LES CAYES, Haiti — Inside the cafeteria kitchen of a locally owned vetiver factory off a busy street in this quake-stricken southwestern Haitian city, the rush is on.
Teams of local chefs and volunteers-turned-sous-chefs are shredding locally grown green onions for marinade, chopping cabbage and green peppers and grabbing cans of tomato paste.
Outside, the first 100 pounds of chicken legs — enough to feed a couple of hundred earthquake victims — are simmering with local seasonings in one of three over-sized paella pans underneath an open tent in the scorching Haitian sun.
Relief team chef José Rodriguez, who has flown in from Puerto Rico to supervise the 11,000 meals cooking operation, circles the paella pan, showing two Haitian assistants how to ensure that the meat doesn’t burn. As another chef adds parsley with a little bit of ginger, Rodriguez checks the flavoring before adding several gallons of water and 165 pounds of locally bought American rice.
“We always try to cook with local flavors,” Rodriguez said before turning his attention once more to the sizzling paella pan.
As humanitarian aid efforts finally begin to pick up in Haiti’s southern peninsula two weeks after more than 2,200 were left dead and hundreds of thousands homeless by a powerful 7.2 magnitude earthquake, one organization on the ground is doing something different.
World Central Kitchen, the relief organization that has made a name for itself setting up makeshift kitchens in disaster zones, is feeding thousands of Haitians across the quake-ravaged terrain. Founded by Spanish-born celebrity chef and restaurateur José Andrés, the not-for-profit is distributing sandwiches and daily hot meals, some twice a day, while trying to support local organizations and the Haitian economy.
“This is really tough; it’s tough in a different way than from the 2010 earthquake, which caused such massive devastation in Port-au-Prince,” WCK Chief Executive Officer Nate Mook said as he visited operations in Les Cayes. “Here, the impact is spread so far out in these rural communities that are very hard to reach with small pockets of people in need.
“Just getting supplies, food and water to them,” he added, “is such a huge logistical challenge. But we are going to be here as long as we’re needed.”
With a team already in Haiti, additional WCK relief workers began arriving in the country the day after the quake. Since then, they have mounted a small army consisting of several dozen local and foreign chefs, cooking assistants, motorcycles, buses and trucks.
Where roads are inaccessible or bridges are out, helicopters and airplanes are being employed to get hot meals in and to ferry them among five kitchens, the largest of which is in Les Cayes at the Frager factory owned by Dutch-trained Haitian agronomist Pierre Léger.
Léger, who in the 1980s revived the farming of the grass known as vetiver — the woody note that’s the base of many famous fragrances — has turned over his cafeteria kitchen and back offices, and provided the amenities like electricity free of charge.
“They are serving my people,” he said, explaining his generosity.
Josh Phelps, director of relief operations for World Central Kitchen, said while other groups are bringing in dry goods, WCK, as it is also known, stands apart.
“One, we are doing hot meals, and two, we will do whatever we can to get it to the people who need it,” he said, sitting in a back conference room where hand-written sheets detail how many meals need to be distributed and where.
But it’s not just about giving out free meals.
“We want people to like it,” said Phelps. “It’s about us serving food with local tastes, and flavors that are culturally appreciated because a lot of these folks are going through a hard time and we’re not going to come down here and cook American food for everybody. That’s why we work with local chefs.”
It’s the local chefs, Phelps said, who come up with the daily menus, which on this particular day consist of chicken mixed with rice. They also help keep the meals authentically Haitian by fusing locally grown vegetables and locally purchased dry goods into savory dishes. In the process, they are also taught new cooking methods like using a paella pan.
“Buying local when we can is first and foremost on our minds,” said Phelps.
Jinimy Fede, 28, a Haitian chef, said while the local cuisine across Haiti can differ from one region to the next, there is one thing that all Haitian cooking has in common: “The local spice.”
“Once they have the taste of the local spice, everything is good,” he said.
Fede, 28, is a recent graduate of École des Chefs, the Port-au-Prince culinary school founded by Andrés six years ago to help the Caribbean nation’s fledgling hospitality sector.
While the school helped improved his culinary skills, Fede said, the experience in Les Cayes has taught him something else. “I’ve learned how to cook for 10,000 people in a day,” he said laughing.
On average the Les Cayes kitchen is feeding about 11,000 quake victims a day, and has a goal of soon ramping up to between 15,000 and 20,000 people daily. A kitchen also recently opened in the Grand’Anse, operating out of a hospital cafeteria run by the Haiti Health Foundation in Jérémie. The goal there, after helicoptering in meals these last two weeks, Phelps said, is to provide between 3,000 and 5,000 meals a day.
The concept of World Central Kitchen was born out of Haiti’s last devastating quake, the Jan. 12, 2010, temblor that killed more than 300,000 people and left the capital of Port-au-Prince and its surrounding communities nearly destroyed.
Looking to see how a celebrity chef like himself could play a role, Andrés crossed the border from the neighboring Dominican Republic into Haiti, where he landed in Malpasse. There, he found several Spanish non-governmental organizations doing relief work and began cooking for them in some of the refugee camps.
“Over the course of many years, we’ve started a culinary school here, and done a lot of work around clean cooking, going from charcoal to gas,” Mook said. “We’ve spent a lot of time here in Haiti. In many ways, this has been the fulfillment of the dream of a chef who cooks for the few but wants to cook for the many.”
Since 2010, Andrés has also been feeding relief workers and victims of calamity in disaster after disaster, the most prominent of which was 2017’s Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. There, he brought together 19,000 volunteers in 25 makeshift kitchens to serve over 3.5 million meals.
During last month’s partial condo collapse in Surfside, he and his World Central Kitchen team mobilized food trucks to feed relief workers searching for survivors in the wreckage.
In many ways, the return to Haiti where it all began, while heartbreaking, is coming back full circle.
“For me, it almost feels like ground zero,” Andrés said as he visited the Grand’Anse on Friday in a helicopter. “All the experiences, all of the trips I have done, in my case to Haiti, which are many, have given me a good understanding of the country; I have more friends in the country. I have NGOs that I like and I know that I can work with.”
That translates, he said, into being able to open a kitchen in a hospital, if there is a need, or one in a factory because “they know that we are serious.”
“Yes, it’s coming full circle,” he said. “We are a very persistent organization. We don’t take ‘No’ for an answer. We always find a way to do it.”
After road access into the southwestern city of Jérémie closed because the main bridge was damaged during the quake, World Central Kitchen was forced to fly in meals by helicopter. Still, it was able to get a refrigerated container into the city. The team had it pulled through a river using an excavator.
“I was very happy to have the first container to cross,” Andrés said. “Experiences give you every opportunity to have a better response.”
Andrés was traveling in Spain when the quake hit on August 14. He arrived last week, after first stopping in the Dominican Republic to see how the Spanish-speaking nation was helping its devastated neighbor. Andrés’ visit here, however, wasn’t just about checking on his team of cooks and the meal operation. He wanted to personally see how else he and the relief organization could be of use in the country that first inspired him to use food to bring comfort after a disaster.
After reading a story in the Miami Herald about the poor fishing village of Boucan Noël, which was decimated by the quake after having already been battered by Hurricane Matthew five years ago, Andrés decided he wanted to see the village for himself.
On Thursday, he grabbed friend Jean Marc de Matteis, the CEO of Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Haiti, which handles logistics for World Central Kitchen, and traveled by chopper. They found the remote oceanfront hamlet with the help of its local representative Ancelot Fremont, whom they picked up in Jérémie.
Upon arriving with freshly made sandwiches, Andrés saw that “almost every building had damage,” including two bakeries that helped villagers earn a living from bread making. The latest devastation, he said, added to an already difficult situation of grinding poverty and chronic hunger.
“Anybody else would not survive these conditions but they are very strong people,” Andrés said of Boucan Noël’s 5,000 residents. “But we are going to help them.”
While World Central Kitchen will now send some meals, Andrés said he plans to help the community get the bakeries working. He’s also exploring whether providing food vouchers, which World Central Kitchen is testing out in some hard-to-reach mountainous communities, is a better option than providing daily meals, given the long, rocky ride into the fishing village.
“It’s a good way to get people fed so that we don’t have to bring it in by helicopter everyday and the money stays in the economy,” Andrés said of the vouchers. “We are also bringing a doctor to take care of some minor injuries.”
Never one to give up an opportunity to try Haiti’s regional cuisine, Andrés bought a huge plate of cornmeal with black bean sauce— mayi moulen ak sòs pwa — from a local cook, sat down amid the rubble and ate it as everyone looked on in fascination.
When he showed his approval, the residents cheered in delight. The cook, who had no idea of his celebrity status, said she felt honored that he enjoyed her cooking.
Refusing to leave empty handed, Andrés brought back a bucket of the town’s fresh fish, which he later shared with friends Friday night in a special meal that included Haitian lentils, avocados and mangos from another part of the quake-ravaged region.
Fremont, the local representative for Boucan Noël, said the group has made several visits since Andrés’ and de Matteis’ Thursday visit.
“We are very happy with them, the assistance they are offering and the fact that they came back with several medical specialists to treat the people who were injured and they provided medication,” Fremont said. “They walked the community, and saw for themselves the situation.... Their visit has given us a lot of hope.”
Mook, World Central Kitchen’s CEO, said one thing that guides the work is a lesson learned from 2010, the need to involve local people in any effort.
“There is a lot more focus on how we can be smarter in how we respond this time, to this earthquake,” he said as the relief organization prepared for its next disaster response, Hurricane Ida in New Orleans. “That has guided our work. Obviously our local team in Haiti started the work initially and we brought in our relief team to come in and support with their experiences, but our kitchens are run by local chefs.”
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