Charles Phan

Chef-owner, the Slanted Door, Out the Door, and Heaven’s
Dog
San Francisco, California

Upstairs from one of his San Francisco restaurants, chef Charles

Phan lives with his wife and children. “That’s the way it is in

most of the world,” he tells me. “You buy a building, you live

upstairs, and you work downstairs.”

When we’re cooking and we need some shrimp heads for a

Vietnamese caramelized shrimp dish, he sends his assistant down

to the restaurant to get some. For Phan, there’s no real dividing

line between work and home, between cooking for his customers

and cooking for his family.

In fact, Phan employs twenty-two relatives. “My mom will

call and say, ‘Your cousin so-and-so just moved here; give him a

job!’” And Phan does, though he doesn’t play favorites if they

don’t do good work. “I’ll still fire them,” he says. “You have to

have rules.”

When it comes to cooking, Phan isn’t a rule follower as much as

he is a casual technician. With a large cleaver, he hacks apart a

chicken for our first dish, steamed chicken with fermented black

beans, a dish Phan ate as a child in Vietnam. Part of what informs

his cooking is his quest to re-create these childhood dishes. “If you