CHARLES PHAN SOLIDIFIED THE ASIAN CUISINE & WINE PARADIGM
He Elevated the Genre from Under a Xenophobic Trope
BY ALAN GOLDFARB
Jan. 30, 2025
Much has been written about the death of restaurateur/chef Charles Phan. Deservedly so. He is the one responsible for elevating Asian cooking in the Bay Area and by extension, putting a dent into the racist notion that Vietnamese, Chinese, Burmese, Thai and Korean restaurant food should be inexpensive. Phan, with his Slanted Door put that shibboleth to the middle of mind because his food and service were without doubt, worthy of world-class status. Furthermore, and more germane to the readers of these pages, he showed that Asian food and wine should have affinity just as tea, sake, baijiu and soju have been for millennia.
I visited almost all of Phan’s restaurants: The original on Valencia, on the Embarcadero near the Giants’ stadium, in Napa, and at Out The Door and Slanted Door in the Ferry Building. The Mission location was special because “we” San Franciscans got a taste of what Vietnamese food could be. The narrow space with its balcony whose diners would never look down at their sistern and brethren imbibers below, as nothing but equals. Valencia was proudly for us the “outer boroughs”, kind of like before Brooklyn became Brooklyn. (I am from South Brooklyn, which is not the Brooklyn that most know it now.)
I had dinner at the Napa Slanted Door within the last year and it was fantastic. But it’s the San Francisco restaurant from where Phan and Slanted Door made their bones with the critical national masses.
Not misconstrue. There was absolutely nothing commercial, glitzy, kitsch or touristy about the Ferry Building SD. Phan would never allow that. Not because he was dictatorial. No way. But it was in his marrow, in his nature and in his humanity, to keep his establishment as authentic and soulful in every way possible.
Starting with the locale – what with drop dead views of the Bay and the Bay Bridge – down to the food, the finely trained staff, and the wine list, Slanted Door gave off an aura of sophistication. With nary a pretense.
Slanted Door helped me feel sophisticated, in a very urbane, hip and anodyne way. Especially when seated at the bar. There’s something about sitting at the bar in a restaurant with a drink and food that gave the illusion of separateness and specialness.
I’d usually began a late Saturday afternoon at the bar – before the crowds descended; and they always descended on SD – with a glass of bone-dry Riesling or a Grüner Veltliner. It was the Slanted Door by the way, which introduced us to Grüner.
And it was Mark Ellenbogen – Phan’s man with the wine – who was most responsible for that. Ellenbogen too was the one who most irritated the good burghers of Napa because he refused to put their high-alcohol, over-oaked and low-acid wines on his list. Because he insisted simply, those wines just didn’t go with Charles Phan’s food.
I wrote about this dustup years ago, but the piece disappeared into the dustbin of wine journalism. However, a 2008 interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, asked the right questions and received the appropriate answers from Ellenbogen.
SF Chron: I know you only have a handful of California wines on your list at Slanted Door - why is that?
ME: This is the quintessential cool-weather viticultural food, and it tends to go better with wines with low alcohol and moderate acidity without much oak influence. You can have a nice, balanced fruity California wine, and often, when you put it with Vietnamese ingredients, it tends to taste bitter or tannic. Many of the wines are unsuited because of the way the food modifies them.
SF Chron: We've heard that you won't put a wine with alcohol levels above 14 percent on your list. Is that true?
ME: No, it's not true. But I generally wouldn't, or at least I try not to the best I can. I try to buy more heavily in cooler vintages. It just goes better with the food. As it happens, with global warming we've had some warmer vintages, so a couple of the wines are over 14 percent. But even if the alcohol seems balanced, it won't taste that way with the food if it's high (in alcohol). If it's high, it's bad - really unpleasant. Most people wouldn't add habaneros to hot food. It's kind of like that.
Which led to this pithy retort from some California producers, who “were miffed” at the somm: “It’s tunnel vision,” fumed one, “his reasoning is singularly bizarre.”
Interestingly, when perusing the wine list at the Napa Slanted Door (Ellenbogen has since departed, I think to Norway), it contains a few offerings from Napa Valley. Of course it does. When in Rome … But you’ll also find Marsanne, Muscadet, Txakoli, Pigato, Godello and wines from the Canary Islands and Switzerland.
So, in the end, and this is certainly the end of Charles Phan in our midst, the Slanted Doors will remain open, as far as one can tell. Phan was perhaps one of the first in the modern era to show us that Asian food and wine can be essential. But Cecilia Chiang at The Mandarin in Ghiradelli Square, Barbara Tropp and China Moon near Union Square, and Yoshi Tome with Sushi Ran (the latter is still going strong in Sausilito), have been the progenitors. Brandon Jew at his Chinatown Mr. Jiu’s is the prototype of the genre now.
But I’d like to call your attention to a little known – but from what I can ascertain, the first Burmese restaurant in the Bay Area and perhaps the country -- in Oakland Chinatown. Nan Yang and its genteel founder and chef Philip Chu. Nan Yang closed in 2013 and to this day, it was the best Burmese restaurant at which I’ve ever eaten. It also gave rise to a plethora of Burmese restaurants in the Bay Area.
Philip had a love of wine, and in the early 2000s and because of that, I tried to convince him to open in Napa Valley. He couldn’t pull the trigger. But he asked me to put together a wine list for him. This was at the Oakland Rockridge to where Nan Yang relocated, in 1992, three years before Phan opened Slanted Door. Chu and his wife Nancy opened Nan Yang in Oakland Chinatown in ’83 before moving “uptown”. And as far as I can tell, it opened a couple of months before Mandalay began in San Francisco.
Nan Yang’s garlic noodles with pork went beautifully with the Rieslings or Chenins I put on the list. With Philip’s Burmese “knish” -- which he named after I told him it tasted just like a Coney Island knish, albeit augmented with minced pork and curry – went wonderfully with a Cab Franc or a cru Beaujolais.
But it was Charles Phan who brought the Asian cuisine/wine paradigm to full fruition. Slanted Door had the cachet and the bona fides to pull it off, led by Phan. He wasn’t the first and he certainly won’t be the last, because Phan’s path is on solid ground.