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Gigi’s Wine Lounge is a new neighborhood wine bar and bottle shop in San Francisco. With dishes like a tuna tartare with fish sauce, a Caesar salad with fish sauce dressing and a Wagyu beef hot dog with “pork floss,” it isn’t exactly an obvious candidate to be featured in this column. But there is, in fact, more than one Jewish story to tell.
There’s Madison Michael, the general manager and wine director of Gigi’s, who came late to her Judaism and grew up loving Vietnamese culture. And there’s award-winning Vietnamese American chef and author Tu David Phu, whose first job out of culinary school, at age 23, was at Saul’s Deli in Berkeley.
I learned this bit when I interviewed Phu in 2017 for Edible East Bay, after the San Francisco Chronicle named him a “rising star chef” and just before he competed on Bravo’s popular cooking competition “Top Chef.”
Phu came to Saul’s in 2009, when Peter Levitt and Karen Adelman still owned the popular Jewish deli. They saw his potential and invested in him, suggesting Toastmaster classes to help him improve his communication skills.
Levitt and Adelman jokingly called him Tu “The Jew” Phu.
“I fell in love with Jewish culture and food because I could relate to it like my own,” he told me at the time.
Phu, 39, was raised in Oakland and lived here until very recently, when he moved to L.A. and wrote a cookbook (“The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quoc, Oakland and Everywhere in Between,” co-authored by Soleil Ho).
When Phu was opening Gigi’s at 299 Divisadero St., he had one person in mind — and one person only — to be manager and sommelier: Madison Michael. They met a decade earlier and connected immediately on a number of things, including Michael’s love for Vietnamese food and culture. Her father had a Vietnamese business partner when she was young.
“For the first five years of my life, I was eating their food, and spoke Vietnamese as a toddler speaks it,” she said. “Ten years ago, when I met Tu, we had such a connection, both coming from fine dining and being heavily tattooed people raised in the Bay Area. And then there were his connections to Judaism and mine to Vietnamese culture. We found kindred spirits in each other. I call him my brother.”
Michael grew up in Healdsburg and spent some years in Fort Worth, Texas. She has a strong Jewish identity now, but wasn’t raised that way. Though it was her father who was Jewish, it was her mother, a spiritual “seeker,” who adopted Jewish practices — and tried to impose her new belief system on the family. Michael was a rebellious teenager at the time and said her mother’s attempts to make the home kosher did not go over well. Michael demanded to know why suddenly the family could not eat foods they’d been eating forever, and her mother’s “because I said so” wasn’t a good enough answer.
It was years later, when Michael was studying gender politics in the Middle East at San Francisco State, that Judaism began to strongly resonate for her, she said.
“What drew me in was the understanding that there is so much in Judaism that is deeply tied to an actualized life,” she said.
Michael practices in her own, nondogmatic way. She tries to take Yom Kippur off, but when she couldn’t last year due to a staff training, she still fasted. About being heavily tattooed, she said, “I’m a proud tattooed Jew still loved by HaShem, and if anyone has a problem with that, they can take it up with someone else.”
“My Judaism shows up in trying to leave the world a better place than I found it, trying to be fair, and merciful, and giving tzedakah whenever I can,” she said.
At 34, Michael has a long and impressive resume for someone her age; she said she’s opened 16 restaurants, including Mourad and Merchant Roots, which she co-owned for a time.
While she doesn’t know how long she’ll stay at Gigi’s, since her favorite thing to do is open up new restaurants, she loves it for its uniqueness. She said she isn’t aware of any other wine bar with a Vietnamese menu. And she’s committed to having at least one or two wines available for around $10 a glass, and some snacks on the menu that should make it affordable as a neighborhood place.
“I feel really strongly that workers earning minimum wage should be able to get a glass of wine and a snack for less than an hour of their life,” she said. “While I can’t fix the cost of rent or living prices, I can make sure there’s delicious wine at an approachable price point no matter what you do for a living. We have an obligation as a small business in a residential neighborhood to make sure all people can come here if they want to.”
I was lucky enough to try Gigi’s, and definitely felt it was the kind of place I’d frequent if I lived closer. We loved the playfulness of all the dishes we tried, and it had a sophisticated yet fun vibe.
“We’re trying to be an offering to this neighborhood and this city, where we’re losing these midlevel neighborhood spaces, where we offer something for everyone,” Michael said, “If you want to come drop $400 on a bottle of Champagne, I’ve got you. If you want to slam sparkling wine in a Chambong with friends” — reader, look it up if you don’t know, but we drew the line at trying one — “I’ve got you. Or, if you just want to read a book with a glass of wine, we can offer that, too.”