Charles Phan, the James Beard Award-winning chef and restaurateur behind The Slanted Door, has reportedly been hospitalized for several days due to an undisclosed medical emergency.
Staff at Phan’s restaurants, which include Slanted Door locations in Napa and San Ramon, have reportedly been notified that Phan is in the hospital, and that a medical emergency has resulted in a brain injury, as the SF Standard was the first to report. (The URL for the story, which may reflect a headline that has since been edited, suggested Phan may be in a coma.)
No other details about Phan’s condition, or the medical emergency that occurred, have been released by his family.
Phan, 62, has had plans to reopen his flagship Slanted Door in San Francisco this year in its original Mission District location, at 584 Valencia Street. The announcement of the reopening came last summer, after four years in which the once bustling Ferry Building location stayed dark, with Phan intending to reopen there.
“Going back to the old place I think would do more for Slanted Door than had we stayed in the Ferry Building,” Phan said last year.
In recent years, Phan has expanded with locations in San Ramon, Napa, and Beaune, France, and in 2022, he opened a Mission District sandwich shop called Chuck’s Takeaway, specializing in banh mi.
Phan was born in Vietnam, but grew up primarily in Guam and San Francisco’s Chinatown, after his family relocated prior to the fall of Saigon. A self-taught chef, he was searching for a spot to open a Vietnamese noodle and crepe spot when he landed on the Valencia Street location, opening The Slanted Door in 1995. The place was immediately popular, and was famously visited by President Bill Clinton during the last year of his presidency, April 2000, when Chelsea Clinton was attending Stanford.
Phan would tell the Chronicle at the time that hosting Clinton and a cadre of Secret Service agents was no big deal because Mick Jagger had already dined there twice.
Demand for reservations — and The Slanted Door famously brought valet parking to the Mission for the first time in the neighborhood’s history — ultimately led to a move downtown, and ultimately to the big corner space at the Ferry Building in 2004.
At one point, Phan also operated several locations of the more casual Out the Door, as well as Hard Water, his New Orleans-influenced bar and restaurant on Pier 3, which like The Slanted Door closed in March 2020 and never reopened. (The space recently was revived as Bon Delire.)
We will update this story as we learn more about Phan’s condition.
Top image: Chef Charles Phan prepares a dish at his dinner with Jeremiah Stone and Fabian von Hauske part of the Bank of America Dinner Series presented by The Wall Street Journal at Chef’s Club on October 13, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Robin Marchant/Getty Images for NYCWFF)