Thom Pham has great posture and nice hair and audacious jackets and a grin like a Cheshire cat.

He glides around his restaurant Azia, which has helped transform a once-tattered section of Nicollet Avenue, and shakes a hand here or folds a napkin there. His movement suggests someone schooled in dance or the martial arts, and, in fact, he's a competitive ballroom dancer and once taught judo (before realizing, "Who would I beat up?")

It's here, moving among the mixed tables of swells and neighborhood locals, that Pham's artistry reveals. The restaurant business is his fandango, and it has been since he started working in his grandmother's kitchen at 4 a.m. every day in Qui Nhon, Vietnam, at age 6.

That was long before the Minneapolis Johnsons adopted 15-year-old Pham, who, as a mixed-race boy of a single mother and an American G.I., didn't have much future in Vietnam.

In the 17 short years since, Pham, 32, has built a mini-empire of three restaurants and a bar, with another restaurant and another bar set to invigorate a worn section of E. Lake Street by late fall.

You might consider those either remarkable accomplishments or staggering risks. But Pham will tell you that hiding from Communists in a basement in Vietnam is a risk. Coming to America at age 15 is a risk.

A martini bar? Not so much.

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Leaving Vietnam

On a typical Friday night, Azia and Pham's adjacent Anemoni and Caterpillar lounge teem with people, many of them handsome, many of them interesting and many of them venturing into the inner city because Pham has created a haven of soft lights and tickling water and birdbath cocktails.

People lip at drinks that have become part of Twin Cities nightlife nomenclature. The Nicollet Sling. The ginger martini. Thom's Tamarind.

Since the doors opened in 2003, Pham has been at the door, maybe in one of his famous jackets, like the pale pink one, or something paisley and velvet. Always a smile. A nod, a table touch.

His grandmother weaned him on the work ethic. The rest, he's not sure.

"My mom is a great lady, but a lousy cook," said Pham with a smile.

Life for a child of an American G.I., even one he's never met, was difficult, even dangerous, in Communist Vietnam. Pham was schooled at home and rarely went outside. He and his family decided he would do better in the United States. (Pham goes back for a visit every couple of years.)

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"Oriental night"

Rick and Mary Johnson adopted Pham through Lutheran Social Services. He didn't speak a word of English, but two days after arriving in Minneapolis, he got a job in the kitchen at Kinh Do, in Uptown.