Decades after José Andrés first arrived in New York City, he can still conjure the scene vividly—and the picture he paints is pure Hollywood. Andrés, then completing his mandatory service in the Spanish Navy after serving as an admiral’s cook, got his first glimpse of sunlight glittering off Manhattan’s skyscrapers from a high perch in the shrouds of an old-style four-masted tall ship straight out of “Master and Commander.”
“Picture it,” the world-renowned chef, author, humanitarian and founder of GW’s Global Food Institute (GFI) told a captivated audience at Lisner Auditorium last Thursday: the young sailor, wind blowing in his face, “more hair than I have now,” passing under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. He was enthralled by the many American flags, by their field of stars on a background of night-sky blue. Though he’d later discover that the stars stood for the 50 states, at the time he thought they were symbolic of endless possibility, of the power of dreams. When it comes to the country that has been his home since the 1990s, Andrés still likes his own story better.
“I thought, man, America is brilliant.”
Andrés, HON ’14, was at Lisner to discuss his new book, “Change the Recipe: Because You Can’t Build a Better World without Breaking Some Eggs,” with journalist and podcaster Guy Raz. The event was sponsored by Politics and Prose. Andrés has been a partner and leader at GW for over a decade: he first offered the interdisciplinary “World on a Plate” class in 2012, served as the university’s commencement speaker in 2014 and founded GFI in 2023 to deliver solutions to the biggest challenges facing the global food system.
Part short memoir, part essay collection, Andrés said his new book originated as a series of open letters to his three daughters, Carlota, Inés and Lucía. When a parent passes, he said, they always leave untold stories behind. “You have nobody to ask—not only about important things, but even about goofy, non-important things.” Writing his own stories is a way of ensuring that fewer things get lost.
And Andrés has plenty to tell. Before his movie-magic arrival in New York, he’d already journeyed far from the small farming town outside Barcelona where he was born. Before joining the Navy, he’d completed a life-changing apprenticeship under Spanish culinary innovator Ferran Adrià. On the training ship’s oceanic voyage, he’d seen some of the world’s most beautiful places and eaten well in most of them. (He admitted that he lost a few meals in the voyage’s early days: “You learn that you need to be throwing up with the wind in your favor. There’s a life lesson.”)
In the 1990s, Andrés arrived in Washington, D.C., to take an executive chef position at Jaleo, one of the United States’ first tapas restaurants. Though peers warned him that D.C. was uncultured and provincial, with a culinary scene limited to lobbyist-friendly steakhouses, he found the opposite: a broad landscape of great immigrant cooking as well as up-and-coming chefs like Patrick O’Connell, who attended GW in the 1960s before founding the renowned Inn at Little Washington.
The city would become Andrés’ second home. In the decades after his arrival, he would open other D.C. powerhouse restaurants like Zaytinya, Oyamel and Minibar. The way Andrés thought about it, each restaurant was a new story.
At the same time, Andrés’ own story was expanding beyond restaurant entrepreneurship. In 2010, he founded World Central Kitchen (WCK) after visiting Haiti in the aftermath of the country’s devastating earthquake. Since then, WCK has expanded to provide meals in the aftermath of natural disasters around the world, as well as in combat zones like Ukraine and Gaza. As Andrés explains it, WCK’s role is simple: feeding people who need food, as quickly as they can. Because the organization is relatively small and flexible, it can often mobilize for emergency response more quickly than large government organizations.
In his restaurants, after all, Andrés wouldn’t tolerate delay. “So what happens if you treat every person as the most important guest in your restaurant?”
Andrés was visibly emotional as he recalled the deaths of WCK friends and colleagues killed by missile strikes in Ukraine and Gaza. But he said missions in those areas continue in honor of those lost.
“The fight must go on. The voiceless need to be supported. People cannot walk on this earth alone. If we can do something to mitigate the pain that people are going through at home and abroad, I believe I will always be there, and I hope that beyond me, World Central Kitchen will always be there.”
And no one needs to be part of a formal organization to help connect those in need to the resources they require, Andrés said. “World Central Kitchen is simply an idea—an idea that flies away. Everybody can be the World Central Kitchen. The only thing you need to do is stop thinking [about] what you should do. Put your boots on, show up, start working.”
