When I was in the navy in southern Spain,
we had a telescope.
When I was given the opportunity, I would go and look the stars.
I loved to spend nights just trying to look into the craters of the moon,
or a brand-new star or supernova.
When you look through the lens,
it's not any different than when you look at your life.
We're always looking to try to see what is beyond the horizon.
All my life, I took this road of other countries,
other places, other people.
Going to a new land,
to an adventure.
Don't hesitate. Don't have doubts.
Because life starts at the edge of your comfort zone.
In the last 20 or 30 years,
a small handful of people changed how we look at food.
Anthony Bourdain opens up the cultural element of food.
René Redzepi comes out with cuisine as a bridge to the natural world.
And then you have José Andrés.
José is a maximalist.
On one side, you have the chef,
who has established a small empire of incredible restaurants.
In essence, bringing Spanish cuisine to the US.
And the other side, you have a guy
entirely dedicated to World Central Kitchen,
a nonprofit organization wanting to feed the world.
It's totally unreasonable to try to do both those things at the same time.
But José wants it all.
He's everywhere all at once.
He runs toward danger.
A forest fire, he's there.
And now he's opening a restaurant.
You see him at some festival someplace else.
All in a week.
He just has this energy about him, and you wonder, "How does he do that?"
A lot of people who get to his level,
they learn to say no.
José doesn't really know that word.
He wants to push life to its breaking point.
At the same time, he talks about a desire to live a simpler life,
slow down a little bit.
But then the next day comes,
and the clock is ticking again.
There's so much more to do.
In a moment where so many people wake up with their fists balled up,
where we argue,
José is a symbol of goodness,
of curiosity.
He inspires people.
Okay, let's have some fun. The crabs are on me.
-Gracias. -You want a pitcher?
-One. -One pitcher?
-We have champagne to drink. -No, no, no, no, no.
The champagne is for my sophisticated friends.
For my other friends?
You can drink all the beer you want.
Where are your sophisticated friends?
I don't see any here.
Don't worry.
There's a lot of goodness in the world.
Hey, enjoy your plastic cup beer, man.
We don't write about it.
The news and the TV are never about the good things happening.
They are always about the terrible things happening.
All right, I'm gonna put 'em right in front of you. Right in the center.
Or the few voices of discord.
Or the mayhem.
Or the hate.
Love trumps hate.
But you have to work hard for love.
It takes years and decades and generations to build something great.
It takes very little of hate to destroy something amazing.
I want food to be the solution.
Food needs to be in every single department.
Because food is defense, food is health, food is immigration, food is environment,
food is science, food is policy, food is history, food is pop culture,
food… food is everything.
All right, we've got round two of crabs here.
This is the dots I'm trying to connect.
The best crab master.
Without those connections, no problem will ever be solved.
Oh yeah.
Growing up, we lived well, but it's not like money was plentiful.
My father was a nurse. My mother was a nurse.
Working family.
The fridge in my house at the end of the month was not very full.
But that emptiness was not something to be sad about.
Because croquetas were coming.
I think every mother in Spain knows how to make croquetas.
My mom, she would use everything to the limit.
Leftover egg that is forgotten, and the leftover piece of ham.
Leftover meat out of a roasted chicken.
And these would go into this béchamel
that she would make as light as she could, to be as creamy as it could.
The least amount of flour possible.
The balls, she would then rub them in the breadcrumbs.
Then fry in olive oil, one by one.
The outside was perfectly crunchy and golden.
And the inside was this runny, beautiful, creamy béchamel.
So my mom showed me that we could do magical things with nothing,
if we gave it the love it deserves.
I was born in Asturias, the northern part of Spain.
Where I come from, saying "I know how to cook" was like,
you are a powerful person.
You know how to cook.
My father would be this kind of cook.
He was a wicked cook. Big cooking.
Open fires to make paellas and traditional dishes.
As a young boy, I was always pushing to be part of that.
My first job was going to the trees,
gathering the wood,
and then helping make the fire.
For a young boy, that was cool. You're helping your dad make the fire.
But one day, I realized I wanted to do more.
I wanted to cook.
My father, he said, "No, I need you to help me with the fire."
I got kind of upset.
And then he sent me away. He's like, "Hey, we can handle this without you."
When we finish, he put me on the side and told me,
"My son, I know you wanted to do the cooking."
"But actually, making the fire,
controlling the fire, mastering the fire,
is the most important thing you can do with your life."
To this day, I remember that moment,
and I think the lesson of my father was an important one.
Trying to control my fire and trying to understand it.
That's what I've been doing my entire life.
Give me some cider vinegar.
A good one.
-I'll take this. Give me a string of that. -A string of chorizo?
-That's a good one for cider? -Very good.
But you don't have a fresher one?
No… I trust you.
Fine, I'll keep quiet.
These have already been world champion twice.
Okay, okay, okay, okay. All right, all right.
Try this one.
Good.
When I was 15,
I went to culinary school.
Do you have good ham hock?
-Do you prefer ham hock or pork belly? -Both.
Ham hock and pork belly. Let's not go hungry.
But I didn't spend a lot of time in class.
For me, the action was happening in the restaurants.
My school was in Barcelona,
a great culinary city.
I wanted to learn.
To smell.
To try everything.
From the little tapas bars,
to the pastry shops,
to the informal cafeteria in the middle of nowhere.
I remember these moments of discovery.
Dishes and ingredients I didn't eat before.
Falling in love with things, like, "Wow!"
Walking in front of the high-end dining,
watching through the window,
only to try to get a glimpse
of the feeling of the restaurant.
For a young cook in the making,
to be aware of the world that surrounds me,
and trying to get some of the spirit.
That, to me, was very beautiful.
Hola.
Are we going there?
There? Sure?
Let's see.
Seawater!
Seawater, but the salt, man.
Well, damn it. We'll need to add some more.
It's done like this. Get it right.
Right. Should we start the grilled crawfish?
When I was 17, I got this job in summer,
a restaurant called L'Antull in the northern part of Catalonia.
And the chef quit.
All of a sudden, I'm the de facto chef in the absence of anybody else.
And there was this guy who would come very late, right before we close.
He would order garlic shrimp, with beautiful red shrimp from Roses.
That was Ferran Adrià.
I already knew about him because everybody was talking about him.
This young chef doing crazy things
in a restaurant called El Bulli.
And one day, the mother of a friend who owned restaurants in that little town
paid for us to go.
El Bulli, already at the time, was very modern
compared to what was going on in the rest of Spain.
Ferran was reinterpreting,
modernizing Catalan traditional cooking.
But also, he started pushing into dishes
that didn't have any connection with tradition at all.
To find somebody that was doing something so modern
was like, "Wow."
For me, it was very obvious next year I wanted to come to work at El Bulli.
Hmm.
If this is the last bite before you go to hell,
it needs to be like, "Wow."
The crunchiness is… is like…
Obviously, if you're doing a TV show, nobody hears the crunching.
Yeah.
Because usually, the sound guy is way too far away from you.
Mmm!
That crunchiness
is an ingredient too.
El Bulli, for me,
was the Big Bang.
Ferran was a guy that had a way to look at the horizon
that was fascinating.
He knew he wanted to go somewhere,
and he wanted to take you with him.
He pushed himself and then everybody else to the limits,
away from our comfort zones.
Everybody talks about El Bulli, molecular and foams and…
Uh-uh.
The best legacy of Ferran was…
start looking at anything under different eyes.
And then, all of a sudden,
the same four ingredients can create a thousand dishes.
Don't take for granted the things you think you know about everything.
Because then we will miss the most amazing things in front of us.
This willingness to know on my own terms.
To search.
To find new ways.
That was what Ferran planted in all of us.
That was El Bulli.
After El Bulli, I was looking for what's beyond the horizon.
I wanted adventure.
When I did my military service,
because I already was a cook in the making,
the navy didn't send me to a boat,
but to cook for the admiral of Spain in his house.
I had my own apartment. I only had to cook for him and his family.
And all was good.
But…
There was this boat, the Juan Sebastián de Elcano.
Tall ship, four mast.
Fascinating boat.
So when I came back to cook for the admiral,
I began telling him,
"I love that you like my cooking so much."
"Wouldn't it be nice if the sailors in these boats
could enjoy the same food I'm cooking for you?"
And so he grant me my wishes, and I went on that boat.
This first time I left Europe.
I've cried when I've come here.
It's because I can't hold it in.
That's the truth.
From that moment, life changed forever.
I went to Ivory Coast.
I remember arriving in Rio de Janeiro
and catching there a squid as we were waiting outside the bay.
And then I arrive in New York.
Being up in the mast…
seeing Lady Liberty in the distance.
That's one of the most fascinating visuals any person can have in their life.
The inner voice of "go and see the world" was very strong.
That became a big call.
When I finished my military service,
I got an offer to go as a cook to America.
They called me out of the blue.
"There's a job for you in New York. You want it?
"But you have to say yes or no now."
"You have no time to, 'Let me think about it.'"
A few days later, I'm going to New York.
That's as fast as it was.
Great!
Let's go.
New York was amazing.
I had a job in a restaurant called Paradis Barcelona.
And a good salary.
And I spent there a few months.
But I was coming from Michelin restaurants in Spain,
where the search for "next" was printed in our forehead.
So I went Puerto Rico, and then I went to La Jolla.
"Let's go here. Let's go there. Let's learn more."
I didn't know what I was looking for.
I just couldn't stay in one place.
One day, I got this phone call.
"Hey, these guys are opening a Spanish restaurant in Washington, D.C."
"They ate your food when you were in New York,
and they would love for you to come and see if you want to join."
This was an opportunity to have my own restaurant on my own terms.
And there I saw a purpose.
Bring real Spanish cooking… to America.
Asturias is one of the places I feel the happiest.
But it's not a place I go often.
It's the place where I was born.
When I go there, it's something very difficult to explain.
It's almost like your cells penetrate the ground.
Like you are connected.
When I have a blue cheese from Asturias,
I go back to those memories,
to those smells.
Images of my early days in life.
In Asturias, we are making cheese using caves.
And those caves gave refrigeration, where those cheeses could be produced.
The fermentation for days, weeks, and months.
The penicillium slowly but surely goes into the cheese,
giving the maturity and the uniqueness.
In the hands of the right artisans,
that cheese becomes legendary.
Because America is my new home,
thousands of miles away from Asturias,
I wanted to make a blue cheese
that somehow would anchor me,
ground me to the place I was born.
When you have that blue cheese, it's a way to say, "This is who we are."
The best gift you can give to America is to bring the best of Spain to America.
We were opening a brand-new Spanish restaurant,
a tapas place.
Okay, let's try.
But at the time in America,
people didn't even know what tapas is.
Back in the '80s and the '90s,
Spanish cuisine wasn't very well known,
and José took offense to that.
So, to start, we have croquetas mixtas,
chicken croquetas, and jamón croquetas.
Jaleo was offering a very real Spanish meal.
And José was basically saying,
"This is the greatest cuisine in the world,
and I'm not gonna stop until every American is in agreement with me."
"If I have to hand-feed it to you and watch you react, then I'll do that."
This is the gambas al ajillo, so fresh shrimp with garlic.
Tapas was the perfect way to understand Spanish food.
"Pass me this, pass me that."
When you have four, five, six, seven little tapas,
it's like having a fascinating trip through Spain.
Jaleo was groundbreaking.
Opening this portal to Spain,
feeding six, seven, eight hundred people a day.
-You wanna try? -Yes, thank you.
It became the restaurant most responsible
for introducing to a broad audience
the pleasures of regional Spanish cuisine.
Slowly but surely expanding the horizon
of what America knows about Spanish cooking.
That, for me, was beautiful to see.
Jaleo was very fulfilling.
A fun, informal restaurant with great food.
My traditional side.
But I was missing something.
I had my creativity inside me I needed to express.
Going back to the roots,
the spirit of Ferran and El Bulli,
to say "I want to be part of that."
And that became the beginning of Minibar.
At this point, I'm becoming a young American.
So, to speak the same language,
I began deconstructing American classics.
Like the Philly cheese steak,
Caesar salad,
New England clam chowder.
Dishes I love, through my lens,
through the Spanish lens, through El Bulli lens.
What José brought to Minibar
was that spirit of modernist Spanish cooking.
Food is there to be played with.
Food is there to be deconstructed and reconstructed.
And it's an extraordinary experience.
El Bulli was this Big Bang,
and Minibar was one of those stars
that came out of this beautiful explosion.
This was the creative outlet of my dreams.
So, this book, this is just a very first look at… at a concept.
So don't get too caught up in the photos right now.
So one idea is that we group the photos together.
This one, what happened? It's too…
But it's okay.
-We can just do that one. -No. I don't like that one.
Either one of these you're okay with?
No, this one is nicer color. Or if it was…
-He can brighten that up. I didn't know-- -But this one, it's so much oil.
-The issue with this-- -This is the--
We need to say how to eat it.
-Scooped? -Yeah, I mean, this plating is so-so.
Why this looks like basmati rice?
José had become a game changer here in Washington, D.C.
And then, he started to open restaurants in other cities.
And along the way, he built an empire.
I could have stayed with Spanish cooking, and only Spain.
But if you are still in one place,
you can never move.
So I decided to be in other platforms,
in other dimensions.
For me, to open restaurants was almost like a drug.
We had to get into Greek and Turkish, Chinese and Peruvian.
And then, once you do it, it's like, "Done, check, next."
"Okay, next. Okay, next."
"Next. Next."
With more hours, more work.
But nothing beats the high you get in "This is a new restaurant!"
Traditional, high-end,
opening in other cities.
I said, "If the sky is the limit, how high I can go?"
Before you know, you have 40 restaurants.
What's up?
-Hi, girl. -Hey, how are you?
Look at that Spanish! Dreaming out loud.
-How are you? -I'm good.
Hi, everybody!
-What's up? -Hola, Chef.
You know, my first volunteer day here was around 1994.
-I graduated from this program. -Yes, sir.
-Yes, you did. -They gave me an honorary degree.
My first degree was the degree I got here.
Oh, right!
It's not success if it's not shared around.
That's something I learned early on.
I began donating my time, volunteering at D.C. Central Kitchen.
First day, peeling potatoes, but then sharing culinary skills.
There I saw that a cook like me could feed a few,
but you could be part of feeding the many.
I remember watching Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans in disarray.
The levees were breaking.
The scene is nothing short of apocalyptic.
80% of New Orleans is underwater.
It was so devastating,
especially in the Superdome.
Close to 25,000 people were trapped there.
Thousands of Americans, in an arena,
without food and water for days.
And I was thinking, "How is that possible?"
It's a gigantic restaurant that entertains with sports and music.
Are you telling me that in a place that has a massive food court,
we cannot be feeding people in six hours or less?
I remember that moment, thinking,
"We could do better."
Gracias.
-In 2010… -Cheers.
…I found myself doing a culinary event happening in the Caribbean.
All of a sudden, not too far away, there was a devastating earthquake.
The Caribbean island nation of Haiti
has been rocked by its biggest earthquake in more than 200 years.
The 7.0 quake…
I'm just watching on TV.
But this time, I'm like, "Here I am. Let's do it."
I got to Port-au-Prince.
I didn't go with a plan.
I only wanted to see it in person.
The first day, we began buying some local pots, pans,
cutting boards, and some knives,
making fires.
But it's a lot of people,
and I needed help.
To my surprise,
men, women, volunteer,
began cooking.
Everybody wanted to help.
We began making thousands of meals a day.
And there is a moment I realized
that if you give people the spark of possibility,
that spark becomes a big flame of hope.
We need more passion fruit. Needs more passion fruit.
Passion fruit doesn't taste every day the same.
The cheese is not the same every day.
-More passion fruit? -Don't want passion to take over.
But the cheese is saying, "I'm here."
The success in Haiti cracked open a new corridor in José.
He thought for all the best efforts of most humanitarian organizations,
there's a lot of inefficiency.
So, when people are starving,
why aren't we calling in chefs,
professional cooks, who know how to feed people?
And so he started feeding the world, one disaster area at a time.
The big moment of truth was Maria,
a gigantic hurricane in Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rican officials now say
it's actually the deadliest storm for Americans in more than a century.
The disaster was beyond belief,
with a very bad response by the federal government.
People are hungry all over the island.
We activated the restaurant community.
Here we have the paellas. We have three paellas going.
We reached 150,000 meals a day.
We brought the entire island together.
And the people of Puerto Rico took care of Puerto Rico.
Twenty-one days in this beautiful island of Puerto Rico,
we are about to reach one million meals.
He never slept. He never showered. He just went out and fed that island.
And it got a lot of attention.
Welcome back to The Tonight Show in Puerto Rico!
People were seeing incredible efforts
and saying, "How can I help?"
Please welcome Chef José Andrés.
Chef José Andrés.
Hollywood stars, politicians.
And José took all of that
and turned it into a bigger and bigger organization.
I don't think anybody could have imagined that it would continue to grow
at the pace that it has.
José Andrés has been nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
More than 260 million meals in Ukraine.
More than 60 million meals in Palestine.
Three million meals in Israel.
Millions of meals in Turkey and Syria.
We were massive.
Chef Andrés!
-That's him! -We love you!
I'm… I'm not him. I'm not him.
-Wow. -That's amazing.
We love you!
-Hey, how are you? -Thank you!
-I love you. -Love you more.
Hi, guys.
José became this superhero-like character.
How are the tapas, good?
Hola.
Hi.
To the point where, when disaster strikes,
the expectation is that José Andrés and his team will be there.
-He's right there! That's him! -Chef Andrés! We love you!
-I love you more. -Take a picture!
-Wow! -This is amazing.
-This is so good. -Oh my God!
-Thank you so much. -Thank you very much.
There you go.
Can you imagine what that would be like?
To wake up to devastating news, and the first thing you have to think is,
"How do I get my team out there?"
Enjoy, guys.
Family, enjoy!
"How do I feed every last person?"
-Sir, thank you for all you do. -Thank you. Hey!
Have a good time.
There's definitely a part of José that's like,
"Can I continue to do this?"
I couldn't help myself.
Always trying to take on more and more,
because you feel the responsibility to take on more.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning and my body tells me,
"Slow down. Do less."
This other part of me tells me,
"It's not enough time. I have not enough days."
I'm living in a body that is telling me two things at once.
And I'm fighting within myself.
Sometimes it's tiring being José Andrés.
The last years, they've been heavier times.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to one restaurant.
The issue I'm facing right now is this conundrum of life.
What is the best use of my time?
Between disasters and famines and wars,
I know people are going bed hungry,
but I don't have that issue,
and I go my bed every day enjoying an amazing life.
And that simple thing also comes with a weight.
I can be here talking to you right now…
…or I can be with boots on the ground
somewhere in
Gaza or somewhere in Ukraine
or somewhere in Brazil or somewhere in Yemen
or somewhere in Somalia.
At the end, you are one person and one human, like anybody else.
And that's the hardest part.
I'm 54, on my way to 55, and life is ephemeral.
It's like this star…
…that passes through the horizon.
That's it, that's life.
Now is the moment that you're shining.
That's the moment that you have to make it count.
That's the moment you can be pushing for change.
That's the moment you can push for the right policy to end hunger.
That's the moment you can push to achieve a three-star restaurant.
Now is the moment.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom
Let's go! Potato salad, oysters, scallops, abalone,
escalivada, cava.
Cheers.
With José, it's hard to measure his legacy in terms of numbers.
You can in terms of the number of meals that have been fed
and the number of restaurants that he's owned.
But I think the more important measure is probably intangible.
The number of people who have been inspired by his example.
Spain could not have asked for a better ambassador.
There's this deep pride that José has with Spanish cuisine.
And the impact that José has had across the country
really continues on today.
At the same time,
he's finding a new way to feed
the most desperate and the hungriest among us.
At the end of the day, that will be the legacy of José Andrés.
The best moments in my life
always happen at the end of my comfort zone.
The world is so beautiful and so big,
and you want to experience all the places and all the people
and ingredients and the smells,
but you can't.
The time we spend on Earth is so short.
And you have to make decisions,
because the clock ticks.
Will that other version of José simplify, slow down?
Will that version ever win out?
It's hard to imagine,
because it's hardwired into his DNA.
Whoo!
-Whoo! -Paella!
He's like, "While I'm still here, while I'm still healthy,
while I still got energy,
I'm just gonna keep going."
Hey!