A little over a year after the unexpected death of founder and chef Charles Phan, The Slanted Door Group is ready to get rolling on realizing his vision to return to the Valencia Street space where it all started.

Tablehopper had some big news last week, which is that The Slanted Door Group can now confirm that plans are moving ahead to reopen the original location of Charles Phan's iconic restaurant at 584 Valencia Street — as the late Phan had planned to do before he unexpectedly died last year.

The team now says that The Slanted Door will likely reopen in that Mission District space in early 2027, which will mean, when it reopens, there will have been a full seven-year hiatus in San Francisco without Slanted Door's famed Shaking Beef. The Slanted Door's longtime Ferry Building location closed for the pandemic in March 2020 and never reopened, and that space is now home to Arquet.

Phan set out to raise the culinary profile of Vietnamese food in San Francisco and beyond, and he most certainly succeeded, beginning with the wildly popular Valencia Street location which opened in 1995. It was one of the first fine-dining concepts in the US devoted to Vietnamese cuisine, and was well known enough within a few years that when then-President Bill Clinton came to visit his daughter Chelsea at Stanford, they had brunch at The Slanted Door with some of Chelsea's friends — and a few dozen Secret Service agents — in April 2000.

At the time, Phan famously shrugged off the presidential visit as no big deal, telling the Chronicle that Mick Jagger had already been in twice.

All that notoriety led to The Slanted Door's expansion to a space at 100 Brannan Street in SoMa, and then to its ultimate, buzzy location at the Ferry Building beginning in 2004.

In the aughts and early 2010s, the brand expanded further with the casual and takeout concept Out the Door, which at one point had locations in Pacific Heights and in the Westfield mall. But before the pandemic struck, Phan had been paring back his SF businesses, and those Out the Door locations had already closed.

In giving up the Ferry Building space, Phan seemed eager to return to his roots in the Mission — in a building he had maintained ownership of all along, and where he previously tried out a short-lived Chinese concept called Wo Hing General Store.

In the years before his death, Phan had opened other Slanted Door locations in San Ramon, in the city of Napa, and in Beaune, France, all of which remain open.

The Slanted Door Group, led by executive chef Dong Choi, tells Tablehopper they will have a better sense of the timing of the Valencia reopening by this summer.