73
“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 rushed
through a lush green Puerto Rican mountain side,
Andrés offered a master class in multitasking, one
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 one of them.
“The bad news is, I’m coming ...”
Working for the blunt Andrés is not for the faint
of heart. On the other hand, the chaos of a restau-
rant kitchen translates into a disaster area. He often
rubs his eyes 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 the feeding efforts, at baseball fields, a track-and-
field facility and a smaller indoor kitchen in the city of
Ponce, where workers prepared ham-and-cheese sand-
wiches with globs of mayo. (“Makes them easy for the el-
derly 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 change the menu for dinner before patting her on the
back and departing for his next stop. In Guayanilla, An-
drés went bed to bed handing out solar lights to fright-
ened residents sleeping outside in the dark. In Yauco,
he stirred 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 the early-morning flight to Fort Lauderdale, An-
drés earned the title of loudest snorer on board. He had
been up late the previous night, enjoying a few pops of
his go-to drink, the rum sour, at the San Juan restau-
rant whose namesake chef, Jose Enrique, first opened his
kitchen doors to Andrés after Maria. And he had woken
up that 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 side of the road
and only a stove 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 had a strong presence: Andrés takes pride that his
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 crashes 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 around for another hour, tak-
ing pictures, lugging a crate of apples to help feed people, talking to any-
one within earshot. After leaving the cruise ship in Oakland, Andrés and
his team were scheduled to hunker down in a San Francisco hotel room
to figure out their strategy for feeding America in the wake of COVID-19.
A staffer worked the phones to reserve a conference room. First, however,
a spontaneous lunch interrupted: 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 he wanted to move the meeting
to a park. Then, instead of squatting in grass, Andrés decided that every-
one, including himself, needed to find a barber to shave their beards 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 World Central
Kitchen staffer at a
quarantined cruise ship
in Oakland in March^
Andrés works on a
dish at minibar, one of
his Washington, D.C.,
restaurants, in 2010CRUISE SHIP: SCOTT HOAG—WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN; MINIBAR: SARAH L. VOISIN—THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES
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