A Story by a Friend about The Slanted Door, Charles Phan and the Phan Family
February 2003

Shortly after The Slanted Door opened some 6 years ago, I had a delicious meal at the restaurant. With dinner we drank a great wine: Ponzi pinot noir from Oregon. Charles joined us at the table and I mentioned how much I enjoyed the wine. When I was leaving he came up and gave me a bottle and said, "Drink this with someone you love." I saved the wine and just recently presented it, symbolically, to my girlfriend; we will enjoy it together this Valentine's day.

Is it Charles's famous generosity (an endless amount of charity events, never publicized) that underlies The Slanted Door winning formula? Why in San Francisco, a city with some 4000 restaurants, has The Slanted Door been such a runaway success and been able to establish worldwide renown and an army of loyal customers?

Charles Phan is the visionary and executive chef of the restaurant, but he has not done it alone. There are upwards of 18 Phan siblings, cousins, aunts, nephews working with Charles, plus some 70 employees, 75% of whom have been with the restaurant from the start 7 years ago. There are numerous bright stars in the Slanted Door family constellation.

The Phans are ethnically Chinese, but were born and raised in Vietnam. Their father fled China during that country's tumultuous times and they were not inclined to stick around after the North Vietnamese took control. On April 30, 1975 they found themselves floating at sea, part of the Boat People exodus. Essentially lost and living on rations, they floated for 10 days, rescued by a Malaysian ship which brought them to Singapore. From Singapore harbor (they were never let ashore) they ended up in a refugee camp in Guam.

A year and a half later they immigrated to San Francisco, where they took up residence in SF's Tenderloin district, a classic first stop for Asian immigrants. From there it was Chinatown.While in Chinatown, Charles began going to school at Mission High School in San Francisco's Mission district, where The Slanted Door would eventually open its doors.

Charles's childhood food and life experiences in Vietnam shape much of what the Slanted Door is today. There were no refrigerators, and fresh food was always purchased daily. You did not buy fish to last beyond that day's meal. French and Chinese sophistication was intertwined with a rich Vietnamese culture. Chicken, pork, fish, vegetables were always raised naturally, and all had a unique and distinctive taste and texture. Food vendors usually focused on a single food: a crêpe or a fish dish. Every ingredient, such as fish sauce, was prized and a point of family honor.

From his early teen years, Charles, like most of his family, worked. Selling newspapers, working in a sewing shop, bussing tables, serving food in nightclubs. Eventually Charles attended architecture school at UC Berkeley. Always an artist at heart, with a passion for ceramics and form, he agreed to architectural school to appease his father. After dropping out in his 3rd year, Charles worked for an architecture firm in New York. In the early 90's he worked in sales for a graphics software company, where we first met.

But all his life, food was a never-ending thread. When in high school he cooked for his family of 10 when their Mom was working. In college he cooked for his buddies. As a child he was in love with French baguettes with butter. In high school he was paying for bottled water and was thought to be odd by his fellow classmates. He was inspired by Zuni Café and Chez Panisse, where simple well-prepared foods made them successful. His many jobs bussing and working the front of the house in restaurants taught him much he would bring to building a restaurant and how to treat staff. His cooking always came from his heart and was for and nurtured by his family and friends. It was then as it is now, though he serves 500 meals a day.

Charles has always been naturally interested in esthetics and space, but it architecture school, Charles refined his ideas about the essence of function. All things pale for Charles in the light of his insistence on the quality of the food he serves. Often oblivious to cost, it simply has to taste a certain way regardless of what may happen to the always slim profit margin First and always foremost, the food, every day, must be perfect.

After wandering through many careers, the idea of creating a Vietnamese restaurant, serving food with the best ingredients, remained intact. One day, walking on Valencia Street in SF, he found an empty shop selling kitchen cabinets on a street mostly known for used appliance shops. A year of elbow grease followed, accompanied by growing family credit card charges. Charles convinced other family members to join, buying into the passion, and quite possible the madness, of their oldest brother. In November of 1995 the 3600 sq ft restaurant was opened. The menu consisted of spring rolls, one salad, a catfish clay pot and some vegetables and meat.

Food is the medium through which Charles and the Phans communicate ideas. Ideas about esthetics, about ingredients, respect for farmers and the earth, merging cultures, about staff and customers as family. But perhaps the most important idea is pride in being Asian American. It did not take Charles long to realize on trips to Asia that he was indeed American. But he also realized that the food culture of Vietnam and his Asian cousins was incredible deep and sophisticated, and yet true Asian food was generally unknown and relegated to second-class status: Asian food equals Chop Suey and cheap tea.

Not by design, but by a motivation fueled by passion to serve the best, innovate, and raise consciousness about Asian culture, Charles and the Phans have broken barriers. "I find things that are unique, new, things people have not tried but have value and enhance the dining experience," Charles told me.

Always a tea lover, Charles started serving tea at $6 per pot, more then the cost then of his spring rolls. Six dollars per pot of tea in an Asian restaurant? But the tea cost $180 per pound and was served as proudly as a fine wine; it was worth every sip, a dining breakthrough for most western visitors.

Charles wanted to serve excellent complimentary beer and wine. A blending of cultures and a new picture of an Asian restaurant. If wine were to be served, he did not want a few industrial California labels. Charles connected with Mark Ellenbogen through a contact at Zuni Café and they discovered that the spices and tastes of Charles dishes coincided with German and Austrian Rieslings and Belgian beers. The Slanted Door now has one of the most evolved wine lists and is famous for its selection of Rieslings.

Most traditional Asian dinners do not include deserts except for some fruit. Charles himself loves deserts and knows his western patrons do as well. Mutsumi, the pastry chef, creates beautiful, delicious and lighthearted after-meal delights. Parfaits, crème brûlée, cakes and sorbets, cookies and berries are the seasonally changing sweet indulgences. Another unexpected part of the dining experience.

Woven into the food and the dining experience is the Phans' attitude about people. A strong sense of family pervades the Slanted Door. For Charles the extended family is very important:his wife and three children, his parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces, nephews and the staff and customers.

Uniquely, the staff eats whatever they want each evening from the menu. This respect for staff is born from his own long years of hardship as a restaurant worker. "We look for heart more than skill when we hire. You have to produce every night, and most of these people are underpaid compared to other industries. It is not the best paying job. Our goal is to make people happy and pay well," says Charles.

"I know what it 's like to be a waiter. If someone burns out, they may need to take some time off. If they need to go home, say for example to Mexico, we send them off with a party, and when they come back we try and find some way to fit them back in."

"I always tell my staff that this is like a Broadway play. People pay you for tonight not yesterday or what you did before. It doesn't matter how famous you are I want people to get what they are paying for this evening."

The Slanted Door opened in San Francisco's Mission district, an area of the city not often frequented by suburbanites. But food has power and can cross all socioeconomic barriers, especially when it is reasonable priced and astoundingly delicious. Regularly dining at the restaurant is a cross-cultural, cross-economic group of people, many who are usually seen at the swankier and stuffier eateries seated right next to younger, hipper tables. The restaurant is on every restaurateurs' list, and celebrities drop by on a regular basis. One standout visitor was President Clinton during his presidency.

According to Charles, "They didn't really announce they were coming. They sent a guy out and said they were from a church group and they want to book a party. We told them we don't take parties of 25. Next thing you know they are cordoning off the whole street and a barrage of cops with guns descended on the restaurant and in he walks. There are all these black cars in the street and this guy comes in and says the President would like to have a table for 5. And we still don't know what President! I was on my way to work and I got a call. My hostess was trembling and crying and I told her to just fake it till I got there. Fortunately, I was just a block away. There was a sharpshooter on the roof and the street was blocked off. I had to prove I worked there and finally they let me in. I got to meet him and cook for him and we all stood around not knowing what to do. Most of these guys go to the Fairmont or a buttoned-down safe kind of place. The president chose to come to the Mission district for a meal with his daughter at this small Vietnamese restaurant. It was quite an honor for all of us."

Presidents come and help the buzz, but as always, it's about the food. Charles is always experimenting; taking a classic Vietnamese dish and reworking it with fresh local ingredients geared for western palates. He said, "my cooking is traditional flavors married with local ingredients and local sensitivity. You can call it modern Vietnamese cooking; people call it different things and any name is OK by me except, well, maybe fusion."

Charles fondly speaks of caramelized shrimp sold as Saigon street food, but Americans don't like to peel shrimp, so it took time to perfect the same taste without the shells in a modern kitchen. It took months of trial and error to perfect the Chilean Sea Bass with 3 mushrooms; many attempts finally resulted in sublime taste and texture. Now that fish, with its perfect fat content, has been removed from the menu in deference to the its environmental vulnerabilities, so it was back to the drawing board. For the Daikon Rice Cake, a favorite standby that was transformed through a multi-step process, Charles removed the bacon, giving it more universal appeal as a vegetarian dish - hard to believe something that tasty came from a Daikon radish.

Just bring up the topic of dayboat scallops, or the right texture and kind of chicken for the noodle soup, the perfect doneness for the Shaking Beef, or why the duck is crispy and not more gelatinous as in Vietnam and be prepared for a passionate discussion.

Every ingredient, taste, texture, temperature, and color of each dish served at the Slanted Door has a history of exploration, a story that is a marriage of Vietnamese cooking with fresh US based ingredients - all interpreted by Charles and his collaborators at the restaurant.

So why is The Slanted Door so successful? Why, during the course of writing this article I have longed to lift the chopstick. It's not one thing, but a family of ingredients, spirit, personality, passion, and commitment to the idea that Asian cooking is as wonderful and sophisticated as the culture which it represents.