new ideas, new projects.”
After finally deciding to close the pandemic-shuttered Ferry Building location for good, Phan said his next project was going to be his triumphant return home to Valencia Street to reopen the Slanted Door in its original space this year. “I’m heartbroken,” Lundberg said. “I thought it would be a wonderful bookend to his career — to see him bring success back to the Mission. I also thought it would be our last project together.”
He paused. I could almost see him smile mirthfully through the phone. “Though I’m sure Charles didn’t.”