After a Long Absence, Slanted Door Is Returning to Its Home on Valencia Street

The Slanted Door is coming home.

The flagship restaurant that popularized chef Charles Phan’s style of Vietnamese cuisine in the mid-’90s and earned the restaurant and Phan accolades over its nearly three decades in business, will return to its original space at 584 Valencia Street and reopen in Spring 2025. “Going back to the old place I think would do more for Slanted Door than had we stayed in the Ferry Building,” Phan says. “I think the size, the volume, that was going to hinder us. But now this gives us a brand new opportunity where we could continue to change dining.”

While Phan expanded the Slanted Door to San Ramon, Napa, and Beaune, France, he and his team worked diligently to find a spot to reopen in San Francisco following its 2020 closure. Abandoning Slanted Door’s hometown was never in the cards, he says. Indeed, the Mission is imprinted on Phan’s history. The family moved to the neighborhood in the mid-’80s when his mother bought a sewing shop. Phan went to Mission High School, and he even started his own sewing shop there. Now, his mother’s house is still in the Mission, as is his casual sandwich shop, Chuck’s Takeaway, and he still takes his tennis games to Dolores Park. “I never really left the Mission in the first place,” Phan says.

That doesn’t make the closure of the Ferry Building any easier. As Phan mentions, it was the first time he was able to showcase his love of architecture, which he initially majored in at UC Berkeley. It was his first major collaboration with Olle Lundberg of Lundberg Design, setting off a 20-year working relationship on all of Phan’s projects. But while the Slanted Door team was able to secure a new lease with the current owners of the Ferry Building — Phan’s original 20-year lease began with the previous owners — the new design with Lundberg underlined issues that they would need to fix with the space, along with the cost of other planned changes, and that ground things to a halt. They asked the landlord for more money for the fixes, but ultimately couldn’t work out a deal. “In normal circumstances,” Phan says, “you would maybe find more investors, find more money. But when the whole world is changing at the same time, you don’t know what sales are going to be.”

Eventually, Phan and the landlords of the Ferry Building mutually decided to part ways. Meanwhile, back at Slanted Door’s original building — which Phan bought in its early years — wine bar Chezchez was winding down. “The tenant in my building was moving out, so I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll go back to where I come from,” Phan says. “It seems to be the theme of my life.”

Phan knows the original Slanted Door holds a place in people’s hearts. Diners have told him about having a first date with their now-spouse, or parents who brought their young child to Valencia, who are now grown up. He’s even heard about (and witnessed) breakups at the restaurant. And while there were cursed moments when hot trays moving through the small kitchen would cause a burn mark or two, Phan says he’s stoked to move back in.

This time he’s working with Lundberg Design again and giving the space a nicer finish with natural materials and custom glass elements; they’re restoring the original seating layout from when Phan first started his restaurant and diners will “get to see where Slanted Door started,” he says.

The Slanted Door hasn’t been open in San Francisco proper for four years, but the menu has been slowly tweaked and updated; the restaurant uses different chicken for its chicken clay pot dish, and has introduced new items like lacquered squab — served in France with pickled garlic and spring onions. “I think the goal is to really re-emphasize what we’re trying to do all these years, which is bring a little piece of Vietnam to you and, hopefully, with our skill and our craft, that will actually taste good,” Phan says. In preparation for the opening, the Slanted Door team will take a group research trip to Vietnam in October.

“I think part of the success of Slanted Door has always been the fact that we keep changing,” Phan says. “We don’t change a lot, but every time we move, we change some of the ways we do things and it becomes something else — the place drives a lot of that energy.”

Slanted Door (584 Valencia Street) is slated to reopen in Spring 2025.

The Slanted Door

The Slanted Door