The Tao of Thom Pham

Unless you’re some kind of genius—a Jefferson, a Lao Tzu, a Trump—articulating a personally defining principle, be it “liberty” or “virtue” or “success,” is close to impossible. Most of us don't even realize we should have one. But Thom Pham does. His personal Tao, as it were, is something he refers to as “The Lifestyle,” but when asked to expound on exactly what The Lifestyle is, he struggles, in his noticeably accented English, to fuse such disparate notions as freedom, feeling special, and appreciating champagne—until Liz Grzechowiak, his executive assistant and professional best friend, cuts him off.

“This is The Lifestyle,” she says, waving a computer printout of Mapquest directions to a local spa. “Once a month, your assistant adds a spa appointment to your printed itinerary and leaves this on the passenger seat of your car.” (That would be Pham’s new black Mercedes CLS 500 coupe.)

Pham (which rhymes with Thom) grins, but it’s the weary grin of a slightly embarrassed man. Maybe that’s because The Lifestyle is an inside joke that sounds silly when expressed in the presence of a reporter, or maybe that’s because Pham is tired and has to be on his feet for another twelve hours. It’s Friday afternoon in the lounge of Temple Bar & Restaurant, Pham’s foray into upscale Asian fusion on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, and Pham, being a good sport, has ordered, at Grzechowiak’s insistence, a split of champagne. She wants to indulge in an afternoon cocktail—The Lifestyle, The Lifestyle, The Lifestyle—that she believes she’s due after a long week, but she doesn’t want to drink alone.

Temple has just started serving lunch, and though business has been slow, the extra hours have taken their toll on Pham and his staff. Pham runs Temple along with his other two restaurants, Azia at Nicollet and 26th and ThanhDo in St. Louis Park. The Phamous Group, his management company, oversees assets worth $10 million, including his three restaurants, a building he’s remodeling on Lake Street in Minneapolis’s Longfellow neighborhood that will eventually become Mix—Pham’s fourth restaurant—and several other commercial and residential real estate holdings. Mix was supposed to be Pham’s third restaurant and open sometime last fall. But that was before he was offered a sweet deal on the former Tiburon space, now the Temple site, late last summer. The deal has allowed Pham to fill Tiburon’s signature shark tank with sleepy freshwater koi, create a dining room with a deep-red glow, and hang miniature crystal chandeliers. All of this has given Pham the opportunity to pursue his dream of playing with the big boys—of going head to head with sophisticated, downtown dining destinations La Belle Vie, Cosmos, and the new Chambers Kitchen.

But Temple has been a challenge. After Pham signed a lease in late August and opened the doors in December, he and his young Asian-American chef, Tuan Ngyuen, debuted a French-Asian fusion menu—with dishes such as anise-mandarin–braised short ribs and monkfish liver pâté—to decidedly mixed reviews. At Azia, his hipster emporium on Eat Street, Pham has gotten used to positive attention, mostly due to Azia’s nightlife vibe. The place is almost always crowded with the most stylish, most diverse young crowd in the cities, drawn by the perfectly calibrated, now-Phamous admixture of a happy hour special featuring cheap, tasty, exotic drinks and cheap, tasty appetizers and the presence of Pham himself, always resplendent in some flashy designer jacket, working the room like a one-man Asian Rat Pack. At Temple, by contrast, he was suddenly getting hammered by the critics.

Pham's firing of Ngyuen in late March, his takeover of Temple’s kitchen, and postponement of Mix's opening sparked whispers in the local restaurant community. Sacking your chef three months after opening usually does. People wondered if Pham weighed style too heavily over substance. David Fhima’s name came up. (Fhima is the restaurant scene’s Icarus—too much too high too soon.) To be fair, it had been four years since Pham launched Azia and eight years since he had opened ThanhDo, and as soon as he decided to do Temple he knew he would have to push Mix back indefinitely. Pham is only thirty-three years old, still precocious in the Twin Cities restaurant scene, but he sounds like a wizened guru when he recalls Azia’s early days. Azia wasn’t an overnight success. During its first year, both Pham’s house and car were repossessed, and for a time he crashed in Azia’s basement.

“It’s all about learning from mistakes and correcting them quickly,” he says, when asked about his recent Temple experience. “Why would I wait six months to correct something that I knew was wrong?” He concedes he intends to avoid firing a chef so soon after any future openings, but he has no apologies or regrets for taking over the menu himself, because he believes he’s both a food guy and a business guy. He believes, for that matter, that his food and service can be on the same level as La Belle Vie’s and Cosmos’s, with perhaps one crucial difference. “I hate to say this,” he says anyway, “because people are going to get pissed—but Minnesota needs a little more flavor, and those places are a little too—white.”

He says, “I mean, I respect them. Parasole—they know exactly what they’re doing. La Belle Vie is great. Capital Grille is doing great. Cosmos is doing wonderful. But, you know, it’s kind of weird to say this, those are kind of a big boy club. And that’s not what we’re doing. We’re about the flavor, about the spice, about the culture, about the style.”

And, oh, yes, about The Lifestyle.