The David Rubenstein Show: Chef and Humanitarian José Andrés

This is my kitchen table and also my filing system. Over much of the past three decades I've been an investor. The highest calling of mankind I've often thought was private equity. And then I started interviewing. I watch your interviews because I know how to do some interviews. I've learned in doing my interviews how leaders make it to the top. I asked him how much he wanted. He said $250. I said fine. I didn't negotiate with him. I did no due diligence. I have something I'd like to sell. And how they stay there. You don't feel inadequate now because being only the second wealthiest man in the world. Is that right? One of the world's greatest chefs is also one of the world's greatest humanitarians. His name is Jose Andres. He owns and operates 30 restaurants around the United States. He also operates World Central Kitchen. Something that he helped to start to feed people in times of great distress around the world. It's an incredible gesture for which he's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He's also a great chef at his own house. I've eaten at his house. I can tell you there is no better meal you're ever going to have than eating at the home of Jose Andres. Well today I'm here with Jose Andres who's the world famous chef and a world famous humanitarian. And we are doing this in a very unusual place. My kitchen which I suspect is not used quite as well as your kitchen. So Jose thank you very much for coming to my house in Bethesda and to my kitchen. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here really. So yesterday I was at your house and you cooked me a terrific meal. And I've been at your house a number of times. On top of everything he has a TV show. One thing I don't know how to do is cook. The only thing I've ever cooked in my life is when you put something in a microwave. I call that cooking. So is that counting or that doesn't count? I think microwaving is cooking too. Okay. What you're planning to make is some type of fried rice? I'm making something that you're going to like because I know you love vegetables. So let's talk about your background and what you're doing which is quite extraordinary. But to give people a sense of it you are Spanish by birth. And you came to the United States originally with the Spanish Navy. Is that right? Yeah. First time. Well, in Spain the military is mandatory. Back in the days it was a dream of mine to be in the Navy. They put me to cook for the admiral of Spain. Why? Because I already was a young cook with talent. I already was champion of Spain of young cooks. Really? You already had a background? Yeah. I began working in kitchens when I was 14, 15. So in the military all of a sudden admiral. But I'm like, sir, I don't want to cook for you with all due respect. What are you saying? This is the best position in the Navy. No, I want to go in a boat. This boat I came to America and I traveled around the world. It was a tall ship, the Juan Sebastián Delcano. The training ship for the midshipmen, for mast. It changed my life because on that boat six months on the ocean I learned the meaning of teamwork. I arrived to Pensacola, Florida and then I arrived to New York. Can you believe that 30 years ago with that ship I docked on the west side in Manhattan on 30th Street. 30 years later I opened my biggest restaurant Mercado Little Spain on 30th Street, 150 meters away from the same place I arrived as a young sailor. American dreams, the American dream is real. So after you finished your tour of duty in the Spanish Navy, you went back to Spain. And when did you come to the United States as a non-Navy person? Yeah, I arrived like around, I came back like beginning of 1991 to New York to be a young cook in a Catalan restaurant in New York, in Manhattan. It was a lot of investment that was coming from Spain into the United States. It was the Olympic Games of Barcelona 1982. It was a lot of kind of cultural and business collaboration. I was one of those guys that came to America to become almost like, you know, a culinary ambassador to a degree. I came to America, I never looked back. So you set up your own restaurant eventually. Yep. And your first restaurant, was it a Spanish restaurant? Yeah, yeah. Then I was in New York. I left New York. I traveled around. I went to Puerto Rico. I went to California. I was in La Jolla. I really got to know America, different parts of America. But then I got this call. Two businessmen that both had two restaurants, Roberto Alvarez and Rob Wilder. And they say, we are opening a Spanish restaurant in Washington and we would like for you to be our chef. I came. I joined another great chef who was a partner. And they said with the chef, I was 23. It was January of 1993. Washington has been my home since then. Now you have 30 restaurants, more or less, in Las Vegas and other parts. Los Angeles, Miami, New York. But they're not all the same. In other words, you have restaurants that do Spanish food, different types of food. Is that right? Yeah. In a way, what I do is I don't open businesses. I always say I tell stories. I'm a cook. I express myself through my cooking, my plates. And what you see is a collection of stories. I share with people the stories I learn and the stories that other people tell me one plate at a time. Then they become restaurants. Now the most famous restaurant you ever wanted to open was in the Trump Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. And you had worked out an arrangement, I guess, with Donald Trump before he was elected president. And then after he made his opening speech when he said he was going to run for president, you decided to back out. He sued you. What was that all about? And how did that get resolved? Well, this was a restaurant where it became the building that used to be the Opo's house office, the Opo's office, that became the Trump Hotel. I had a dream of opening a restaurant on that building. But then when Mr. Trump began opening, he's making opinions about immigrants. I thought that the way he was doing it was not aligned with my values. I understand everybody can have their opinion, but their opinion should be respectful. He began showing kind of a lot of disrespect in the way he was talking about my fellow citizens, in this case immigrants, undocumented or not, good people. At the end, I guess, between the lawyers, they arrived to a friendly resolution, which I cannot talk much more about it. But he opened his hotel and I got what I wanted that was not opening my restaurant on that location. Okay, you have 30 restaurants, more or less, not the one in the Trump Hotel. You're pretty successful. You're well-known. You're also teaching at Harvard in food and other things. Pretty nice life. You're going to build an even bigger business empire. And then all of a sudden, there's an earthquake in Haiti. So why did you decide to kind of walk a little bit away from your restaurant business to go feed the people in Haiti? You're not Haitian. Nobody asked you to do this. What propelled you to all of a sudden say, I'm going to feed the people in Haiti that don't have any food? I almost had to go back 28 years ago when I arrived in D.C. first. I was able to go to an organization called D.C. Central Kitchen, the best fighting hunger organization I know. We don't only take care of people out of the streets and ex-convicts, put them in a place of possible success. We train them to be cooks. In the process, we get food that is about to be thrown away. We put everything together. We give opportunity to people. We feed people at the same time. Brilliant idea. I saw the power of food to change the lives of people, the life of a community. When Haiti happened, I was very close to Haiti. I was in the Cayman Islands. And it's almost like a connection. I'm enjoying a good time with my family on a beautiful island on a vacation. And all of a sudden, I'm like, man, take a look at that disaster. I didn't go immediately. But very much a few weeks later, I landed in the Dominican Republic. I drove to Haiti with one simple intention. First, to learn. Because to help, you must learn how help must be provided. But for me, it was the beginning of the creation of World Central Kitchen that was very simple. To bring together the power of the food people of the world, restaurants, chefs, food people, farmers, to make sure that we will be able to answer to emergencies quick and fast. Unlike sometimes when other relief organizations go in to help people who are in distress, you don't just say, here's some food. Go cook it. You actually provide meals themselves. You cook the meals. Is that right? At the very beginning, when there is destruction, I used to think that you can give people food. It was very naive. When there's destruction, it means that the homes are destroyed. There is no clean water. There is probably no gas. People are probably in distress, looking for loved ones. When chaos happens, you cannot give people dry beans and expect that that's all you can do. At the very beginning, it's very important that you move away the problem of where the food is coming from, where the water is coming from. This is one less problem that they have to handle. So that's what we do. We arrive. We see the situation. We start feeding people using whatever possibilities we have in the places we go. Every situation has a different response. This is the crazy reality we live, that to be poor is expensive. That's why the main role on governments in partnership with private sector and partnership with NGOs must be that food is a right that should be enjoyed by all. I notice when you're pouring something in, you just kind of pour in what you think is right. You just have a lot of experience of what the right amount is. I do believe that we are following recipes too much in this DNA, in this 21st century, and we are planning too much. And if anything, this year, and especially the last four years, I think they are teaching me what I always thought was the best way. Overplanning is death of businesses. You have to be more concentrating in giving your teams the possibility of failure, and more important, the possibility of making decisions on their own, where not every single moment must follow a plan, because more often than not, things don't go as planned, and people need to be adapting to the new circumstances on their own. Let's talk about COVID. When COVID came, people stopped going out to restaurants. You had 30 restaurants. I assume you had to close virtually all of them. Is that right? For a while? We had to close all of them. But you still paid your employees for a while, because you were nice about it, but wasn't that kind of expensive, the paying people who weren't working? I mean, this is a decision I probably will make again. My partners supported it, and then we were very lucky that then something called PPP came. But when we made the decision, we kept everybody in peril for four, five, six weeks. And when you're talking about 1,200, 1,400 employees, that's a lot of money. But we had to do it because, remember, there were very chaotic days. Nobody knew what was happening. We had to close because it's a virus. When will we be reopening? Everything was kind of very complex, and we thought that being there next to the people at the beginning was the right thing. I will do it 10 times over. So in this period of COVID, you have been feeding people in the United States who have lost their jobs, who don't have food. Did you ever think in the United States you'd be in a situation where people are standing in food lines at quite the level that we've seen? Kind of. We saw a glimpse when the federal government shut down. We don't realize that we had many Americans, hundreds of thousands of Americans, millions, without a paycheck for six weeks. And some people could handle it, but it was many, especially mothers, single mothers with few children, no paycheck from the federal government. Many of them suffered. So we already began kind of a system where we were feeding over 36 states, and we were doing thousands and thousands of meals. This somehow was the training for what happened. I never imagined that we would have something like this, but we knew that America, as great of a country we have, it's a lot of people that they are living under the poverty line. And when something like this happening, when people losing their jobs, an emergency situation like the one we were facing, that hunger was going to be open for everybody to see. Well, despite your efforts, which have been heroic, many Americans are going to sleep at night hungry. And I think there are large numbers of tens and tens of millions of Americans. So is that because the government isn't getting food to people in addition to what you're doing, or people just don't have the money, or what is the basic problem? Well, World Central Kitchen, we are used the tip of the iceberg. There's many great organizations doing good work. But what happens is we don't have anybody that really is trying to coordinate everything. We saw in this pandemic hospitals without food because everything was shut down. People were not going to work. Cooks were not going to the kitchens. All of a sudden you had hospitals that nobody was feeding. Organizations like World Central Kitchen, we had to activate that emergency. But then we saw millions of Americans losing their jobs. Many of them are undocumented. I'm not going to get political if we should be taking care of the undocumented or not. But this is the reality, that we had millions of Americans, undocumented, working the fields so you and I, we could have vegetables in the supermarket. Working on delivery so you and I, we could be getting food delivered home. We had undocumented that they've been moving America through this pandemic. So it's very clear to me that we must be taking care of everybody. The federal government has possibilities to have a better way to keep everybody fed. The last big meaningful conversation about how to feed America happened in 1969 under the Nixon administration, which was the White House Summit of 69. 50 years ago, over 50 years ago, it's way overdue that we have another food summit at the White House where we bring the ideas that have worked in the past, new ideas that they need to be coming forward, and improving others that need some tweaking. We have the power to do it. I hope that in this new administration, and Republicans and Democrats together will come to allow those new ideas to come and flourish. Now you've argued, I think, that there should be a food czar, and that the Department of Agriculture should be maybe renamed the Department of Food and Agriculture. Right now, who's in charge of food in the United States? Quite frankly, technically nobody. And I know some people would say, José, come on, I'm here. José, I'm here. We need the person next to the president that has the big political support. And the office we need. After September 11, the National Director of Intelligence Office was created to make sure that all the agencies and all the intelligence people will come together so we can be good defending America from a possible terrorist attack. I do believe it's time that we will create also the office of the National Director of Food and Nutrition at the White House, almost with a seat on the National Security Council, next to the president, and making sure that we bring the resources of every single department. Food is more than the USDA, even is the obvious one. But food is also the Department of Housing. We can end food deserts in every housing project that the U.S. Housing Department has. It's transportation, because food also needs to have good mechanisms to bring food to the poor rural areas all across America. Food is also homeland security. Food is immigration reform. Food is so many things at once that that's why we need to take food once and for all seriously. So you campaigned for Joe Biden, President Biden. Would you be interested in this job? Or you've still got your restaurants and World Central Kitchen, so you're not going to do something like that in the White House yourself? If there was nobody else, maybe I could be a good leader on that front, only because I'm a hard worker, I'm creative enough, and I know how to bring people together. But me, quite frankly, I'm a guy that likes to be with boots on the ground. I like to see what's happening. So if it's me one day, who knows? I'm 51 now. What I want now is to make sure that, number one, we recognize that we need that person, that we recognize we need that position, and that actually I'm very happy with Secretary Vilsack because we need somebody with expertise. Obviously, having a governor of a rural state, having somebody that has done eight years as Secretary of Agriculture is going to help enormously to put the USDA forward. And I know he's coming to the position with bold ideas, but I keep saying we need the White House Food Summit, and we need this new director, National Director of Food and Nutrition. This is imperative. If we don't do this, we are going to miss a lot of opportunities to maximize the potential of the many agencies coming, working together. I know some people are going to be telling me, is this a fried rice by the famous chef? I'm not famous. I'm Jose. I'm cooking at home. I'm cooking for my friend. And I'm not Superman. I cannot be interview, answering questions, controlling the fire, controlling the vegetables, controlling everything. So is this perfect? No. Is it going to be delicious? Yes. I cook because I love to feed my family, and I love to change recipes. I don't like to repeat recipes. I barely cook the same recipe twice ever. Why? Because life is too short. I only have a few thousand meals in my life left. I want to make sure that every meal counts. I want to make sure that every meal is like, wow. So when you're a chef, you're cooking elaborate meals for people. They then consume it in 5 or 10 minutes. Do you get pleasure out of making people happy, or do you say, I worked so hard on this, and now it's gone in 5 or 10 minutes? Well, sometimes I create dishes that they are used to experiencing in one second. Sometimes a second is all it needs. You know sometimes one of the most amazing things? If you get fresh snow, and you go out with a spoon, and you grab the top of the snow fresh, you get a little bit of honey or maple syrup, and you put a touch on top, a little bit of salt, and you bring that snow that just came down, and you put it in your mouth, your life is going to change forever, because that's going to be the best sorbet, the best that you've ever eaten. So it's very important to understand those moments. Now when you go home after a hard day at work, the World Central Kitchen or your restaurants, do you say to your wife, could you cook a meal for me, or do you do all the cooking at home as well? No, my wife does a lot of cooking at home, and my daughters, obviously she has more of the traditional recipes that we always cook, like lentils or chickpeas with spinach. Those are dishes that are always in my home and my daughter's love. But you don't say, honey, this isn't quite as good as I would have cooked it, or let me tell you how to cook this better, you never say that. When my wife cooks, it's always the best meal. Okay, so if you were in a desert island, and you could only have one meal, what would you want to eat? What is your favorite food to eat? If I was on an island and I had one meal, probably, without doubt, I would say, give me an egg. An egg? I love eggs. Okay. I love eggs. A fried egg is the most complex thing in the history of mankind, to fry an egg properly. Those people that will control the power to fry an egg, it's just people that they can't retire from anything else in life, because it's the ultimate thing in life to know how to properly fry an egg. So around the world, there is a rating system of great restaurants, the Michelin Guide. Do you pay attention to that kind of thing? Is that important to you, Michelin Guide stars, or is that not that big a deal? When I was 14, 15 years old in Barcelona, I would walk outside one, two, three Michelin-starred restaurants only so I could have the opportunity to have a glimpse inside, because my family would not take me. They were expensive restaurants. I still remember that my heart was kind of bumping the first time I came into a Michelin-starred restaurant, in the kitchen, not even to eat. So imagine myself 35-plus years later. Obviously, I have two restaurants with two Michelin stars in L.A. and Miami. Even the L.A. one is already closed. And the biggest joy of my life was the day we got those two-star Michelin. Will I work hard to try to get, in the future, a third star? Sure. It's what you live in life for, right? Michelin has been here forever. It's one of the big guides. I don't do it so much for Michelin. I do it for my team. I do it for me. I do it for the people. I do it for the pride. But do I work in the future to try to achieve three-star Michelin? You bet I will. For your humanitarian efforts, you've been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. I don't know. They said it, but I don't know. But is that something you care about, or you're more focused on other stuff? I mean, quite frankly, all those things are good for the Forrest Gump movies of my life. But at the end, what I care, I have a hard time now knowing when there is an emergency and I'm not there. Right now, next to being with my family, my heart really is at its best. And I feel good with myself when I'm in an emergency, knowing that we are bringing relief to others. This is going to be so good, I'm going to charge you. Okay. Well, I'd say I've eaten fried rice all over the world for many years. This is the best I've ever had. It's really good. Hey, you want to invest in a restaurant? Um, okay. If you're the chef. Okay. Boom.