THE PEOPLE’S CHEF
MOST DAYS, THE RESTAURATEUR AND CHEF JOSÉ ANDRÉS RISES AROUND 7 A.M. and, after flicking through the headlines on his iPhone X, makes his way over to his home gym to work the elliptical machine. Only after he’s showered and shaved does the 48-year-old, who likes to describe his career as “one long attempt to explain the world through food,” allow himself his first meal of the day: a glass of fresh-squeezed fruit juice and a large mug of coffee with steamed milk, typically consumed in the kitchen of the Maryland home he shares with his wife, Patricia, and their three daughters.
“My wife is always telling me, ‘Enjoy the moment. The moment is now,’” Andrés says one recent morning, sipping the foam from the coffee. He is dressed, as he usually is, in rumpled khakis and a dress shirt. His feet are bare; his hair, still damp, protrudes at strange angles from his head. “Sometimes I get close,” he sighs. “But pretty soon I’m thinking, Maybe you’d be happier if you were there, doing that. Then I’m off again.”
The past year has been an especially peripatetic one for the chef, both logistically and professionally. Holding out one hand, he ticks down the list on his fingers: First, there was the legal battle with the president of the United States—an imbroglio that originated in 2015, when then-candidate Donald J. Trump described Mexicans as “rapists” and criminals. Andrés, who was born in Spain and became a naturalized American citizen in 2013, promptly pulled out of a deal to open a restaurant in the lobby of the Trump hotel in D.C. Trump sued Andrés for $10 million for breach of contract; Andrés countersued for the $8 million he said he had already invested in the property, arguing that “the perception that Mr. Trump’s statements were anti-Hispanic made it very difficult to recruit appropriate staff for a Hispanic restaurant, to attract the requisite number of Hispanic food patrons for a profitable enterprise, and to raise capital for what was now an extraordinarily risky Spanish restaurant.”
Last spring, Trump and Andrés settled the lawsuit, but the bad blood between the two men persists, and in recent months Andrés has only stepped up his criticism of the president’s immigration policies—especially the decision, earlier this year, to revoke the temporary protective status granted in 2001 to hundreds of thousands of Salvadoreans. As Andrés points out to me, it was not that he didn’t support the idea of immigration reform. But many Salvadoreans work in the restaurant industry, and he worried about the hole their sudden exit would leave in the economy—not to mention, of course, his own business. The revocation order, he says, “wasn’t pragmatic, it wasn’t thought out. It just made for chaos.”
