Key Results

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• Member retention: Original members still subscribing after 15+ months
• Steady monthly growth: New members joining incrementally every month
• Team development: new chefs building classic techniques and personal guest relationships through subscription fulfillment
• Community bridge: Keeping longtime guests connected during transition

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A San Francisco institution

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The Slanted Door's story begins humbly: Charles Phan wanted to sell spring rolls on the street. Maybe open a Vietnamese crepe shop.

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But over the next 30 years, those simple ideas became something much bigger. What started as a small restaurant on Valencia Street grew into a San Francisco institution. Along the way, Charles wanted to become, as Director of Operations Michelle Mah puts it, "the Chez Panisse of Vietnamese cuisine for San Francisco." He succeeded, bringing craft cocktails, wood-fire cooking, and a massive Austrian and German Riesling program to Vietnamese cuisine at a time when no one else was doing it.

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"The fact that he was doing it with Vietnamese cuisine, because that was true to him, was just the cherry on top," explains Executive Chef Dong Choi. "As a young chef, how it rippled throughout the country and inspired this next generation of chefs to follow was about, hey, we're not relegated to just being an amazing spring roll on the street."

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The Slanted Door proved Vietnamese cuisine could stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone, serving everything from those famous spring rolls with peanut sauce to carefully-sourced ingredients from decades-long vendor relationships - and all through the lens of California's culinary DNA.

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Staying connected during transition

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When Charles Phan passed away, the team faced a profound challenge: how do you honor a legacy while building toward the future? How do you keep a community engaged when your flagship restaurant is closed for transition?

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The Slanted Door Group still operates multiple concepts, including Chuck's Takeaway at their commissary kitchen, and locations in San Ramon, Napa, and even a Beaune, France. But for many longtime SF-based guests, classic Slanted Door staples are out of reach.

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"A lot of our members are core members from Valencia or the old Ferry Building, and they miss it so much," Michelle shares. These were guests who'd been coming for decades, who knew the menu by heart, who wanted to stay connected to the restaurant that had become part of their San Francisco story.

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The team needed a way to maintain those relationships, generate revenue during the transition, and keep their culinary team engaged - all while planning to one day reopen in San Francisco.

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A direct-to-guests monthly club

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Working with Table22, The Slanted Door launched a monthly meal subscription that delivers restaurant-quality Vietnamese cuisine directly to members' homes. But the club quickly became more than a revenue stream, turning into what Chef Dong thinks of as a welcome monthly break from normal operations.

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"The consistency of being able to do [our club] outside the operations of the normal restaurants as a team has been fun," Dong explains. "It's almost like an off-ramp for us to make sure we're connecting. We're not just talking about the restaurants every day. We're talking about something fun that's really direct to the guests. Having that predictability, knowing that's there to talk about and execute, has been fun for the team."

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The club gives them creative freedom to explore, working on new recipes and showcasing classics, while maintaining the consistency The Slanted Door is known for. And Table22 handles all the infrastructure - the storefront, payment processing, customer communications, and marketing support - so The Slanted Door team focuses entirely on creating meaningful and exceptional food.

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The benefit of teaching through doing

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Perhaps the most valuable result of the supper club wasn't anticipated: it created an unexpected training ground for Chef Beach, who runs the commissary kitchen. Coming straight out of culinary school without traditional restaurant service experience, the monthly subscription gave him hands-on experience with restaurant techniques and, just as importantly, guest hospitality.

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"He never really worked inside a restaurant before, so he's finally getting to cook these recipes with us, do a little R&D with us," Michelle explains. "Having him be a part of this collaboration is really giving him a lot of knowledge. He's learning so much technique-wise, flavor profile-wise. It's been really educational and fun for him to explore foods he's never tried before, never made before."

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Every pickup day, Beach hands members their bags personally, building the kind of relationships that define hospitality. "He learns their dogs' names, their children's names, their allergies, and he has a really personal interaction with them that's been really nice," Michelle says. "It gets him out of the humdrum of just running a production kitchen."

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Beach has become something of a Table22 celebrity among members, proving that hospitality can thrive outside traditional restaurant service.

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Partnership with seamless support

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Table22's infrastructure made the club feel like a natural extension of The Slanted Door's operations rather than an additional burden.

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"The support team at Table22 has been excellent from marketing, to email, to the helpline," Michelle says. "Everyone's always checking in on us, letting us know how many items we have, making sure we get our emails out, and just keeping us on top of all of our marketing."

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"The support is always super responsive and very efficient, very supportive. It's always made our lives easier. And for our guests who might be hesitant, it feels very seamless, like it's coming from The Door."

- Chef Dong Choi, Executive Chef, The Slanted Door Group

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Perhaps most importantly, Table22 helped The Slanted Door reach new audiences. "Table22 has really helped us get the message out to capture new guests and new customers that we wouldn't normally be able to reach for something like this," Dong explains.

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Building community, looking forward

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The club has delivered steady, predictable growth. "We get new members every month-we still incrementally grow," Michelle shares. "And we still have some of the original members from day one with us, and we've been doing it for over a year now, a year and three or four months at this point. It's great to see that they still support us and want to be a part of this ride and journey with us."

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Those members keep asking the same question at every pickup: "When are you reopening?"

The answer is coming - but until then, the monthly subscription keeps the community connected to the flavors, the team, and the legacy of what Charles built over three decades.

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When asked what they'd tell another operator considering a subscription club, both Michelle and Dong were immediate: just do it.

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"It allows your guests-maybe reaches different guests that normally don't come in, or don't have the option. We can only go to so many restaurants, unfortunately, and you have such amazing choices in the Bay Area. But to be able to have a service like this where you're not going out, to be able to have some of that food at home and still support the restaurants that you care about, is a cool opportunity to give your guests."

- Chef Dong Choi, Executive Chef, The Slanted Door Group