Good Food
Remembering pioneering San Francisco chef Charles Phan of The Slanted Door
Good Food looks back on a conversation with Slanted Door chef Charles Phan, who paired local California ingredients with elegant Vietnamese food.
By Evan Kleiman • • 1 min readThe food world has lost a California legend. Charles Phan, who in 1995 opened The Slanted Door in San Francisco's Mission District, passed away at age 62.
Phan didn't intend to open a restaurant. He went to architecture school. Yet he became one of San Francisco's most beloved chefs by pairing local ingredients with the food he grew up eating in Vietnam. In 2014, he sat down with Good Food to discuss The Slanted Door Cookbook and shared the story of leaving Saigon in 1975, when his family boarded a cargo ship in the dead of the night.
