Charles Phan, the influential chef who opened San Francisco’s Slanted Door restaurant and popularized a new style of modern California-Vietnamese cuisine, died unexpectedly on Jan. 20. He was 62 years old.
This morning, Slanted Door’s Instagram account announced, “It is with profound sadness that we share the heartbreaking news of the unexpected passing of our beloved leader, visionary and friend, Chef Charles Phan, due to cardiac arrest.”
Born in Đà Lạt, Vietnam in 1962, Phan came to San Francisco as a refugee after the fall of Saigon, along with his family, at the age of 13. He studied at UC Berkeley for three years, dabbling in architecture and clothing design, before eventually deciding to open a Vietnamese restaurant — despite never having cooked professionally prior to that.
Before Phan opened the original Slanted Door on Valencia Street in 1995, the Bay Area had already established itself as a global destination for California cuisine — a food movement that grew out of restaurants like Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, with their focus on relatively simple preparations of seasonal ingredients sourced from local farmers. But while there was an abundance of Cal-Italian and Cal-French restaurants at the time, up until then no one else in the Bay Area had really applied that model to Vietnamese food — or any of the other non-European, so-called “ethnic” cuisines, really.