Remembering Slanted Door Chef Charles Phan, Dead at 62

In a September 2005 Food & Wine story titled “Vietnam à la Cart,” writer Laurie Winer noted that Charles Phan’s decade-old San Francisco restaurant the Slanted Door was considered by many to be the best Vietnamese restaurant in the United States. Phan died of cardiac arrest on January 20 at the age of 62, according to a statement from his family. He leaves behind a legacy of leadership and innovation, plus a profound impact on America’s understanding and appreciation of Vietnamese food. 

Phan’s father grew up working on his family’s sugarcane and turnip farm in China, and was eventually sent to work with a great-uncle. He amassed money and land as a merchant, but feeling unsafe under Communist rule, fled on foot to Vietnam — leaving his wife and children behind — to start over. Phan’s father remarried, had five children (including Charles), and rebuilt his fortune, never imagining having to leave home again. But the violence of the regime followed him to his new homeland, where the Vietnam War broke out in 1955. 

Phan, born in 1962 in a central highlands town north of Saigon, told Food & Wine in that same 2005 story that despite growing up in a war-torn country, life seemed relatively normal to him, even after a neighbor’s home was bombed. “As I grew older, it got worse,” he says. “There were land mines. Kidnappings were rampant.” 

Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army on April 30, 1975, ending the war. Along with millions of their fellow citizens, the Phan family fled the country, uncertain of where fate would lead them. Along with his parents, five siblings, aunt, and an uncle (who had fled China along with his father), the 13-year-old Phan boarded a ship with nothing but some powdered milk that sustained them all for the three months it took to reach Guam. For the next year and a half, the family lived in a refugee camp and then with a couple who employed them.

In 1977, the family moved to the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, where Phan worked as a busboy at a pub that employed his father as a custodial worker. “I was not a normal kid. I have no memory of even a football game,” he told Food & Wine. “Things like that didn’t exist for me.”

At the University of California, Berkeley, Phan studied architecture and design, eventually working at a New York City architecture firm to please his father, while also helping his mother run a sewing machine company. He returned to Vietnam for the first time in 1992. The trip sparked something within him, and after a period of unemployment and cooking for friends upon his reluctant return to the U.S., Phan sought space and funds to open a restaurant with the ambiance he felt was lacking in American Vietnamese restaurants.

By 1994, he locked onto the Valencia Street space that would eventually become the Slanted Door. “I just went into this kind of survival mode,” he told Food & Wine. “I had $30,000 to my name at this point. I signed a check and took it to the owner, bypassing the agent entirely. He was still showing the space after I bought it.”

The titular door, he noted, was not slanted — rather a reclamation of a crass stereotype about Asian people, chosen on a dare from a friend — but that was not the only bold or irreverent thing about Phan’s choices. He assembled a notable wine list in a modern space unlike any other Vietnamese restaurant in the Mission, let alone the city, and quickly gained attention and praise for his cooking that employed both bold flavors and quick blasts of heat. Winer noted that many of his recipes included the phrase “heat until small puffs of smoke appear,” (see his recipes for Shrimp and Jicama Rolls with Chili-Peanut Sauce and Spicy Lemongrass Chicken). 

Phan explained that in addition to his campaign to familiarize American diners with the ingredients and techniques of Vietnamese cuisine, he hoped that the ethos of it would seep through. “Instead of focusing on a big hunk of chicken or steak,” he said, “I would like people to see meat as a kind of condiment, as Asians do. It’s just a beautiful, healthy way of eating.”

Twenty years after Phan opened Slanted Door, Restaurant Business magazine reported that it was the highest-grossing independently owned restaurant in California, grossing $16.5 million in annual sales — a figure that Eater noted was made all the more impressive by the fact that the per-head average was $48 (just shy of $80 in 2024 terms). The next year, in 2015, the James Beard Foundation named Slanted Door the Outstanding Restaurant in America. Though the restaurant went dark at the start of the pandemic, Phan announced plans to reopen in its original Valencia Street location in the summer of 2025. Over the past few decades, Phan opened outposts of Slanted Door in San Ramon and Napa, California, as well as Beaune, France, and other concepts including the fast-casual Out The Door, a whiskey bar, and others — including several based in his Chinese heritage. He authored the IACP Award-winning cookbook Vietnamese Home Cooking as well as The Slanted Door: Modern Vietnamese Food.

Phan’s influence reached far beyond the stove. He was known as a kind and generous mentor and leader, breaking ground for countless chefs and cookbook authors — many of whom sought to have the foods of their culture honored in the same way as European and American cuisines were vaunted.

Cookbook author Andrea Nguyen told Food & Wine’s editor in chief Hunter Lewis, “I’ve always been impressed by how his ethos and sensibility spread to restaurants like Monsoon Seattle. I thought, OK, Vietnamese can be more than Little Saigon places and people were willing to pay for it. That gave me hope as a cookbook author, because I didn’t see Vietnamese food as something that needed to be presented in Vietnam as the motherland because we have roots here and we are Vietnamese America. It’s modern, elegant, and respectful.” She continued, “Now you’re seeing new generations doing high end Vietnamese food like 2018 F&W Best New Chef Kevin Tien in D.C. who is unapologetic in presenting his cuisine in a modern way.”

Nguyen also emphasized how significant it was for Phan to champion particular ingredients and to keep innovating. In her Instagram post honoring him (where she also credited him for the popularity of Shaking Beef on menus across the country), she wrote of a particular braised duck noodle soup (mì vịt tiềm) served at a restaurant of his in the Pacific Heights. “This was my ideal version of this soup done in an elegant manner. He was always pushing broken rice for years,” she told Lewis. “He sold broken rice at his Ferry Building concession. I don’t know if people understood what he was trying to do with the rice but he was very experimental.”

And like many, Nguyen, mourned the too-soon loss of the man himself  and everything he had ahead. “It’s very sad because he was so young. Depending on how you count your years — in Asian tradition he could be 63 or western style he’d be 62 — it puts all of our mortality into perspective and what we can do on this planet while we’re still here.”