José Andrés
Spanish-American chef and restaurateur, known for popularising tapas in the United States and for humanitarian food relief
Biography
José Ramón Andrés Puerta, known as José Andrés, was born in Mieres, Asturias, on 13 July 1969. He is a Spanish-born chef and restaurateur who built most of his career in the United States. He belongs to the generation of Spanish cooks who, from the early 1990s, carried tapas and modern cooking across the Atlantic. His importance to the history of gastronomy lies in two areas: he is often credited with helping to bring small plates and tapas to North America, and he turned his kitchens into a tool for feeding people after natural disasters and conflicts.
He spent his childhood in the province of Barcelona, where his family moved when he was young, growing up in Santa Coloma de Cervelló. By the age of twelve he was already cooking for his whole family. At fifteen he enrolled at the Escola de Restauració i Hostaleria in Barcelona, and while studying he trained at El Bulli, the restaurant run by Ferran Adrià, which was then gaining international attention. During his military service he was assigned to cook for an admiral, a detail that often appears in accounts of his early years. After finishing his training, he left for New York at the age of twenty-one.
In New York he worked in Spanish restaurants such as El Dorado Petit, Paradis Barcelona and El Cid, none of which survive today. He also spent time in other Manhattan kitchens, broadening his technical training. In 1993 he was hired to lead the kitchen at Jaleo, a new tapas restaurant in Washington, D.C. That restaurant became the foundation of his career. It is often said that Jaleo was among the first places to present tapas as a serious dining format in the United States, and several of the brands that define his work grew from it.
With the owners of Jaleo, and later as a partner in his own group, Andrés helped open Café Atlántico, focused on the cooking of Latin America; Zaytinya, with dishes from Greece, Turkey and Lebanon; and Oyamel, which serves traditional Mexican food. In 2003 he started Minibar, which began as a six-seat counter inside Café Atlántico and became a stand-alone restaurant with twelve seats. Its format, an author cuisine served at a counter as a long tasting menu, became one of his best-known ideas. In 2006 he formed ThinkFoodGroup with Rob Wilder, and the company expanded to Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Puerto Rico. Minibar received two Michelin stars in the Washington guide in 2016. His plans for a restaurant in the Trump hotel in Washington led to a dispute: after Donald Trump's remarks about Mexican immigrants in 2015, Andrés withdrew from the contract, the Trump Organization sued, and Andrés countersued before both sides reached a settlement in 2017. The space later reopened in 2023 as The Bazaar by José Andrés.
Television and books extended his public profile. From 2005 to 2007 he hosted and directed the weekly show Vamos a cocinar on Spanish public television, TVE, and in 2007 he published a recipe book with the same title. In 2005 he had already published Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America. He also taught: in 2010 he gave a course in culinary physics at Harvard with Ferran Adrià, and in 2012 he was named dean of Spanish studies at the International Culinary Center, where a curriculum on traditional and modern Spanish cooking was developed. That year he also returned to teaching at George Washington University, where he offered a course on how food has shaped civilisation, and in 2023 he launched the Global Food Institute there. He became a naturalised American citizen in late 2013, after more than two decades living and working in the country. His business has also faced criticism: an employee filed a complaint over unpaid overtime, and Andrés acknowledged mistakes and irregularities in some pay.
For many people, his humanitarian work is the most visible part of his career. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti he founded World Central Kitchen, a non-profit that prepares and distributes meals after disasters. The organisation has worked in countries including the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Peru, Cuba, Uganda and Ukraine, and in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 he received the Basque Culinary World Prize for this work, and in 2021 the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord. That year Jeff Bezos also gave him an award of 100 million dollars, part of which Andrés said he would use to help people affected by the war in Ukraine. In 2024 seven WCK workers were killed in Gaza by drone strikes. Andrés said the attack was deliberate, a view Israeli and US officials rejected. In 2025 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Beyond cooking, he was appointed an ambassador for citizenship by President Barack Obama in 2015, co-chaired the President's Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition in 2022, and in 2024 he announced he would seek to run for a seat in Maryland in 2026.
Today Andrés continues to run his restaurants and, above all, World Central Kitchen, whose operations he oversees with the support of a team of about two hundred people. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Patricia Fernández de la Cruz, who was born in Cádiz and whom he married in 1995, and with their three daughters. He enjoys golf and cigars, and he keeps a collection of about 1,500 rare cookbooks. His legacy is less a single dish than the way he helped Americans understand Spanish cooking and the way he showed that a kitchen can be used as a response to humanitarian crises.
Key contributions
- The popularisation of tapas and small plates in the United States, starting with Jaleo in Washington, D.C. (1993).
- Minibar by José Andrés, a counter-based tasting menu of author cuisine that earned two Michelin stars in 2016.
- Vamos a cocinar, a Spanish public television show (2005-2007) and a cookbook of the same name that introduced his cooking to Spanish audiences.
- World Central Kitchen, a non-profit founded in 2010 to serve meals after natural disasters and humanitarian crises.
- The Global Food Institute at George Washington University, founded in 2023.