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Charles Phan, the Innovative Chef of SF’s Slanted Door, Has Died

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man in chef jacket smiles with noodle dish displayed at elbow in large restaurant
Charles Phan in 2010, posing at Slanted Door next to a dish of seafood with crispy egg noodle. (Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

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.

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That was Phan’s real innovation. Inspired by restaurants like Chez Panisse and Zuni Cafe, the self-taught chef created now-iconic dishes like his cellophane noodles with Dungeness crab; grapefruit and jicama salad; and fish-sauce caramel claypot chicken, made with boneless, skinless cuts to accommodate Western sensibilities. The combination of Slanted Door’s very Bay Area farm-to-table approach to traditional Vietnamese comfort food dishes and its upscale, Westernized style of service was an immediate hit.

“I’ll always remember my early visits to the Slanted Door on Valencia,” Sylvan Mishima Brackett, the chef-owner of the Cal-Japanese izakaya Rintaro, wrote on Instagram. “The energy was incredible and the food was exciting and fresh and new.”

And when Slanted Door moved to its grand waterfront location at the Ferry Building in 2004, it became one of the most famous restaurants in all of San Francisco — and, for a number of years, the city’s single most lucrative restaurant.

In many ways, Slanted Door’s success paved the way for today’s diverse landscape of California cuisine — the thrilling array of Cal-Viet, Cal-Moroccan, Cal-Cantonese and Cal-Creole restaurants that help define the Bay Area dining scene, reinterpreting their respective cuisines through a Northern Californian lens.

In more recent years, Slanted Door may have fallen slightly out of fashion — the restaurant wasn’t written about quite as frequently, or as glowingly, by the local food media as it was during its heyday in the 2000s and 2010s. Its Ferry Building flagship restaurant never reopened after shutting down at the start of the pandemic. Still, Slanted Door’s remaining locations in Napa, San Ramon and Beaune, France, continue to draw crowds. During the pandemic, Phan also opened a casual sandwich shop, Chuck’s Takeaway, in the Mission. And, to bring the chef’s legacy full circle, Slanted Door was slated to move back to its much smaller original location on Valencia Street later this spring.

Meanwhile, Phan’s career continues to inspire a whole generation of younger Asian American chefs. As Oakland chef Tu David Phu posted on Instagram, “I/we stand on the shoulders of Chef Charles. It was because [of] him it was possible for chefs like myself to find a way.”

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