70 Time April 6–13, 2020countries, serving some 15 million meals and corralling more than 45,000
volunteers. Andrés was nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
Upon landing in the Bay Area, he hopped on the phone with Nate
Mook, World Central Kitchen’s executive director, to discuss a potential
partners hip with Panera Bread t o g ive away meals. He put on a mask and
visited the kitchen his organization had set up at the University of San
Francisco, where several dozen workers prepared jambalaya and salads
for quarantined passengers. He thanked h is workers—many of whom are
veterans of past feeding efforts—but noted the risks of overcrowding a
relief kitchen in the era of COVID-19. “Less people is better,” he told a
World Central Kitchen staffer. “If not, we’re going to fa ll like flies.”
Next stop: the cruise ship, to distribute meals. On the ride over the Bay
Bridge to Oakland, Andrés was already managing past the task at hand,
as he spoke to Mook about financing a mass feeding program. “This is
going to be something remembered in t he h istory books,” he says. “This
is going to be beyond Sept. 11, b eyond Katrina. Think big. Because every
time we think big, we deliver. And the money always shows up.” Later that
evening, Andrés a nd h is s taff h uddled with leaders of an Oakland-based
company, Revolution Foods, who have contracts to cook and deliver school
lunches: t hey’ ve continued operating during the COVID-19 emergency.
Andrés urged the company’s CEO and h ead c hef t o i solate c ooks s o t hey
steer c lear o f i nfe ction. He coached them on forging partners hips : with
restaurants ordered shuttered, Andrés noted, many cooks will soon be out19 h asn’t been limited to any one place. But it p ul-
verizes the economy as it rolls across the world, and
people need money to eat. World Central Kitchen
already is distributing meals in low-income neigh-
borhoods in big cities like New York, and monitor-
ing the globe for food shortages elsewhere, some
sure to be acute.
In the meantime, Andrés is a lesson of leadership
in c risis. In a catastrophe in which the response o f
the U.S. government has been slow, muddled and
unsure, his kitchen models the behavior— nimble,
confident, proactive—the general public needs in a
crisis (and, so far, has provided it more reliably than
the federal government). Consider the Grand Prin-
cess. President Donald Trump made crystal clear
he would have preferred that people remain o n t he
vessel so the infected passengers would not increase
the tally of cases he appeared to see as a personal
scoreboard (“I like the numbers being where they
are”). Then, a few breaths later, the President said
he was deferring to experts, which made l ife e asier
for the quarantined passengers and crew who dis-
embarked, a few hundred at a time, over a week,
but h arder for Americans l ooking for the clear, un-
ambiguous instruction that’s so essential t o p ublic
health. “We have a President more worried about
Wall Street going down,” says Andrés, “than about
the virus itself.”
At the port of Oakland, where the Grand Princess
finally docked, Andrés’ team made its own state-
ment. Setting up a tent at the side of the ship, it
forklifted fresh meals not only for the quarantined
passengers but also for the crew. “When we hear
about a tragedy, we all kind of get stuck on ‘What’s
the b est t o way to help?’ ” playwright and producer
Lin-Manuel Miranda, who first connected with
Andrés in 2017 during the Hurricane Maria relief
efforts, tells TIME. “He just hurries his ass over and
gets down there.”
Andrés, at the age of 50, is charismatic, i mpul-
sive, fun, blunt and driven, an idealist who feeds
thousands and a competitor who will knock you out
of the lane on the basketball court. He is also among
America’s best-known cooks. His ThinkFoodGroup
of more than 30 restaurants includes locations in
Washington, D.C.; Florida; California; New York
and five other states; and the Bahamas. They run
the gamut from avant-garde fare to a food court
that the New York Times restaurant critic called the
best new e stablishment in New York in 2019. But
in recent years, Andrés, an i mmigrant from Spain,
has attracted more attention with his humanitar-
ian work. World Central Kitchen prepared nearly
4 million meals for residents of Puerto Rico i n t he
wake of the devastation wrought by Maria (he titled
his best-selling book about it We Fed an Island). The
organization has launched feeding missions in 13CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA FOR TIME
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