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Charles in Charge Ask Charles Phan: It takes a village to build an empire. Part businessman, part godfather, part (ridiculously) nice guy, the chef of the Slanted Door is about to take over San Francisco—for the sake of his family. |
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posted on January 28, 2008 |
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A couple of things you might not know about the 45-year-old chef and owner of the Slanted Door, Charles Phan: 1. He lives with his mother. 2. He met his wife at Starbucks. With regards to number two, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say the entire Slanted Door family was born at Starbucks. In the spring of 1995, Phan met Bangkok-born Angkana Kurutach at the chain’s 12th Street location in Oakland. Then 31 years old, she was working as a barista to earn a little money before returning to Thailand to become a teacher. Phan was living in a nearby loft. Two years earlier, he had moved back to the Bay Area from New York, where he’d been a draftsman at an architecture firm. From there, he’d gone on to work for his family’s sewing shop, which went bankrupt, and then sold software at a business that also went belly-up. Once again, he found himself out of a job. Despite the fact that his last post in the restaurant industry had been as a busser 10 years earlier, and his kitchen experience was limited to cooking for family and friends, he had an idea he couldn’t get out of his head: a restaurant serving Vietnamese food, with an ingredients-driven menu à la Chez Panisse. Having tried unsuccessfully to rent the 12th Street storefront to open a cafe, he was boycotting the Starbucks that had snagged the space. Until, that is, he saw Kurutach working behind the counter. “I was one of the best coffeemakers—very fast,” she recalls. “So when he did finally come in, I didn’t notice him at first.” Phan persevered, standing in line daily to place his espresso order, hoping to get Kurutach’s attention (and tossing the coffee out after he’d left). One day, his persistence paid off. “I finally looked up, and he tried to talk to me,” she says. “I could see that he had sparkling eyes. When he told me he was opening a restaurant, I was so stunned—we were young then. I was like, ‘Wow.’” Twelve years later, the Phan family is far more than a twinkle in Charles’ eye. Kurutach and Phan now have three small children of their own—two girls and a boy—and employ a staff of 200, of which 22 are actual family members. (Kurutach, for instance, is in charge of community outreach; one of Charles’ three sisters, Betty Phan, is the HR manager; one of his cousins is a cashier; and his brother-in-law is a maintenance manager.) Along with this extended human family, Phan is the patriarch of the Slanted Door and two spin-offs, each called Out the Door, and that’s just the beginning. Which brings up the third thing you probably don’t know about Charles Phan: He’s about to take over San Francisco.
At this moment, Phan has some 23,500 square feet’s worth of new projects simultaneously under construction in three (the opening date and menu have yet to be determined); the global cafeteria in the new California Academy of Sciences opening in the fall (beneath which Loretta Keller, the owner of Coco500, will have a separate, more-formal restaurant called the Moss Room); and a third Out the Door, located in a former silk-flower factory built around 1912 on Bush Street in Lower Pacific Heights, slated to open this spring. To supply these restaurants, Phan is building a commissary—a huge skylit prep kitchen, where everything from the bread-baking to the stock-making for his restaurants will be done—on 18th Street, in the Mission. It’s just around the corner from the three-bedroom Victorian flat where he, his wife and kids have been living for the past two years, since his father passed away, in order to help out his mother. (The first to admit his family’s current situation is convivial but cramped, Phan has one more project in the works: a two-story loft that will be their private residence.) All of these properties are scheduled to open this year. If he’s stressed about it, though, it doesn’t show. “I try not to really worry about stuff anymore,” he tells me. “I try to imagine the worst-case scenario, and if I can take it, then I don’t worry about it.” A little sake also helps take the edge off things. Phan is a “cheap date,” as Olle Lundberg, the owner of Lundberg Design and the architect for all of the Slanted Door projects, puts it—referring to Phan’s (charmingly) low tolerance for alcohol. When I meet Phan for sushi one night, he walks in not a moment late, wearing a crisp white shirt that’s obviously seen him through the day, his hair spiked with a bit of gel. He slouches down into the chair with the weariness of someone who’s had a long week. He’s just returned from speaking at the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park’s graduation—a trip cut short so he could appear on Dateline, cooking up his signature shaking beef. In a couple of weeks, he’ll be off to return his late uncle’s ashes to Vietnam, the duty of the eldest child. Phan’s easygoing exterior belies his breakneck schedule; even when he’s tired, he’s good-naturedly cracking jokes and generally showing more interest in pouring us some sake than talking about himself. (Which means he’s soon talking plenty, spinning out ideas for his businesses left and right.) At the end of the evening, seated at the bar of the Lone Palm for a nightcap, he admits that some of his best business decisions are made over drinks—that he prefers to think “from the gut, from the heart.” I believe it: Phan’s road to success seems to have been a mix of big-picture perspective (from food to design, all of Phan’s restaurants have a very clear point of view), savvy business and a dash of by-the-seat-of-his-pants luck. He’s also not afraid to break the rules. In 1995, when he opened the Slanted Door in a modern, open, two-story space on Valencia Street, that part of the Mission was a funky strip known mainly for its taquerias—a place no Marina-ite would dare tread. Today, the blocks between 16th and 18th streets are lined with some of SF’s most popular restaurants, from Limón to Bar Tartine to Luna Park. Meanwhile, the Slanted Door has grown up and moved out. After a successful temporary stint at an otherwise cursed location in South Beach, it’s now king of the Ferry Building. With its clean lines and wall of windows, this is one of the rare restaurants in SF to break another rule: the unspoken one saying that great food doesn’t come with a great view. Given that restaurant lifespans are measured in dog years, the Slanted Door continues to have an amazing amount of buzz. Meesha Halm, editor of the San Francisco Bay Area Zagat, estimates that it garners the most votes in the guide. Seven days a week, the restaurant turns its 200 seats twice—for lunch. Want a dinner reservation? Call (way) ahead. But what really stands out about the Slanted Door is that its success has revolved around food many Western diners don’t find to be within their comfort zone. Outside of a handful of metropolitan areas, the majority of Americans think of Vietnamese food as something that belongs in a take-out box—if they even think about it at all—yet the Slanted Door has been selling both locals and tourists on tofu skin, rau ram, tamarind, Chinese dates and whole fish with the head on, and at prices that rival those at the most expensive restaurants in town. (That shaking beef, which originally went for $9, is now made with Meyer Angus filet mignon and goes for $29.) Add this to Phan’s projection that the Slanted Door alone will make $15 million in gross revenues this year—enough to turn most restaurateurs green with envy. But instead, everywhere I turn, someone has a story to tell about Phan’s kindness, such as chef Loretta Keller’s of the time Phan showed up unsolicited one Saturday, children and ladder in tow, to help her install some lights at Coco500. As Lundberg says, “Charles is a rock star, and he doesn’t act like one. I’ve been to New York and Japan with Charles, and people just fall all over him. He’s so refreshing to hang around because he’s just a kid from the Mission. He’ll never change.” Part of this might have to do with his life, pre-rock-star status. Phan has experienced his share of worst-case scenarios, something that seems to have fortified him, giving him the ability to take chances. It’s also imbued him with a great sense of responsibility for his extended family, blood or no. At the age of 13, Phan, along with his father, mother and six sisters and brothers, were forced to flee Vietnam—and their solidly middle-class lifestyle, complete with tutors, maids and a nice house—on April 30, 1975, the day Saigon fell. His family found itself on a boat with 400 other people, lost at sea for 10 days before making it to Singapore. It took another two-week boat ride to land at a refugee camp in Guam. “We got out into international water, and that’s when my mom said, ‘You need to take the lead. We’re not going to be able to do a whole lot because we’re old and don’t speak the language,’” Phan recalls. “So it really pushed me. Essentially, after that, I got more of a responsibility thrust on me.” After spending more than a year in Guam, the Phans left for San Francisco, where they moved from a two-room studio at Jones and O’Farrell (“My friend used to shoe-shine in that Bourbon & Branch place—it was a stinky bar back then,” Phan recalls) to Chinatown and, ultimately, to Capp Street. “We were FOB—fresh off the boat,” he recalls. “My dad”—who had been a successful merchant in Vietnam—“got a job at an English pub as a janitor.” Phan’s first restaurant job was working there as a busser. Eventually, he entered UC Berkeley and did three years in the architecture program before dropping out. It’s tempting to revel in Phan’s refugee-who-pulled-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps narrative, the kind of made-for-movie story the Academy Awards would eat up. And although he’s matter-of-factly aware of its impact, he’s not one to get dramatic about it. At this point in his life, he’s all about looking forward. A day in the life of Charles Phan goes something like this: On a crisp winter morning, he arrives to pick me up at my office down in Union Square, again politely on time. I get a text: “Your chauffeur is here.” His dust-covered Chevy Tahoe truck is double-parked in the loading zone in front of Neiman Marcus, surrounded by a Mercedes and a Range Rover. It sits high so high above the ground that I have to hoist myself in. Typical of his schedule, Phan has to be in about 10 places at once. Lately, with all the construction, he’s been playing the role of contractor, which he clearly enjoys. He’s wearing black boots; faded, decidedly non-designer jeans with a ring full of keys attached to his belt loop; and a black Marmot fleece jacket over a T-shirt. Tossed into the backseat, along with a hard hat and a neon-orange vest, are a couple of cookbooks—Alice Waters’ latest, The Art of Simple Food, and Tartine. Our first stop is in Golden Gate Park, at the immense, cutting-edge Academy of Sciences, still under construction, to meet with Keller and a couple of people from a land-design company based in Sebastopol. Most of the discussion focuses on the “living wall” the two restaurants will have running through them, a structure incorporating vines, moss and other plant life. (Phan and Lundberg have already created a wall made of panels filled with honey at the Westfield SF Centre’s Out the Door.) There’s also going to be a view from the restaurant into an aquarium. Phan asks about fertilizer issues, fish maintenance and lighting, even the possibility of growing some unusual Asian herbs on the wall. “Once we open, it’s 24/7,” he warns. “We’ll have customers 365 days a year.” There’s no time to close down, should the living wall suddenly stop living. As we’re leaving, Phan whips out his iPhone, excited to show me images of a recent trip to Mexico—pictures of taco stand after taco stand. (“Oh, man, it was so good,” he says about one place that made a great al pastor.) He points to a spot outside the Academy where he has visions of setting up a stand selling straightforward, completely un-Vietnamese tacos. “I just sent my brother-in-law down to Mexico to buy a taco stand for $700,” he laughs. We stop for a lunch of chicken pho, his favorite, at Turtle Tower in the Tenderloin, then move on to the Soma Grand, where he’s working out the details of the opening party for the residences. Eric Adkins, the Slanted Door’s bar manager, is there, a strapping guy with a shaved head. He makes Phan look diminutive. Nevertheless, he’s almost jumpy, he’s so keen on pleasing his boss. Listening to Adkins’ rather complex ideas for the party’s cocktails, Phan cuts him off, reminding him to keep the menu “verbiage” short, and that the Slanted Door is not about Asian stereotypes. “The last thing I want is a tiger mai tai or some bamboo sidecar. I don’t want lemongrass on anything but my clams.” (The drink ends up being a hot buttered rum with orange.) “He hates anything that hints of thematic design,” Lundberg says. “Anything that even vaguely implies Asian design, he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want the architecture to be overly referential. He likes modern, clean design. He wants it to reflect his food.” Adkins has just gotten married, and as we’re walking back to the car, Phan tells me he expects Adkins will want to have kids soon. “I have to build this whole little empire, so that people like my executive sous chef, Justine [who’s been with him for 12 years], will have a pension. Because I’m the oldest in the family, I’m always worried about the family future.” Phan’s all-in-the-family model might saddle him with an immense amount of responsibility (it’s not easy to fire an uncle, which is something he’s had to do), but it’s also allowed him to have the freedom to do what he wants, knowing he has a staff he can trust to man the stoves. “It was set up to be this way,” Phan says. “I started in the business really young and getting pissed on and yelled at, shit that made me so mad I’d go punch a locker. So when I started the company, I promised I wouldn’t [treat my staff] like that.” Case in point: While most restaurants that pool tips include only the front of the house, the Slanted Door has a system that covers everyone from bartenders to line cooks to dishwashers. This kind of treatment has kept people around, he says. “Our bottom line is so great because we’ve had people working for us for years.” The next day is Thanksgiving, and Phan, with the help of his brother, will be cooking a 60-person Vietnamese-American-Mexican mishmash of a dinner at the Slanted Door for his clan. But when I ask him whether the success of the Slanted Door and its vision has more to do with the family as a unit than himself, he isn’t self-effacing. “It’s all me,” he says. “They have a saying in Chinese—you’re the first cow to plow the field, because it’s the hardest. My siblings, my family—they farm the field, but I’m the one who started it.” The last stop we make is at the Out the Door that Phan is building in Lower Pac Heights. Duke, a graying 12-year-old dog, greets us at the door, followed by Nick Vriheas, the electrician who’s worked with Phan since the Slanted Door’s Valencia Street days. Phan immediately launches into talk of power loops, two-by-fours, four-by-sixes. An elderly neighbor stops by to ask how things are coming along. “We’re waiting—the whole block is waiting,” the man says, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. In truth, the whole city is waiting. But by the time this Out the Door opens, Phan will, no doubt, have moved on to another project. In a quiet moment of reflection about his father, who passed away at the age of 85, Phan shakes his head. Not so much in sorrow, but because of the thought that he himself might only have another 40 years to go—which is not nearly enough time to accomplish all the things he has planned.
A couple of things you might not know about the 45-year-old chef and owner of the Slanted Door, Charles Phan: 1. He lives with his mother. 2. He met his wife at Starbucks. With regards to number two, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say the entire Slanted Door family was born at Starbucks. In the spring of 1995, Phan met Bangkok-born Angkana Kurutach at the chain’s 12th Street location in Oakland. Then 31 years old, she was working as a barista to earn a little money before returning to Thailand to become a teacher. Phan was living in a nearby loft. Two years earlier, he had moved back to the Bay Area from New York, where he’d been a draftsman at an architecture firm. From there, he’d gone on to work for his family’s sewing shop, which went bankrupt, and then sold software at a business that also went belly-up. Once again, he found himself out of a job. Despite the fact that his last post in the restaurant industry had been as a busser 10 years earlier, and his kitchen experience was limited to cooking for family and friends, he had an idea he couldn’t get out of his head: a restaurant serving Vietnamese food, with an ingredients-driven menu à la Chez Panisse. Having tried unsuccessfully to rent the 12th Street storefront to open a cafe, he was boycotting the Starbucks that had snagged the space. Until, that is, he saw Kurutach working behind the counter. “I was one of the best coffeemakers—very fast,” she recalls. “So when he did finally come in, I didn’t notice him at first.” Phan persevered, standing in line daily to place his espresso order, hoping to get Kurutach’s attention (and tossing the coffee out after he’d left). One day, his persistence paid off. “I finally looked up, and he tried to talk to me,” she says. “I could see that he had sparkling eyes. When he told me he was opening a restaurant, I was so stunned—we were young then. I was like, ‘Wow.’” Twelve years later, the Phan family is far more than a twinkle in Charles’ eye. Kurutach and Phan now have three small children of their own—two girls and a boy—and employ a staff of 200, of which 22 are actual family members. (Kurutach, for instance, is in charge of community outreach; one of Charles’ three sisters, Betty Phan, is the HR manager; one of his cousins is a cashier; and his brother-in-law is a maintenance manager.) Along with this extended human family, Phan is the patriarch of the Slanted Door and two spin-offs, each called Out the Door, and that’s just the beginning. Which brings up the third thing you probably don’t know about Charles Phan: He’s about to take over San Francisco.
At this moment, Phan has some 23,500 square feet’s worth of new projects simultaneously under construction in three (the opening date and menu have yet to be determined); the global cafeteria in the new California Academy of Sciences opening in the fall (beneath which Loretta Keller, the owner of Coco500, will have a separate, more-formal restaurant called the Moss Room); and a third Out the Door, located in a former silk-flower factory built around 1912 on Bush Street in Lower Pacific Heights, slated to open this spring. To supply these restaurants, Phan is building a commissary—a huge skylit prep kitchen, where everything from the bread-baking to the stock-making for his restaurants will be done—on 18th Street, in the Mission. It’s just around the corner from the three-bedroom Victorian flat where he, his wife and kids have been living for the past two years, since his father passed away, in order to help out his mother. (The first to admit his family’s current situation is convivial but cramped, Phan has one more project in the works: a two-story loft that will be their private residence.) All of these properties are scheduled to open this year. If he’s stressed about it, though, it doesn’t show. “I try not to really worry about stuff anymore,” he tells me. “I try to imagine the worst-case scenario, and if I can take it, then I don’t worry about it.” A little sake also helps take the edge off things. Phan is a “cheap date,” as Olle Lundberg, the owner of Lundberg Design and the architect for all of the Slanted Door projects, puts it—referring to Phan’s (charmingly) low tolerance for alcohol. When I meet Phan for sushi one night, he walks in not a moment late, wearing a crisp white shirt that’s obviously seen him through the day, his hair spiked with a bit of gel. He slouches down into the chair with the weariness of someone who’s had a long week. He’s just returned from speaking at the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park’s graduation—a trip cut short so he could appear on Dateline, cooking up his signature shaking beef. In a couple of weeks, he’ll be off to return his late uncle’s ashes to Vietnam, the duty of the eldest child. Phan’s easygoing exterior belies his breakneck schedule; even when he’s tired, he’s good-naturedly cracking jokes and generally showing more interest in pouring us some sake than talking about himself. (Which means he’s soon talking plenty, spinning out ideas for his businesses left and right.) At the end of the evening, seated at the bar of the Lone Palm for a nightcap, he admits that some of his best business decisions are made over drinks—that he prefers to think “from the gut, from the heart.” I believe it: Phan’s road to success seems to have been a mix of big-picture perspective (from food to design, all of Phan’s restaurants have a very clear point of view), savvy business and a dash of by-the-seat-of-his-pants luck. He’s also not afraid to break the rules. In 1995, when he opened the Slanted Door in a modern, open, two-story space on Valencia Street, that part of the Mission was a funky strip known mainly for its taquerias—a place no Marina-ite would dare tread. Today, the blocks between 16th and 18th streets are lined with some of SF’s most popular restaurants, from Limón to Bar Tartine to Luna Park. Meanwhile, the Slanted Door has grown up and moved out. After a successful temporary stint at an otherwise cursed location in South Beach, it’s now king of the Ferry Building. With its clean lines and wall of windows, this is one of the rare restaurants in SF to break another rule: the unspoken one saying that great food doesn’t come with a great view. Given that restaurant lifespans are measured in dog years, the Slanted Door continues to have an amazing amount of buzz. Meesha Halm, editor of the San Francisco Bay Area Zagat, estimates that it garners the most votes in the guide. Seven days a week, the restaurant turns its 200 seats twice—for lunch. Want a dinner reservation? Call (way) ahead. But what really stands out about the Slanted Door is that its success has revolved around food many Western diners don’t find to be within their comfort zone. Outside of a handful of metropolitan areas, the majority of Americans think of Vietnamese food as something that belongs in a take-out box—if they even think about it at all—yet the Slanted Door has been selling both locals and tourists on tofu skin, rau ram, tamarind, Chinese dates and whole... |
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