WINE SPECTATOR
March 31, 1998

RISING STARS
AMERICA'S HOTTEST YOUNG CHEFS

By Harvey Steiman

CHARLES PHAN, 35, Slanted Door, San Francisco
Born: Da Lat, Vietnam
Education: University of California at Berkeley
Cooking Style: Vietnamese
Signature dishes (wine suggestions): "shaking beef"-browned tenderloin cubes with vinaigrette and lime sauce on the side (German or Austrian Blauburgunder); spring rolls (Champagne)
Favorite wines: Riesling, French Chablis

Combine Vietnamese home cooking with the ingredient-fanatic sensibility of Alice Waters and you have Charles Phan's food. "You have to go that extra step," he says, offering as an example his popular sauteed spinach dish, made with organic spinach from a small farm. "People who tell me they have hated spinach all their lives love this spinach. I don't do a lot to it, just a little chicken stock and garlic. It's the product."

To go with the food, Phan has one of the niftiest short wine lists anywhere. Brief (fewer than 100 wines) and creative, it features more offbeat wines than it has Chardonnays and Cabernets, the better to match with such traditional Vietnamese fare as spring rolls, green beans with shiitake mushrooms and sizzling rice flour-and-coconut rolls.

Phan studied architecture (earning a degree from UC Berkeley), and it shows in the modern lines of the two-story restaurant. His establishment is a block from 16th Street, a scruffy but trendy neighborhood ("The rent was cheap"), so Phan has modified some of the food for non-Vietnamese palates.

"I realized that the things we were eating at home were not being presented in restaurants in a way you could understand if you were not Vietnamese," he notes. "That's why I opened the Slanted Door." He uses Chilean sea bass, for example, instead of rockfish. It has become a signature dish, and gets compliments from Asian customers too. "That's where I come in," Phan says. "I am sensitive to both cultures, so I can be the bridge."

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