The Wo Hing General Store, opened by Slanted Door Founder Charles Phan in the original Slanted Door space in 2011, but it closed last year. Photo by Hélène Goupil

Wonderful piece on KQED by Rachael Myrow visiting Charles Phan of the Slanted Door (originally in the Mission) and many other San Francisco restaurants.

Charles Phan is a local boy, through and through: before he became a celebrity chef with the runaway success of the Slanted Door, he went to UC Berkeley and Mission High School. He spent his teen years in San Francisco’s Chinatown and recalls it nostalgically, even though his family struggled financially at the time. In the 1970s, his mother was making $2 an hour.  READ AND LISTEN TO THE WHOLE PIECE

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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