The Tao of Thom Pham

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.