Charles Phan, a self-taught chef whose family fled Vietnam when he was a teenager and whose sleek restaurant helped change America’s perception of Asian food by replacing menus of inexpensive noodle dishes and spring rolls with ones that married the best local ingredients with the food he grew up on, died on Monday in San Francisco. He was 62.
His death, in a hospital, where he was taken last week after experiencing cardiac arrest during a tennis game, was confirmed by Anh Duong, the publicist for his restaurant group.
Mr. Phan became something of a food world star. He published two cookbooks, competed on the television show “Iron Chef” and walked through the streets of Saigon with Anthony Bourdain on his TV program “Parts Unknown.” He fed celebrities like Rihanna, Stephen Curry and the Obamas. But even with that fame, he rarely turned down invitations to donate time or food to charity events or help other chefs.
His success with the Slanted Door, the San Francisco restaurant he opened in 1995, buoyed fellow chefs from immigrant families who had long wanted food critics and diners to value dishes from their countries as much as they did cuisine from Italy or France.
“We knew right away when he opened the restaurant what it was going to be,” Rob Lam, the chef and owner of Lily in San Francisco, said in an interview. “We were like, dude, this is a game changer. This takes it from the street to dining room.”
Mr. Phan realized that making his mother’s dishes with the kind of local, top-notch ingredients used in kitchens like San Francisco’s Zuni Café was a gamble.
“Let’s be realistic,” he told The Washington Post in 2017. “Twenty years ago, I had to ask, ‘Are white people going to eat this? Will they pay me for this?’ I would sell a whole fish, and people would be upset to see the eyes and the bones. It was about trying to survive as a business.”
It was a smart bet. After trying his hand at several jobs, including selling software, designing clothes and managing the family sewing shop, Mr. Phan opened the Slanted Door, on Valencia Street in the Mission District, with help from his family.
The street was on the cusp of the district’s tech-boom transformation from a neighborhood of bohemians, Spanish-speaking immigrants and ramshackle Victorian houses to one of boutiques, third-wave coffee shops and some of the city’s most innovative restaurants.
Diners would sometimes have to dodge drug deals to get to the Slanted Door, occupying a tiny space that he had renovated. But once inside, they were rewarded with fat Dungeness crab claws over cellophane noodles and shaking beef, a dish known as bò lúc lắc in Vietnamese. The name refers to the way a cook must keep a hot pan in constant motion to sear the meat. In Vietnam, the dish is often made with tough cuts of beef chopped finely and fried until it’s almost crispy.
Mr. Phan recast the dish with medium-rare cubes of the same beef Alice Waters used at Chez Panisse, her famed restaurant in Berkeley, then served it on pristine local watercress instead of lettuce. It became the most popular dish at his restaurant.
“The food just jumped out at you,” Miriam Morgan, a retired food editor for The San Francisco Chronicle, said in an interview. “You thought, ‘What is this?’ It was so bright and had such freshness. The flavors just popped.”
In 2004, he moved the restaurant into the city’s Ferry Building, taking over a prime 8,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts space with a mesmerizing view of San Francisco Bay. By 2014, it was the highest grossing independently owned restaurant in California, with $16.5 million in annual sales.
Toàn Phan was born on July 30, 1962, in Da Lat, a provincial capital popular with vacationers in what was then South Vietnam. His parents, Quyen Phan and Hung Con Phan, had immigrated from China. Mr. Phan, the first person in his family to be born in Vietnam, was the eldest of six children.
His family ran a general store and was comfortable enough financially to have maids do most of the cooking. When Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army in 1975, the Phans joined the millions who fled the country, boarding a boat for Guam.
“When we were safe in international water,” he told The Washington Post, “my mom brought me to the top of the ship and said, ‘From now on you need to be in charge of this family and take care of your siblings.’ I was 13. My childhood ended that day.”
After a year and a half in a refugee camp, the family landed in San Francisco. Their American sponsor took the six Phan children to a doctor, and each was given an American name.
Once settled in Chinatown, Mr. Phan worked any job he could find, often in restaurants. At home, he cooked for the family while his parents each worked two jobs. He experimented with assimilation food, including a Thanksgiving dinner direct from Gourmet magazine. No one liked it, so the family ate curry and rice instead.
Mr. Phan made his way to the University of California, Berkeley, to study architecture and design, and met Pichet Ong, a graduate student who would later become a pastry chef and a longtime friend.
The two polished their English by listening to the singer Karen Carpenter. Mr. Ong said in an interview, “For me, it was that I loved the music, but for him, it was about improving his accent, because she articulated her words so well.” By Mr. Phan’s third year, fed up with tuition hikes, he left college.
With the success of Slanted Door, he opened and closed a series of other restaurants, including some centered on Cantonese dishes, a whiskey bar and a bánh mì shop.
Slanted Door has expanded to San Ramon and Napa in California, as well as to Beaune, in France’s Burgundy winemaking region. His flagship at the Ferry Building closed during the Covid pandemic and never reopened. He was planning to move it back to its original location on Valencia Street when he died.
He is survived by five brothers and sisters, his three children and their mother, Angkana Kurutach.
The food writer Joan Nathan said that Mr. Phan was the best raconteur she ever knew.
“Even the most ordinary stories were funny,” she said. “He was one of those people you wanted to sit down with, have a glass of wine and listen. He was hysterical.”
And he was generous with his time in helping other chefs find their footing. Tanya Holland, a chef who ran a restaurant in Oakland, met him at a Meals on Wheels event when she didn’t know anyone in the city. He became a trusted adviser, helping her negotiate leases and navigate the media.
“He wasn’t leading with ego like so many of these folks,” she said in an interview. “He felt like there was plenty of room for everyone.”
Mr. Phan made it his mission to spread some kindness in an industry that didn’t always offer him any.
“I have been stepped on and humiliated so badly that I once punched in the locker door,” he told The San Jose Mercury News in 2003. “I don’t condone the behavior of yelling chefs who don’t respect people. That cycle has to be stopped. People can’t be mistreated. That’s what makes food taste bad.”
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