Although the roommates were usually inseparable, they spent this past New Year’s Eve apart. Aylee — whose last name is not being used to protect her privacy — left town. Phan planned to spend a quiet few days with her 16-year-old dachshund, Lolli, and volunteer at a soup kitchen on New Year’s Day. But as the hours counted down to midnight, Phan texted Aylee with an update: Ran Duan, a scion of Boston night life who GQ magazine once named “America’s most imaginative bartender,” had invited her out with a group of friends.
There was a show that night at Roadrunner, a beat venue in Brighton. Duan had VIP tickets.
“I have a ticket for you,” Duan texted. “Do you want any recreational enchantments?”
“No thank youu,” she responded. “I have a drug test this week haha.” Phan was routinely tested in order to fill her prescriptions for ADHD medication, Aylee says, and often brought them up as a way to shrug off offers of drugs.
Phan and Duan weren’t exactly close. Duan — lauded for his renowned cocktail destinations Blossom Bar and Baldwin Bar — helped Phan get restaurant reservations and once dated one of her other friends. But they were connected through Instagram, where Duan would post glimpses of his flashy lifestyle to thousands of followers: jet-setting around the globe as an ambassador for alcohol brands, photographing diamond-draped models, and dancing with a rotating cast of women at beaches and concerts.
A few weeks earlier, Duan had posted a carousel of photos from the past year. The caption: “May the last month of #2024 be the plot twist you’ve been waiting for.”
On New Year’s Eve, Aylee, in Denver, and Phan, in Boston, texted until about 10:30 p.m. The next morning, Aylee got a phone call: Phan was dead. Her body had been found at Duan’s house in Burlington.
For days, Phan’s friends and family struggled to make sense of it. The Phan they knew wasn’t the type to drink to excess or do club drugs. Burlington police weren’t sharing much about their investigation. And they hadn’t heard from Duan.
Still reeling from the news, Aylee and Phan’s other friends saw a new Instagram post from Duan: In a video reel of parties in Tulum, Mexico, lasers and club lights flashed over a sweaty crowd, and two women in bikini tops grinned at the lens. Midway through the video, there’s a snippet of Duan, shirtless and flashing two thumbs-up.
Phan’s friends and family were aghast.
She was dead, and they didn’t know why. Meanwhile, the 38-year-old man she was with that night, it seemed to them, had gone back to living his life, posting and partying as if everything were normal.
They weren’t the only ones who noticed. As the link to Phan’s online obituary coursed through Boston’s larger cocktail community, questions began swirling about what had happened, and how exactly Phan came to die in Duan’s home that night.
Online, Duan presents an image of success, even excess. But some of Duan’s acquaintances and former employees say that behind closed doors, the past few years have taken a toll on his restaurants and personal life alike.
Duan’s celebrated bars are struggling. Ivory Pearl in Brookline closed in March of last year, revenues are down, and a number of long-term bartenders, including his beverage manager, have left his company. For months today, Duan himself has stayed largely out of the public eye, spending much of this year in China with family. He transferred oversight of Birds of Paradise, his bar at Brighton’s Charles River Speedway, to two longtime colleagues. In June, Duan settled a lengthy legal dispute with the mother of his two children, who fought him over child support and alleged he had racked up large personal expenses on company credit cards.
It’s no secret that the lives people present online are the ones they want the world to see. Duan’s social media makes no mention of business struggles, his child support battles, or Phan’s death. Indeed, in recent months, he has largely gone dark.
In the absence of any real information about Phan, the same online world that fueled Duan’s high profile has been filled with speculation. He’s been dogged by questions, many from anonymous online commenters.
As early as January 18, an anonymous poster in the private Facebook group “Are We Dating the Same Guy? | Boston / Cambridge” screen-grabbed an image of Duan in Tulum and posted it with a string of red flag emojis.
“My friend was with him on new year’s eve and she never made it home,” the poster wrote. “She died in his house that night, and he’s partying in Mexico … like nothing happened.”
From there, other posters chimed in. “Restaurant owner. Owns Blossom Bar, The Baldwin Bar, and Birds of Paradise,” one replied.
“I’m sorry what? Is this even real?” another asked.
People who saw the exchange started to screenshot it and share it with others. If the questions about Phan’s death had merely been whispered until then, this pushed them into wider view.
In a conversation with the Globe, Duan spoke about his businesses but said he was unable to comment on the events of New Year’s Eve due to a police investigation that is still ongoing.
“Julia was one of the kindest and sweetest people and I am devastated by her passing. This past January, the investigators asked that I not comment publicly on this matter,” he said. “I will continue to respect the process and — most importantly — Julia’s privacy; but I do want to express that she, her family, and all those who loved and cared for her are in my thoughts.”
Yet the online chatter has continued, to the point that one local bartender who used to work with Duan says she heard about Phan’s death from a bartender in another city, like a grim game of telephone.
The situation is “sad and it’s unfortunate” for everyone involved, says the bartender, who asked not to be named because she still works in the industry. “I don’t know what to think.”
Throughout his career, Duan has often presented himself as an entrepreneur who pursued the American dream — and attained it.
He was a toddler when his parents moved from China to the United States. Duan’s father, Xiaoyi, was an opera singer, and after a stint in Baton Rouge, the family moved to Somerville so he could pursue advanced studies in opera at Boston University. They ended up staying, and his parents opened Sichuan Garden, a Chinese restaurant in Brookline. Ran grew up doing his homework in its kitchen.
Duan did not plan to enter the family business, but changed course after graduating in 2009 from Johnson & Wales with a degree in hospitality management, amid a recession that was straining the industry. By then, his parents had opened a second Sichuan Garden, in Woburn’s historic Baldwin Mansion, and Duan, inspired by visits to then-buzzy cocktail bars such as Eastern Standard and Drink, persuaded his father to open a tiki lounge downstairs. They called it The Baldwin Bar.
At first, some locals seemed unsure what to make of the place — Boston’s northern suburbs not being known for mixology — but in time, Duan’s self-taught cocktail artistry drew them in droves. The dramatic, Technicolor drinks — adorned with tinctures, foams, and smoke, and poured into his collection of 400 vintage coupes — popped on Instagram. The bars became both an experience and a destination, one that Duan, and seemingly everyone else, meticulously documented online.
His biggest break came during the US Bartenders’ Guild’s national cocktail competition in 2015. Then a new father, Duan concocted a boozy combo of a Manhattan and an El Presidente and named it Father’s Advice. He told the judges it was inspired in part by his own father’s wisdom: “The greatness of a man is not measured by his wealth,” Duan explained, “but by his integrity to love and his abilities to put someone else’s needs before his.”
Duan took home the best prize.
The good times continued for nearly a decade. His family’s suburban Chinese restaurants became must-visits. Duan was named a semifinalist for the prestigious James Beard Award five times, and he landed on “best bars” lists of both Esquire and Bon Appétit. In 2020, he branched out with a Brookline seafood restaurant named Ivory Pearl — the first establishment he opened without his father — and he later opened the C-Side Bar in the CambridgeSide mall, and Birds of Paradise in Brighton, which Wine Enthusiast dubbed the “most inventive bar in Boston” in 2024.
But the last year, Duan tells the Globe, has been a trying one for the businesses. The restaurants, like many in town, are struggling to meet performance expectations. Gen Z is drinking less, he says, and economic uncertainty has led him and his family to reassess the restaurants’ futures.
“There’s going to be a huge transition period for our company,” he says, which will involve leaving some locations, even while opening new ones. Duan says he recently signed a discount for a long-term lease in downtown Boston. The business model is designed for him to build bars and then have his team run them.
That team includes veteran bartenders Will Isaza and Jen LaForge, who today head up operations at Blossom Bar and credit Duan with helping their careers skyrocket.
“At this point, between Jen and I, we’ve probably worked for a dozen owners, if not more,” Isaza says. “Ran would be right at the best of the list as far as, operationally, in ownership, the amount of effort and time he puts into his staff, and then to us as management.”
The pair say that Duan’s personal life has not affected the businesses and that Duan typically steps back once a restaurant is up and running.
“We’ve obviously had a conversation with staff all around to make sure that they’re aware of things that are happening and make sure that they feel safe within our spaces,” Isaza says.
In the months since New Year’s Day, Duan has often been away. Occasionally, he’s posted updates to his Instagram stories from visits to temples in China or nightclubs in Dubai.
Still, anger has continued to metastasize online about Phan’s death. During a livestream of a cocktail event this spring where LaForge was on stage, a viewer took to the online comments: A woman was dead. And yet, “everyone’s acting like nothing happened.”
While Duan’s celebrity grew over the past decade, Phan was in Maine, building her own future.
At her family’s nail salon, she charmed regulars with her infectious smile. In high school, Phan was a standout student and sailed through Advanced Placement courses while keeping the classroom light. “I remember having to force myself to stifle my laughter at her jokes in AP Economics,” a friend commented on her online obituary.
At the University of Maine, she double majored in philosophy and business administration, managed finances for the student newspaper, and qualified for two honor societies while making the dean’s list. After graduation in 2022, all that hard work in school paid off: she landed a job at JP Morgan in Boston, finally arriving in the city where she’d longed to live.
Phan quickly amassed friends, who fell for her easy laugh and recognizable high-pitched voice, always cheering on the ones she loved. Aylee admired how deeply Phan cared about her health. She’d regale her roommate with facts picked up from Huberman Lab, a popular podcast by neuroscientist Andrew Huberman offering advice on how to sleep better, reasons to drink less alcohol, and warnings on the dangers of club drugs.
Phan loved a night at the club, where friends say she might have a few drinks but nothing else. Occasionally, she’d find herself behind the DJ booth, taking Instagram videos of spinning tracks and jumping crowds for her 1,200 followers. Atop one video of green strobe lights pointed skyward, electronic beat throbbing in the background, she wrote, “this is the dream.”
By the time Phan arrived in Boston in 2022, the luster of Duan’s restaurants was starting to dim — at least in the eyes of some former employees.
Logging hours behind the bar at one of the Duans’ establishments has always been grueling work. New ingredients are often swapped in daily, and sodas, bitters, and mixers are all prepared from scratch. Some bartenders wryly called their pay “blood money,” for how often they’d cut their hands making garnishes, and how tired they’d feel after a 10-hour weekend shift that might net $300, tips included.
Bartenders such as Justin Ang knew they could make more money slinging simpler drinks at some downtown bar. But the experience and prestige of working for Duan was a chance to build a personal brand and make your name in cocktail competitions.
“He’s a creative business owner, and believes strongly that employees not merely have jobs but careers,” says Jon Rosse, Duan’s longtime friend and current business partner. “He cares deeply about all of the employees.”
Employees say Duan looked out for his team throughout the pandemic, and once even bought insulin for a staff member who was short on cash. In 2022, he booked nine Airbnbs and flew his staff to San Juan for the Fourth of July, a $36,000 expense. Ang, who spent six years as a bartender and manager at Baldwin Bar, says he and others were told they might someday become partners in the business, and he appreciated the occasional $20 or $30 Duan would produce to boost his bartenders’ nightly pay.
“I knew I was going to make [expletive] money,” Ang says. “But when he told me he was taking money out of his pocket it made me stay longer.”
But in time Ang and others began to notice Duan’s increasingly flashy habits, especially after he separated from his longtime partner, Justina Huynh, in 2023.
He collected luxury watches and drove an Audi R8 sports car. Staffers who followed Duan on social media saw him traveling the world, developing drink menus for hotels or mixing cocktails at events hosted by Bacardí or Bombay Sapphire. After opening Ivory Pearl with Rosse, who owns an upscale jewelry brand, Duan’s Instagram account was flooded with images from St. Barths and Palm Beach.
“He was flexing everything — watches, cars — and I just don’t understand: Where did he get his money from?” Ang recalls thinking. “When I worked at Baldwin and Blossom Bar, we never clocked in, and we never got paid overtime. We never had sick time.”
Duan disputes this. “If we made any errors on our part, then we would have definitely rectified it right away,” he says.
Those close to Duan also saw the way he used the corporate credit card. According to court filings in his custody case, the two $289,313 Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons he and his father drove were purchased by Sichuan Garden and written off as company cars. Duan once explained to Ang he was able to do so because he used them for business purposes.
“He was bragging about it,” Ang says.
Court documents in Duan’s child-custody dispute, filed by attorneys for Huynh, also say that large parts of Duan’s day-to-day expenses were drawn from company accounts: “His financial statement states that his father, Xiaoyi Duan, pays several of his living expenses on his behalf, including an undisclosed amount for his mortgage, cell phone, and all of his cars.”
Only in the last few years, former employees claim, has Duan begun to implement industry-standard labor practices at all of his bars, such as clocking in and out, and offering sick pay and overtime. Ang’s wife, Sarah Buckley, says she urged the change after she began working behind the bar at Baldwin in 2023.
“It made me uncomfortable,” Buckley says. “I fought to get sick time. I fought to get punch-in logs.”
There was another shift: the way Duan’s personality seemed to change sharply after he and Huynh separated. The couple, who were together for 11 years, were mired in contentious child support proceedings for a year and a half.
Court documents tell a story that challenges the family-centric image Duan had long cultivated. Soon after she left him, Huynh alleged, Duan threw away his children’s toys and all of the family photos. Her attorneys claim Duan was putting roughly $20,000 a month in personal expenses on his business credit cards, while saying he was unable to afford child support, and that he cut off Huynh’s access to her credit card and cellphone after they split.
In court filings, Huynh’s attorneys said Duan told her he no longer had access to one of those corporate cards and couldn’t afford the level of support she requested, because his funds were tied up in the business. They also claimed Duan had a “practice of minimizing his taxable income by maximizing his spending” through the restaurants, including the orange McLaren Artura coupe he leased, through his father’s Sichuan Garden account, for $2,426 a month starting in April 2023.
In February 2024, a judge ordered Duan to pay $874 a week in child support. Huynh’s attorneys subsequently argued that wasn’t enough, and that he “continues to enjoy essentially unlimited spending habits and luxury cars and vacations.” When the two finally settled this June, the two sides agreed Huynh would get $5,000 a month in child support.
In court filings, Duan did not directly address Huynh’s assertions about his spending and behavior, and he declined to discuss the custody dispute with the Globe.
Duan’s spending caught attention around town, too. Lauren Friel, the owner of Dear Annie and Rebel Rebel wine bars in Greater Boston, says Duan would rack up a $1,000 tab for himself and his friends in a half-hour, then leave half-empty $300 bottles of wine at the table.
He “wanted to make a big show about how much money he was spending,” Friel says. “It had always felt like he had walked into the VIP room at a club.”
Kate Holowchik, a local bartender and pastry chef, has been close friends with Huynh for nearly a decade. Holowchik’s former fiancé worked for years at Baldwin Bar, and she worked there herself for several months in 2023. She says she watched as Duan began partying harder and posting about his trips to the gym and clubs.
“It was like the behavior of a 20-year-old, and he was hanging around with a lot of young people,” Holowchik says. “He’s always had this air of being invincible.”
In the spring of 2024, Duan went on a local podcast, Havers, where he discussed his lifestyle, telling the host he was “addicted to travel” and about his work as a brand ambassador for D’Ussé, the cognac owned by Bacardí and Jay-Z. And he spoke of his newfound single life.
“Honestly, Instagram is the best dating app,” he said. “The DM game is definitely very interesting. … I’m 37 right today, some of the DMs I get from these girls, they’re like 23, 24. I’m like, Wow, I can’t believe this.”
“That’s why we say you have it all,” the host, local food blogger “Chopstick Murphy,” told Duan at another point in the conversation. “Because you have a life today where you can do everything that you really love.”
In a recent interview with the Globe, Duan dismisses the idea that his social media reflected a shift in priorities and lack of focus on his businesses. “My role is constantly evolving outside of operations into developing more concepts,” he says. “I rarely travel for pleasure,” he says, explaining that his social media posts are typically just research and development for his bars.
“People see what they want to see on social media,” he adds. “People can assume what they want to see, but that’s not real life.”
The orbits of Duan and Phan collided in Boston’s nightclubs.
Phan was into hip-hop and house beat, while her roommate, Aylee, preferred EDM, so the friends would sometimes split up on their nights out. No matter where they went, they texted constantly, gossiping about who they saw and making sure they were both safe.
In time, Phan found her own people to go clubbing with — she was considered the baby of the group, friends say, the person they all looked out for. At some point last year, one of those friends was dating Ran Duan.
Duan was just someone Phan knew from going out, friends say, a guy who acted like a big shot at the clubs, covering tabs or ordering bottle service.
Once, for a friend’s birthday, Duan hooked Phan up with a reservation at Birds of Paradise and sent drinks and food to the table. On Phan’s birthday, he’d helped her get a table at Trade in downtown Boston, where he was friends with the chef.
She and Duan were not together in any romantic way, friends say, nor had Phan expressed interest in him. As 2024 drew to a close, there was no sign they’d be spending New Year’s Eve together.
Aylee says Phan had been asked to relocate to Texas for her job, but she chose to quit instead. Phan spent a few weeks that fall back home in Maine, where she rented a cabin with some friends. Aylee had invited her to join her in Denver for a New Year’s Eve concert, but Phan passed.
The roommates spent a few cozy days at home after Christmas watching reality TV, and when Phan drove Aylee to the airport on December 29, she still seemed on the fence about whether to go out for New Year’s Eve at all. But eventually Phan did, joining a group of friends, including Duan, for dinner and a New Year’s Eve concert.
Between interviews, public records, and security lens footage, the Globe has been able to piece together some of that day.
In the afternoon, according to texts shared with the Globe, Duan sent her the set list for that night’s show at Roadrunner by British electronic duo Gorgon City, and handpicked she wear “comfy shoes, and not heels.” Phan declined his offer of “recreational enchantments” — a spokesperson for Duan says he was referring to marijuana — and let Aylee know about her plans.
The group had dinner at Trade — Phan texted Aylee at about 10:30 p.m. to tell her how full she was — and then headed to Roadrunner.
Social media videos from that night show a mobbed dance floor, with strobe lights and thumping beats. As the new year rang in, six jets of smoke shot into the air, and confetti spilled from the ceiling onto an ecstatic crowd.
Heather Diehl for The Boston Globe
Somewhere in there were Duan, Phan, and their friends — several of whom did not return repeated messages from the Globe. Duan, too, declined to discuss what happened at the club, citing the ongoing investigation.
The venue, which holds 3,500, has strict bar policies for shows like this, typically limiting patrons to one drink, says Holowchick, who has worked as a bartender there. (In a statement, Roadrunner declined to discuss specific protocols, which it said are based on “audience, event date, and too many other variables to name.”) The club has EMTs on site, Holowchick says, and security at all doors and in the bathrooms, trained to engage with anyone who appears overly intoxicated.
At some point in the night, that apparently included Phan, who friends later heard had been asked to leave the club. Duan drove her to his home in Burlington. There had been talk of an afterparty there, but it never happened.
They arrived at 2:07 a.m., according to outdoor security lens footage obtained by the Globe that shows Duan lifting a slumped Phan from the passenger seat of his car and carrying her from the driveway to his front door. It’s pouring outside, and on the recording, she makes quiet guttural noises in his arms. As he shifts her to unlock the door, he says, “I’m going to prop your shoulder up, OK?”
A little more than nine hours later, at 11:14 a.m., Duan calls 911, according to Burlington police logs. In a recording of the emergency call obtained by the Globe, he sounds breathless.
“We went to a concert last night, and one of my friends got really drunk,” he tells the dispatcher. “I need an ambulance right today. I put her down on the couch last night, took her shoes off. She passed out on the couch. I just woke up. I came down here.”
The dispatcher asks how old she is, if she is unconscious.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Duan says, breathing heavily on the line. He tells them that her body is warm, but that the left side of her face is blue. They ask if her chest is rising.
“What is going on? Baby, are you awake? shorty. Julia?” he asks her. “I’m just freaking out right today.”
Four minutes after Duan made the call, help arrived.
At 11:41, a police officer stepped outside to make a phone call that was captured by security footage obtained by the Globe.
“We have a death,” the officer said. “Single family home, 24-year-old female.” He said there was no drug paraphernalia in the house.
The officer then went on to relay to his colleague what Duan had told him. Duan said he had been going back and forth to help his friends get into the show, but had seen Phan dancing with another woman. He told the officer he didn’t see her take anything, but someone had seen her put something in her mouth — the person didn’t know if it was “another drug, gum, or a piece of candy.” After that, the officer said, “It was like a light switch.” According to the officer, Duan said Phan had at one point told someone — it’s not clear who — “I’m really feeling the molly today.”
“I’ll dig into the molly thing a little bit more and let you know,” the officer said.
At 1:20 p.m., emergency workers carried Phan out the front door of Duan’s house in a body bag.
In April, the state issued a death certificate. It said that Phan had died as a result of intoxication from MDMA, also known as molly.
Phan’s family hasn’t spoken publicly about her death and declined interview requests from the Globe. But for them, finding out what happened to her has been an all-consuming quest. Phan’s parents speak Vietnamese, and language barriers have made communication with law enforcement difficult. People close to both Duan and Phan say a deep respect for privacy and personal reputation in their Chinese and Vietnamese cultures is another reason why little has been said about that night.
Those close to Phan struggle to believe that she knowingly took MDMA that night at Roadrunner; that wasn’t the Julia they knew. She was always attuned to her health, and didn’t take drugs.
Phan’s family has put pressure on the district attorney’s office to keep the investigation open, Aylee says, and they stress that no one knows if Phan might have been drugged that night, or by whom.
Sorting out a cause of death in situations where someone might have consumed multiple substances — at a hot and crowded club, no less — can be difficult, says Dr. Caleb Alexander, co-director of Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. An adverse reaction to MDMA can lead to increased heart rate, seizures, liver damage, and dramatic changes in body temperatures, which can all culminate in organ failure.
“I’m not shocked that someone could succumb to MDMA alone, let alone a combination of MDMA with other drugs. It’s just a tragic case,” Alexander says. “We teach people one pill can kill.”
Some in the hospitality industry believe Duan should have made better decisions that night. For instance, they say, he could have driven her the mile to St. Elizabeth’s hospital, rather than the 20 miles to his home.
“He was capable of driving — why didn’t he take her to the hospital?” Holowchik says.
“You’re a proprietor of a bar,” says Buckley, the former Baldwin Bar employee. “A lot of us, even in college, learn that if someone is in distress, you’re going to call 911 … You get somebody help in that situation.”
Aylee tries not to dwell on her friend’s death, but it can be hard to avoid. Someone created an anonymous account on Instagram, apparently only to tell Phan’s friends to stay away from Duan. Strangers even approach Aylee at clubs asking her what happened to Phan.
Phan’s friends have spent this year making peace with life without her. About a week after her death, one got a tattoo on her arm of a “J” with angel wings. “It feels like I lost half of me,” she wrote in the condolences on Phan’s online obituary.
In June, to celebrate the 25th birthday that Phan never got to see, a handful of her closest crew gathered at a Boston restaurant. They brought with them a framed photo of her smiling and posted a video to Instagram clinking glasses in her honor.
As they raised their toast, one glass remained on the table, untouched.
Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her @janellenanos. Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.
About the Author
