(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Does José Andrés ever sleep? In August, he was in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, where his World Central Kitchen (WCK) organization helped local chefs such as Bryan Caswell provide 20,000 meals at the George R. Brown Convention Center. By early December, he was coordinating relief efforts for those affected by the fires in the Los Angeles area, tweeting at the Red Cross from Miami that he’d found a kitchen to make 1,000 meals a day.
In between, he spearheaded an effort to feed the citizens of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which made landfall on Sept. 20. In his ever-present khaki field vest, Andrés’s name became synonymous with the relief effort that has provided 3 million meals across the island—about 75 percent of them hot—serving paella outside the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan, delivering Thanksgiving dinner in Vieques, and bringing carne guisada to rural mountain communities such as Naguabo.
His motto is simple: action before planning. “When you have people who are hungry, you don’t have time to sit down at a table and make plans,” he says. “If you’re lucky, it happens at the same time. But probably the planning is after.”
Yet “there’s nothing revolutionary about the chef’s strategy,” says Brad Kieserman, vice president for disaster operation and logistics at the Red Cross. Feeding people is Andrés’s life’s work, and when disaster strikes, he shows up. “I’m never surprised to see Chef,” Kieserman says. “He always brings energy, passion, and his indefatigability. Can other people replicate what he does? Absolutely. They can model it every day in their own community.”
Andrés is based in Washington, D.C., where his Michelin-starred Minibar is the flagship restaurant of almost 30 he operates across the U.S. Long credited with bringing the small-plates concept to America, he runs an empire that includes the Bazaar, which dishes out a menu of avant-garde cuisine in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, and Miami; Beefsteak, a vegetable-focused restaurant that has outposts across the mid-Atlantic; and Jaleo, a less-formal Spanish spot with five locations. He has three eateries in Los Angeles alone, the site of his current volunteer efforts to cook for the 200,000 people forced to evacuate.
Five days after the storm hit Puerto Rico, Andrés flew on one of the first available flights to San Juan. He arrived at the eponymous restaurant of his friend José Enrique, the island’s most celebrated chef, who was already cooking sancocho, a hearty stew made with pork and potatoes.
“The night he flew in, José came to my restaurant and started formulating a plan,” Enrique says. It was true chaos, Andrés recalls. “Ninety percent of the island didn’t have electricity,” he says. “Banks were closed, gas stations were closed, food stores were emptying, people were using generators, but there was not enough diesel to go around.”
Andrés set up three channels that roughly mimicked his response in Houston to Hurricane Harvey. One was a system by which community centers and hospitals could pick up meals from Enrique’s restaurant. Another handled deliveries by car to places that didn’t have access to transportation. Food trucks served a third role by going to communities that were cut off from the rest of the island. (Andrés persuaded some of the cooks who owned the trucks to stay on the island rather than flee.)
“We didn’t plan for long or meet for long,” he says. “We said, ‘We just have to start cooking.’ ” Unlike the efforts of other rescue organizations, he didn’t want to limit distribution to cold food or MREs (meals-ready-to-eat), instead preferring the dignity of a home-cooked meal. “It was important to serve hot food,” he says.
The day after his arrival, Andrés already was overseeing production to feed 2,300 people. “From there, it went ballistic,” Enrique says. “Not a snowball effect but an avalanche.” After six days, the output was close to 20,000 meals a day, and the group of volunteer chefs had outgrown the facilities. It was an epic, efficient production—one that he’s characterized as “the largest restaurant in the world.”
“Big agencies don’t activate quickly enough,” Andrés says. “They spend a lot of time asking, ‘How should we do this?’ ” By mid-October, there were three kitchens at the coliseum, the largest indoor stadium in Puerto Rico, serving about 80,000 meals a day for workers inside medical centers, people waiting in line for gas, even volunteers at the Salvation Army.
At its height, the WCK operated 18 kitchens in Puerto Rico. Crews were preparing and delivering more than 120,000 hot meals and sandwiches every day to reach all 78 municipalities on the island, spending $300,000 to $400,000 a day to accomplish the task. “It more than exceeded everyone’s expectations,” Enrique says. “Except maybe José Andrés’s.”
Born in Mieres, Spain, Andrés trained under Ferran Adrià, the renowned chef at Spain’s legendary temple to modernist cuisine, El Bulli. Eventually he moved to the U.S. and became a naturalized citizen in 2013. Along the way, he’s received the award for outstanding chef from the James Beard Foundation, been named best chef in America by Bon Appétit, and was granted a National Humanities Medal. In 2012, Time magazine included Andrés on its list of the 100 Most Influential People, thanks to his efforts to feed Haitians after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake.
It was his experience in Haiti that inspired him to create the WCK. Although he’d worked with such nonprofits as D.C. Central Kitchen for years under its founder, Robert Egger, Andrés wanted an organization that would have a global focus. “I do what I do in Puerto Rico because of Robert Egger,” Andrés says. In 2013, the WCK created a “chefs without borders” network that now includes more than 140 professional cooks. “This is not about one man feeding the world,” he says. “That’s why I didn’t call the organization ‘José Andrés.’ ”
Until this year, WCK focused most of its resources on such things as food-related job training in impoverished regions and education and social enterprise projects. It has built a culinary school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, helped honey harvesters in the Dominican Republic, and cleaned coffee-roasting facilities in Nicaragua. When Hurricane Matthew hit Haiti in 2016, killing more than 900 people, the WCK distributed 15,000 meals from a mobile kitchen, the beginning of its disaster relief efforts that continued in Houston and Puerto Rico.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bb2iKEph5kZ/?taken-by=chefjoseandres
The organization’s work in Southern California is in partnership with L.A. Kitchen, an offshoot of D.C. Central Kitchen; Andrés is a founding chairman. “Feeding people in Los Angeles brings it full circle for me,” he says. “Men and women who graduated from L.A. Kitchen’s program were feeding firefighters, feeding victims. This is the beauty of it. In moments of need, the same cooks and the same people can be the agent of hope.”
Social media has been Andrés’s primary method of communication. He couldn’t be in Los Angeles when operations started because of prior commitments at his Miami restaurant. (On Dec. 9, Andrés was being honored for the WCK’s work.)
But he sent messages on Twitter (630,000 followers) and Instagram (224,000 followers) that told where chefs could help in California. It’s a strategy he employed in Houston and perfected in Puerto Rico. Since he first posted the Twitter hashtag #chefsforPuertoRico on Sept. 27, it’s been viewed almost 3.7 million times, according to the Twitter analysis tool Keyhole.
The visibility of these efforts has helped the WCK secure donations, crucial to feeding people still left without food, clean water, and electricity. The organization was also awarded $10.8 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency grants. Having fulfilled the FEMA contract, Andrés announced on Nov. 13 that the WCK would stay in Puerto Rico through Christmas and focus on the central regions. (Donations will allow the group to feed people through December.) It will continue to operate satellite kitchens to serve the most vulnerable communities, including those in the municipalities of Ponce and Naguabo.
“There’s no single entity that is going to be able to handle any part of a large response by itself,” says the Red Cross’s Kieserman. “It’s a big table. But Chef Andrés contributes according to his talents, and his passion is feeding people.”
Andrés won’t say how much of his own money he’s spent on the effort, noting that the WCK is “still working” on donations to cover all the costs. “After my wife started seeing my credit card bills from Puerto Rico, she said, ‘José, you always said you wouldn’t die rich. Now I know what you mean,’ ” he says.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Andrés traveled back to Puerto Rico with his wife, Patricia, three daughters, and 12,000 pounds of turkey. They began at 3 a.m. that holiday morning, serving meals at three locations around the island—San Jose, Vieques, and Humacao. At 7 p.m., Andrés, his family, and 1,000 volunteers as well as members of the military sat down and had their own celebratory feast.
To contact the author of this story: Kate Krader in New York at kkrader@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net, James Gaddy
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