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“Go do your thing, chef,” a man sitting at another
gate told him as he made his way through the termi-
nal. A 6.4-magnitude earthquake had brought An-
drés back. A car was waiting to take him to the south,
where the tremors damaged homes and left hun-
gry people sleeping under tents. As his ride r ushed
through a lush green Puerto Rican mountain side,
Andrés offered a master class in multitasking, o ne
moment conducting ThinkFoodGroup business
over the phone—“I never saw the deal. I need to
see the deal before I sign sh-t,” he barked at one
executive—while in another prepping his World
Central Kitchen field workers for his arrival. “ I’ve
got good news and bad news,” he told o ne o f t hem.
“The bad news is, I’m coming ...”
Working for the blunt Andrés is not for t he faint
of h eart. On the other hand, the chaos of a restau-
rant kitchen translates into a disaster area. He often
rubs h is e yes and tugs at his beard, before express-
ing frustration. “I would like to say you put too
much food on a tray,” he tells a few of his workers
in Puerto Rico. “But that never f-cking happens.”During his 36 hours in Puerto Rico, Andrés pinballed
to some half dozen World Central Kitchen sites to assist
with t he feeding efforts, at baseball fields, a track-and-
field facility and a smaller indoor kitchen in t he c ity o f
Ponce, where workers p repared ham-and-cheese sand-
wiches with globs of mayo. (“Makes them easy for the el-
derl y to chew,” Andrés says.) In Peñuelas, the chef shared
a quiet conversation with an overwhelmed food-truck
operator World Central Kitchen had hired, urging her
to c hange the menu for dinner before patting her on the
back a nd d eparting for his next stop. In Guayanilla, An-
drés went bed to bed handing out solar lights t o f right-
ened residents sleeping outside in the dark. In Yauco,
he s tirred meat sauce in one of World Central Kitchen’s
signature giant paella pans. Within days of the earth-
quake, Andrés’ operation was serving 12,000 meals a
day in Puerto Rico.
On t he e arl y-morning flight to Fort Lauderdale, An-
drés earned the title of loudest snorer on b oard. He had
been u p l ate t he p revious night, enjoying a few pops of
his go-to drink, t he r um sour, at the San Juan restau-
rant whose namesake chef, Jose Enrique, first opened his
kitchen d oors t o Andrés after Maria. And he had woken
up t hat morning for a radio interview before the flight.
In Florida, he would catch a private charter to Hurri-
cane Dorian–damaged Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas,
where hollowed-out cars still lie by the s ide o f t he road
and o nly a s tove remains where a kitchen once stood in
most people’s homes. Although the hurricane had struck
more than three months earlier, World Central Kitchen
still h ad a s trong presence: Andrés takes pride that h is
team doesn’t just parachute in. They stick around.
Andrés went door to door, distributing some two
dozen hot meals, continuing his deliveries well past
dark. Afterward, he was genuinely hurt that a few of
his relief workers were too wiped out to join him for dinner and a few
drinks. He napped again on the ride back to the hotel—his head bobbed
with such force, it seemed in danger of collapsing to the ground. But once
at the hotel he wanted to stay up a little longer, sip Irish whiskey on the
beach and stare at the stars.
Perhaps Andrés c rashes so hard because he lives in perpetual motion,
often acting on impulse. His “plans” deserve quotation marks. He’ll shout,
“Let’s go,” in his booming voice—then stick a round for another hour, tak-
ing p ictures, lugging a crate of apples to help feed p eople, t alking t o a ny-
one within earshot. After leaving the c ruise ship in Oakland, Andrés and
his t eam were scheduled to hunker down in a San Francisco hotel room
to fi gure out their strategy for feeding America i n t he wake of COVID-19.
A staffer worked the phones to reserve a conference room. First, however,
a s pontaneous l unch i nterrupted: Andrés took five workers to a favorite
Chinese restaurant, which was nearly empty because of corona virus fears,
for piles of dim sum. Then Andrés declared h e wanted to move t he meeting
to a p ark. Then, instead of squatting in grass, Andrés decided that every-
one, i ncluding h imself, needed to find a barber to shave t heir b eards and
shorten their hair after a social-media user pointed out that facial hair can
reduce the effectiveness of the N95 masks World Central Kitchen workers
had been wearing. Andrés, who had been up until at least 2 a.m. on the East
Coast before catching his early-morning transcontinental flight, passed<
With a Worl d Central
Kitc hen staffer at a
quarantined cruise ship
in Oakland in Marc h^
André s works on a
dish at minibar, one of
his Washingto n, D.C.,
restaurants, in 20 10CRUISE SHIP: SCOTT HOAG—WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN; MINIBAR: SARAH L. VOISIN—THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES
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