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 know the flavor profiles,” he explains, “it’s much easier to work on things. You eventually get it right.”
The chicken gets tossed with olive oil, salt, rice wine, cornstarch, soy sauce, white pepper, preserved black beans, ginger, garlic, and scallions. Then it’s placed in one of Phan’s favorite cooking vessels, a dish that not only can withstand the heat of a steamer or the stove, but that’s beautiful enough for presentation: a deep clay bowl.
“I love cooking in clay bowls,” he says, showing me a collection of various shallow clay bowls, some from Chinatown, some from Spain. “The transfer of heat is really slow, and by the time you take it to the table, it’s so hot that whatever you’re serving continues to bubble. It keeps the heat.”
Phan adds the chicken mixture to one of these clay bowls and places it in a bamboo steamer sitting in a wok filled with simmering water. “You want to make sure you can see the water,” he advises, “because if it all evaporates, your steamer will burn.”
While the chicken cooks, he places another clay bowl directly on the stove and adds canola oil and sugar. This is the start of his caramel shrimp dish, and it’s surprising how resilient that clay bowl is, sitting right on the flame.
The sugar turns dark brown and Phan adds a shallot, ginger, and the shrimp heads. Soon the chicken dish is done and Phan finishes up the shrimp dish with lemongrass, chili, and fish sauce. Finally, in a large wok, I stir-fry bok choy with shiitakes and garlic. And just as the food’s all done, the door bursts open and Phan’s wife comes home with their children.
One starts playing the piano, another tells Phan about the diorama he helped her build for school. Downstairs, customers are dining, and upstairs, the family is contemplating dinner. At the Phan residence, it’s difficult to tell where work begins and where family life ends. Everything is blurred and Phan is at the center, feeding everyone—wife, children, friends, customers; it’s all one and the same to him.
“It doesn’t take a lot of money to eat good food. If you know what you’re doing.”
Serves 2
What’s remarkable about this dish is that instead of developing flavor step-by-step, you stir together a bunch of ingredients—chicken, ginger, soy sauce, preserved black beans heated with garlic in olive oil—and pour them into a clay bowl that you place into a steamer. Thirty to forty minutes after steaming, you have fall-apart chicken that’s been infused with all of those other components and, because it all happens in one vessel, it makes its own sauce. Serve the steaming hot clay bowl at the table and marvel at how the food stays hot as you devour it.
1 whole chicken, 3 to 4 pounds
Olive oil
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons rice wine or sherry
1½ tablespoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon soy sauce
A pinch of white pepper
1-inch knob of ginger, peeled and grated
3 scallions, sliced, white and light green parts
½ teaspoon sugar
1 shallot, sliced
2 tablespoons chopped garlic
¼ cup preserved black beans, crushed slightly with the back of a knife
Cilantro leaves, for garnish
Steamed rice, for serving
Cut the chicken with a large sharp knife or a cleaver, separating the wings, legs, thighs, and back from the body. Cut all of these into 2-inch pieces*, slicing through the bone, including the back. Save the breast for another use.
In a large bowl, toss the chicken with a splash of olive oil, a big pinch of salt, the rice wine, cornstarch, soy sauce, white pepper, ginger, scallions, sugar, and shallots.
In a small pot or skillet, heat ¼ cup olive oil and add the garlic. As it becomes fragrant, add the preserved black beans and cook for a minute, stirring, until the flavors combine. Pour over the chicken, stir everything together, and allow the dish to sit, covered, for 2 to 3 hours at room temperature.
Transfer the chicken to a clay bowl that’s wide and deep enough to hold everything along with the juices that will come out when it cooks. Fill a wok halfway with water and bring to a simmer over medium-low heat. Place a bamboo steamer* in the water and put another bamboo steamer on top; the second steamer will not touch the water. In that steamer, place the clay bowl and cover with the bamboo top. Allow to cook like this, monitoring the water (you don’t want it all to evaporate), for about 30 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through*.
When it’s ready, very carefully remove the clay bowl from the steamer. (It’s hot!) Garnish the chicken with some cilantro leaves and serve with steamed rice.
Serves 2
Most of us associate caramel with dessert. In this dish, when you stop the cooking process with fish sauce, you get a marvelous caramely sauce that’s sweet and savory, briny and smoky, and a staple of Vietnamese cooking. Phan prepares this in a clay bowl, but if you don’t have one, use a Dutch oven. Just be extra careful with the caramel; not only does it go from dark to burned in a matter of seconds, the melted sugar is piping hot and sticky. Serve with lots of rice for soaking up the sauce.
1 teaspoon canola oil
2 tablespoons sugar
1 sliced shallot
1 tablespoon peeled and slivered ginger
Shrimp heads from 1 pound of shrimp (optional)
1 tablespoon fish sauce
⅓ cup very finely chopped lemongrass (about ½ stalk)
1 fresh red chili, chopped
1 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined
Black pepper
Steamed rice, for serving
Place a clay bowl or pot directly on medium-low heat and allow it to heat up slowly*.
As the bowl is heating, add the oil and sugar and watch it carefully; eventually, the sugar will melt and start to color. When it’s a deep dark-brown caramel, add the shallots, ginger, and shrimp heads, if you’re using them. Stir together for a minute and then add the fish sauce, lemongrass, chili, shrimp, and a sprinkling of black pepper.
Stir and cook until the shrimp are cooked through, 2 to 3 minutes; they’ll grow firmer and pinker as they cook. Add a little water if it needs more liquid. Serve at the table in the clay dish with steamed rice on the side.
Serves 2
Phan’s take on bok choy includes shiitakes, garlic, and rice wine. It’s as simple to make as it seems, but the flavor is deep and complex.
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 bunch of bok choy, washed, carefully dried, and sliced
½ cup sliced shiitake mushrooms
Rice wine
Fish sauce
Heat a wok on very high heat*.
Swirl oil down the sides with the wok still on high heat. Add the garlic and watch it carefully; you barely want it to color. As soon as it looks like it’s ready to darken, add all the bok choy and shiitakes and use tongs to toss them, shaking the pan while you do.
Add a little water, a splash of rice wine, and a splash of fish sauce, continuing to toss the vegetables. When the bok choy is wilted (less than a minute) and flavored properly (taste to find out), serve right away.
