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. Hang out with Thom Pham for a while and you’ll come to understand that his sense of The Lifestyle derives from his personal creation story, the result of his particular immigrant’s alchemy. He was born in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, in 1974, a year before the capital fell to the North Vietnamese army. The son of a Vietnamese mother and a GI father whom he’s never met, he was one of the lucky Amerasian children able to emigrate to the United States, in his case, through Lutheran Social Services. He came to Minnesota with his older brother, Thanh, in 1988. Thanh was seventeen at the time, he was fourteen.

The boys were adopted by Richard and Mary Johnson and moved in with their family in an eight-bedroom house in the Longfellow neighborhood. The Johnsons had four daughters and a son of their own and two older foster kids—a girl from Africa and a boy from China—and were active at the nearby United Methodist Church, where the girls still sing in the choir. Thom didn’t know any English, and he struggled for some time to interact with his new siblings. Though his brothers and sisters attended South High School, he decided to go to the more distant Southwest, an obvious attempt to differentiate himself from the Johnsons.

His life, though, had never been easy. In fact, the stories he tells about his childhood—most of which are all but impossible to corroborate—are often harrowing. Pham’s grandfather was a well-known sugar cane exporter and a judo master. His grandmother was the daughter of a French father and a Vietnamese mother, and, according to Thom, was the very epitome of a lady. He says he rarely saw his mother. Six years before he was born, she had run away from her childhood home in the port city of Quin Nhon to avoid an arranged marriage. She went to Saigon, took up with an American military policeman stationed there, and bore his two children, Thom and Thanh. She eventually returned to Quin Nhon with her kids, but the shame brought down on the family by this prodigal daughter was too much, so she left the little boys with her parents and returned to Saigon. “We would only see my mother once or twice a year, if that,” Thom recalls.

Amerasians—children born of Vietnamese mothers and American soldiers—were part of the tragic dividend of the war in Vietnam. After the U.S. pulled out, kids such as Thom were another reminder of the brutal internecine conflict, more representative of the superpower invader than of a native son. The young Pham brothers’ grandparents had lost most of their  property to postwar “land reform” and three older sons to the war itself. The boys were forbidden to leave the house without supervision. “But we were kids,” Thom says, “and when that backdoor was left open, we went out.” Waiting for them, however, was a hostile and violent community. Thom says he and his brother would come home beaten—sometimes by other children, sometimes by the children’s parents, sometimes by Communist soldiers. One time, he says, he and Thanh were thrown into the town’s well. Another time, they were detained overnight in a backwater detention center. Once, Thom says, he was covered with honey and thrown into a nest of fire ants. “It was horrible,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘How can these people treat us this way? How can they be so evil?’ ”

The history of Thom’s name reflects the changes he underwent throughout his childhood. He was born Thom Van Roman (the last name of the biological father he’s never met), but his grandparents changed his name to Thom Van Pham when he moved in with them in Quin Nhon. When he was adopted by the Johnsons, he Americanized “Thom” and took his adoptive father’s first name as his middle name—becoming Thomas Richard Pham—refusing to take the Anglo surname. “Do I look like a Johnson to you?” he says today, laughing.

He says he was a misunderstood teenager without many friends, and the judo he’d learned from his grandfather came in handy. “Imagine, Southwest [High] in the eighties,” he says. “There was a Latin group and a white group and a black group—I didn’t belong to any group.” He hints at something more than boys-will-be-boys adolescent violence when he describes marketing his judo skills as his first entrepreneurial venture: “Whoever paid the most money, I would be their friend for a while.”

As difficult as life was in Vietnam, there had been a simple formality about the way he was raised, and at first the laid-back attitude of his adopted land was jarring. “The first two years, I was pretty much locked away from the world, but when I was sixteen or seventeen my cousin had a birthday party,” he says. “It was my first party. Great, I can dress up. That’s what we do in our culture. When you’re invited to go someplace, you dress up. In dress pants, with your shirt tucked in, and all slicked and ready to go. But when I got there, I swear to God, I got so mad, I couldn’t even talk. They’re, like, all in these sweatshirts and shorts and all that and grilling in the garage. And I was like, ‘This is fucked up! What is this?’ I was so mad I wrote to my mom. I wrote, ‘You cannot believe what happened to me today. I went to this party, and people were so disrespectful of themselves and myself.’ And I went on and on about it for three pages.”

Things got better as his English improved, and he became more active at Southwest, joining the swimming team. Then he landed a job at Kinh Do, the popular Vietnamese restaurant in Uptown, where he did just about everything, from busing tables and frying won tons to serving as host. With the money he earned, he bought some fresh threads and a new white Geo Trakker with pink details. He had a hot girlfriend.

If there were any signs of trouble, his adoptive parents deny it. “Thom never acted out,” says his adoptive mother, Mary Mackey (the Johnsons have since divorced). However, Pham tells a story in which he ignored his adoptive father’s insistence on less television and, frustrated, Richard Johnson cut the TV cords in the house. “Then I cut all the electrical cords,” Pham says. “Lamps, appliances, everything. Then I bought a new TV and a new radio, put them in my room, and I was the only one who could enjoy them.” “Oh, I don’t remember that,” Richard says. “If anything, it was his brother who gave us most of the problems.”

In 1998, after studying business for two years at Normandale Community College, Thom returned to Vietnam to see his mother and his grandparents and to spend eight months traveling around his homeland. “I saw people without arms, without eyes, with horrible deformities,” he says. The trip gave him a perspective he was lacking—an understanding that he was one of the fortunate. “And I could understand some of their rage, the anger that drove them to do what they did to me,” he adds.

Though Thom’s brother moved away from the Johnson home when he turned eighteen, Thom decided to remain a part of the sprawling family. What’s more, after working at Kinh Do for a few years, he began playing the real estate market, buying houses, fixing them up, and either selling them or renting them out.

Pham says his interest in business comes from his mother, whom he describes as a successful businesswoman in Ho Chi Minh City, and his grandfather. He attributes his gastronomic instincts to his grandmother, who ran a catering business in Quin Nhon. “Growing up, we would sit around the table, and the topics would always be food and business,” he explains. Real estate, though he became good at it, didn’t satisfy him the way the food business did. So when he was twenty-four, he bought a run-down chow mein joint in St. Louis Park and opened ThanhDo. He created his own menu—pan-Asian comfort food with pot stickers and noodle dishes—and hired his younger Johnson siblings to work in the kitchen and on the floor. He rehabbed and decorated the place himself, scraping decades worth of dust from the walls, repainting the rooms top to bottom, and hanging paper lanterns bought at Urban Outfitters from the ceiling. ThanhDo was an immediate success.

“I remember the first day—I hung a big banner promising 30 percent off,” he says. “People were lined up outside of the place. I came running out from the kitchen screaming, ‘Lock the doors! Lock the doors!’ ” One evening in April, Thom Pham is standing behind the salad station at Temple wearing a well-tailored Paul Smith sharkskin suit, long, black leather shoes with tiny studs on them, and some kind of extravagant, futuristic, bright yellow watch, instructing his pantry chef how to toss a noodle salad.

Alexis McKennis, vita.mn sex columnist and Temple’s maitre d’, has grown close to Pham over the past couple of years. She is one of many female co-workers and friends who describe him simply as a “sexual being.” He seems to be connected at the hip to Grzechowiak, the tall, fair executive assistant he plucked from the ranks of Azia’s servers, in a just-barely platonic sort of way. “I keep telling her to leave her husband,” he teases. “She’s crazy about me.” Pham is openly gay, but he has what can only be described as a breast fixation. One night, after hours, he demonstrates his ability to unclasp McKennis’s bra with either hand. “What can I say—I love beautiful people,” he says with a smirk.

For an Asian homosexual of modest stature, Pham—a notoriously reckless driver, screeching from restaurant to restaurant in that black Mercedes—exudes a hypermasculine, almost James Dean–like energy. He has gone from being the little boy in his grandfather’s house to the successful restaurateur and big-city playa. He came out of the closet in his twenties, after opening ThanhDo, and began dating Mike Stebnitz. He and Stebnitz were a couple for almost seven years—they opened Azia and Azia’s adjacent sushi room, Anemoni, together.

In early 2006, Stebnitz and Pham broke up. Stebnitz sold his shares in Azia to Pham, but they remain friends. Stebnitz says that they still have a lot in common—Stebnitz had also been adopted—but that it was difficult to find a support system for their relationship in Pham’s conservative adoptive family. “There was support for Thom, and there was support for me,” Stebnitz says, “but there wasn’t a lot of support for the relationship.” Richard Johnson says that Pham’s sexuality rarely comes up during family conversations, and even “if it was something we disagreed on, it doesn’t matter because relationships in our family are based on love.” Pham, for his part, seems to revel in the friction between his personal politics and his adopted family’s. He takes an obvious pride in providing for a family of white Methodists that, once upon a time, held a perfunctory “Asian night” (mediocre chow mein take-out) as one of its rotating ethnic family dinners. Now, all five of his younger Johnson siblings are employed at ThanhDo, cooking and serving Asian food exactly the way Pham wants it. And, in what is undoubtedly his most Freudian real estate acquisition, after Richard and Mary Johnson divorced and sold their home, he bought their old house—his old house—near Lake Street from the new owners, and turned the nine bedrooms and one bath into two much more spacious bedrooms and three baths, and once again makes it his home.

If his house serves as a touchstone of his ability to overcome adversity, Pham seems at home taking a hands-on approach to the adverse environment at Temple. He’s been standing behind the line in the kitchen a lot lately, which may not be the best site for those Paul Smith suits, but he believes it’s good for Temple. That, of course, remains to be seen. On a recent Friday night, there were seventy reservations on the books at Temple, a 180-seat restaurant. By contrast, at Azia, with about 250 seats, there were 400 reservations that night.

“Ngyuen just wasn’t getting it,” Pham says. “He’s more into French-American cooking, and I wanted the concept to be more French-Asian.” But, by most more objective accounts, the concept isn't the only problem facing Temple. Most of the early reviews focused on the high prices at a restaurant that doesn’t reach the level of culinary execution and service sophistication of a Chambers Kitchen or a 20.21.

Because Asian food, especially the Southeast Asian–influenced variety Pham serves at Temple, Azia, and ThanhDo, is so popular with younger diners—it’s colorful, it’s sweet, it’s fresh, it’s hip—Pham sees his three restaurants as different stages in a sort of progressive gastro-Asian academy. He believes he is educating his dining clientele. While ThanhDo is his home-cooking spot out by Mommy and Daddy in the burbs, he characterizes Azia as his high school of Far Eastern cooking in Uptown, and Temple as his downtown, postsecondary option. (Whenever it opens, Mix, he says, will fit between ThanhDo and Azia.) He is taking his niche market along what he hopes will be a natural learning curve. But when Temple opened, the student wasn’t quite ready for the prices, and the teacher didn’t really deserve to be paid what he was asking.

Pham’s cuisine is of the fun-goes-great-with-a-cocktail variety. But while some of Temple’s food is done very well—the pine nut–crusted sea bass on dumplings is superb—both prep and service can be inconsistent, prompting the negative reaction the restaurant received when it opened. First the critics and then his customers blanched at the $12 cocktails and $65 Kobe rib eye. Since firing Ngyuen, Pham has expanded Temple’s menu—both appetizers and entrées—by almost a third, mixing in more items in the $18 to $25 range. He has also instituted a late-night happy hour menu with drink specials, something akin to the wildly popular happy hour at Azia. Grzechowiak says, “We figured out quickly that when people get drunk, they want something fried. They don’t necessarily want monkfish liver.”

While Pham doesn’t view the menu expansion as either a dramatic concession or an out-and-out regression, others in the restaurant community seem uneasy. David Shea of Shea, Inc., a consultant on restaurant design, whose client roster includes both La Belle Vie and Fhima’s, loves Pham’s entrepreneurial aspirations, but cautions him to slow down and concentrate on building infrastructure. “The plate costs that he’s doing—he’s jumping into the ultimate levels of service,” Shea says. Pham needs to discern what Temple’s service personality should be, then refine it. “Fine service is La Belle Vie, fine service is Chambers. I love the service at Manny’s, but it’s friendly, in-your-face service. [Restaurant Alma’s] Alex Roberts has a different kind of approach—an urban hip kind of thing.”

Shea believes that Pham should consider a more gradual growth. “It took [Chicago’s] Rick Bayless [another Shea client] ten years to move from having two restaurants, Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, to a larger operation," says Shea. "It’s important for Thom to focus on executing the best. He’s got a great personality, a great place in the business, but the idea that he’s got to be out there, hitting the market the right way . . . he shouldn’t overshoot it.” His advice: “Play to his strengths, which is great personality and a great kind of showmanship, and build a good infrastructure of chefs, sous chefs, GMs, accounting people, back-of-the-house people.” Finally, he references David Fhima and his disastrous closings (Mpls. Cafe, Louis XIII) brought on by financial miscalculations based on hasty growth and the pursuit of style over substance: “Don’t do a David Fhima, where you try to do it all on your own and it falls on your house like a ton of bricks.”

For the most part, Pham agrees with the assessment. He says there will always be people at his restaurant who look at the tab and say, “Eleven bucks for water!” At the same time, he trusts his instincts, approach, and accessiblity. On any given night, Azia is packed with people of all ages and all colors, beautiful people and hipsters, people eating, bobbing their heads to the DJ in the Caterpillar Lounge, getting wasted. “People ask me all the time,” Pham says, “ ‘Why don’t you open a gay club?’ It’s because I love people. Why should I open one door and close another? If you have a double door, why lock one?”

Why keep anybody from enjoying The Lifestyle? 

Associate editor Steve Marsh wrote about adventurer Dan Buettner in the April issue.