Feeding The World - Star chef José Andrés is trying to make the earth a better place, one meal at a time...

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An article on chef José Andrés from the November/December 2025 edition of Cigar Aficionado...

Feeding The World

Star chef José Andrés is trying to make the earth a better place, one meal at a time

 

By David Savona -  From José Andrés, November/December 2025 

 

 

Portraits/Jim Wright 

José Andrés is digging through one of his cabinet humidors in his home in Bethesda, Maryland, stacking box after box of cigars atop a wobbly base as if he were playing a version of cigar Jenga. Out they come, Cubans and non-Cubans, Montecristos and Cohibas, Fuentes, Plasencias and Davidoffs. The tower grows ever higher, appearing destined to topple, but it holds just long enough. “Here,” he says, directing a visitor to grab half the pile and take them out back, his booming, accented baritone a voice of command.

He has a snow-white, perfectly trimmed beard and intense blue eyes and moves around his home with his feet bared and his shirt untucked. He has the build of a man who has been around food all of his life, ample of belly. The patio is festooned with grills of all sizes, six in all, each awaiting the fire. When he speaks, the words flow rapidly—he has a lot on his mind, a lot to do and not enough time to attend to it all.

But for this moment, his busy life is put on pause while he goes through his stash, opening one box after the other. He’s been away for four months, so he wants to make sure his smokes remain properly humidified, and he’s searching for the right thing to light up right now. He grabs a wine key from a small pile of tools and cuts open the seals on a large box of Fuente Fuente OpusX cigars. Satisfied, he removes two and prepares to light. When he is offered a cutter, he shakes his head.

Chef José Andrés taking matters into his own hands and unloading food in Gaza.

“No,” he says, emphatically. “First you light. You never cut first. Hello?” He takes the uncut cigar, grabs a lighter and begins toasting the foot. The lighter is low on gas, and he spies the cedar sleeve that was wrapped around the cigar. “This is even better,” he says, tearing the thin wood into strips, which he fashions into a cedar spill. He lights the cedar and now warms the cigar’s end, patiently, slowly. When he is satisfied with his work he hands the uncut smoke to a guest, who cuts, takes a puff and ends up with a perfectly ready smoke, despite the atypical lighting style.

For the one he will smoke himself, he’s less elegant. “I’m going to do it this way,” he says. He reaches for some serious firepower—a blowtorch, the gas cannister two feet tall. The fire, as long as the cigar itself, shoots from the end and ignites the Opus. Then he cuts and takes a hearty puff.

Andrés is 56 and is used to doing things his way. He’s one of the most famous chefs in America, the owner of José Andrés Group, with its collection of 40 restaurants, many of them near his home in the Washington, D.C. area, but also in Las Vegas, New York, Miami and Chicago. One holds two Michelin stars. If you’ve dined on tapas or if you’re familiar with pan con tomate and gambas al ajillo you owe a tip of the hat to Andrés, who was instrumental in popularizing and elevating Spanish cuisine in America starting with Jaleo, which opened in 1993.

But his enviable success in the dining arena is but a small part of his story. It’s what he has done for charity that truly sets him apart. He is the founder of World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit, non-governmental organization that travels to those in need to bring them food when the systems around them have failed. The organization has provided more than 500 million meals to people who have suffered some of the worst that life can dish out, whether it be in war-torn Gaza or Ukraine, the flooded valleys of North Carolina, Caribbean countries destroyed by hurricanes or the hills of Los Angeles savaged by fire.

“We know how hard it is to feed a family,” he says. “If you can take that burden away from these people in this very desperate hour, that is one less problem.”

His mission began in January 2010 after a powerful earthquake ravaged Haiti, killing more than 200,000 people. He was about 600 miles away. “I was in Cayman, having a cigar, watching an NFL game with my friend Eric Ripert, one guy that loves cigars too, and my friend Anthony Bourdain. And then we got the news of what happened in Haiti. And it seems it was so close to where we were.” Andrés knew he had to do something.

Baking bread in Ukraine, one of several war zones where World Central Kitchen has gone to help those in need.

Ripert, the storied chef of Le Bernardin in Manhattan, has known Andrés for about 30 years. “José always had a great heart and was always extremely generous.” He remembers the day in Grand Cayman. “We heard that it was an earthquake in Haiti, and it was very bad. And José was very touched by the news . . . He went straight to Haiti and assessed the situation and created the system of World Central Kitchen. He uses restaurants and people on location—using as much local food as he can, but if not, he brings food from wherever he can and creates very quickly a system that’s efficient.”

World Central Kitchen is a well-oiled, fast-moving machine that works with local restaurants and sets up mobile kitchens, doing whatever it takes to get help out quickly. “The first thing we do is bring sandwiches and we do scouting. And we tell a community in need we will be here every day until you don’t need us anymore,” says Andrés. “We open a kitchen there or we support a local restaurant. We send a food truck. We don’t have one way. Our ways are many.” He stresses the need to move. Quickly. “Not one month from now, not six months from now—the urgency of food and water is today.”

Andrés is often on the road and at the front lines of many of World Central Kitchen’s efforts. He sees the pain of the afflicted up close and realizes that in our world of comfort it’s not easy to understand what it’s like to go without. “Hunger and thirst is not something we understand very well,” he explains. “The only way to understand what people are going through is to live almost through the same situations they are. For if not there is no way to understand what it is to go three days without water.” To help him understand, sometimes he suffers. “Sometimes I don’t drink water because I’m trying to understand what people are going through,” he says. “Also, sometimes you feel guilty.”

The areas where World Central Kitchen works are not only uncomfortable—they are often dangerous. Andrés wears flak jackets when in war zones. In 2024, seven members of his operation were killed in the Gaza Strip when their convoy was struck by Israeli drones. “The seven souls we mourn today were there so that hungry people could eat,” Andrés said during a memorial service at Washington National Cathedral. “Their examples should inspire us to do better, to be better.”

Bringing in food via helicopter after Hurricane Dorian savaged the Bahamas.

World Central Kitchen operates outside of politics, and before it was on the ground in Gaza, it helped in Israel, after the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 2023. “I had some people question why we were in Israel but my mind was never in doubt because people there needed our help,” he says. “We are an emergency organization and we adapt to difficult situations and those people suffered in that massive attack on that day.”

Andrés has been on the ground for so many disasters, making them hard to compare. “Every one is terrible in its own way,” he says, gathering his thoughts and relighting his cigar. He thinks back to Hurricane Dorian, the category 5 monster that stalled over Abaco, the Bahamas, for two and a half days, sweeping the small island with 185-mile-per-hour winds and pounding the land with relentless waves. “That created one of the biggest surges we have ever seen, where literally some islands were covered in water. People were literally on the roofs—on the entire island. Every little airport was destroyed, every control tower was destroyed. There were no airports.”

Dorian required considerable pivoting as the infrastructure of the Bahamas was utterly shattered after the 2019 storm. “We got six helicopters, two sea planes, we made a big kitchen in Nassau, in Atlantis, and that became our center of operations,” he explains. “We were sending food not only to Abaco, but many of the islands, from Nassau to Abaco and everywhere in between. In the process, we’re bringing water purification, also desalination systems, sometimes medicines, sometimes in the early days we would use the helicopters to take people back to Nassau if they had very important medical needs. And the only reason we were able to do those things is because we were there first and in a massive way.” At one point they were providing nearly 80,000 meals a day.

He has learned to rethink the way he sees the world. Stadiums are one example. “Everybody has these arenas and these stadiums wrong. They are not sports venues, they are not music venues, they are huge restaurants that entertain with the sports and music.” During the pandemic, he fed people using the Nationals baseball stadium as an outpost.

But food alone can only do so much. Without command of logistics, it’s worthless. “You can have all the food you want—you can say we have five million meals in a warehouse—but if after the hurricane passes and the earthquake passes the five million meals stay in the warehouse because you couldn’t reach the people it’s the same as not doing any relief.”

The flooding last year in Asheville, North Carolina, proved particularly onerous in terms of moving supplies to where they needed to be. “You had to reach those communities.” Sometimes they were in valleys that had been destroyed or in small towns that were wiped out by the waters. Others were isolated in mountaintops. Especially endangered were elderly people with no means of escape. “We had to get to them. How? Walking, with motorbikes for difficult terrain or landing by helicopter. And that’s what World Central Kitchen did. You have to reach the people. Food production without distribution equals nothing.”

In January 2025, Andrés was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Biden.

His actions have drawn the attention of some very heavy hitters. In July 2021, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, awarded Andrés $100 million to help World Central Kitchen. Time magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world—twice. And President Joseph Biden, in one of his last acts in office this past January, presented Andrés with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “With his unmatched personality and heart,” said the announcer, “José Andrés shows us that there is a seat for everyone at the table.”

When he’s traveling to war zones and disaster areas, cigars are a constant and welcome companion. “In all these places I always have cigars. It’s probably the place that I smoke the most.”

When he entered Kiev, Ukraine, for the first time, in the early days of the Russian invasion, cigars came in handy. “Everybody was leaving Kiev. We were arriving. And we arrived four, five a.m. in the morning. The invading troops were not too far away. And the two boxes [of cigars] I brought with me didn’t make it, because I was giving away cigars at every checkpoint,” he says. When he got to the second hotel in the middle of the night (his reservation wasn’t accepted at the first), he found a very special amenity. “The first thing I see with very big letters—CIGAR ROOM.” He bought two of the three remaining boxes, and, feeling guilty, later restocked the supply for future travelers.

As a young boy in Spain, growing up outside of Barcelona, Andrés marveled at his mother’s ability to feed him and his three equally hungry brothers on a modest salary. He reminisces in particular about the succulent croquetas his mother would concoct from leftovers, mixing them together with a cream sauce and frying them up. “In my house, everything would be used to the limit, and sometimes in tasty ways,” he says. “My mom would make better dishes with the leftovers. I have a memory for her croquetas.”

He liked them so much that he wouldn’t even wait for them to be cooked. “She usually would make them late in the day, coming back from work . . . and that means making a béchamel with the onion, the butter, the roast chicken pieces, chopped. It was very diverse, the leftovers, usually there would be egg, the sweet ham. Chicken usually.” Andrés would wait for his mother to go to sleep before taking an early taste of what was to be tomorrow’s meal. “At night I would go and put my finger in the tray,” he says, “and then I would push it with my fingers to try to cover up the scene.” Then his brothers would do the same, perhaps with less precision. “By the end of the evening, that tray looked like a war zone, man.” He smiles. “She began making two trays. The big one—this would usually be lunch—and a little one, she allowed us to do that, so we would not sneak at night.” Croquetas are now standouts on the menu at some of his many restaurants. “To this day, at Jaleo and Bazaar, my two most Spanish-leaning restaurants, it’s one of the top sellers. And I’m so happy.”

Andrés prefers to light his cigar before he cuts, in this case using a large and powerful blowtorch.

While José’s mother was the main chef of the household, on weekends it was his father who took over the cooking. “My mom was more feeding the family, and my father was more like ‘let’s feed everybody. The friends, family members, the uncles.’ Anytime there was a reason for celebration he was the one cooking for everybody. And I think I got this in my DNA too much.” Paella was his main dish. “We would go camping and spend there one, two weeks. My father not only cooked for my brothers and my mother, but for all the other camping tents.”

When he was 15, he went to study cooking at school and then cooked at a variety of restaurants in Spain. “I would be going to a lot of restaurants for just two days, just to get a glimpse of what was going on.” Working at a convention center helped almost as much as places with Michelin stars. “That was great because I was getting this glimpse of super-high-end cooking, but also volume cooking . . . . This was a very good early training in my life.”

After a stint in the Spanish Navy (where he first encountered cigars on a trip to the Dominican Republic) he began working at Spain’s El Bulli. It was widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential modern restaurants for its creation of foam as well as traditional dishes made in completely revolutionary ways. “El Bulli was one of the most exciting places in the last two, three decades on research and development. Everything began on tradition.  A lot of trial, a lot of science in the process.”

He speaks about mayonnaise, the emulsified combination of oil and egg, as an example of taking food to a different level. “Mayonnaise is a mother sauce, but it’s very narrow in its achievement. Mayonnaise allows you to say, ‘ah—this is a fat and this is a protein.’ So, if you combine any fat and any protein you can achieve basically the same result . . . . That opens the entire universe. By learning that you went from a little road, which is mayonnaise, to a big highway that can take you to many other little roads.”

After El Bulli, he moved to the United States and began building his empire, starting in 1993.

When Andrés describes food, he makes you hungry. He starts ticking off the items that really make him happy: sea urchin, mushrooms, asparagus, artisinal ketchups made from oysters. He likes to live large—and that can sometimes be hard to keep up with. Ripert of Le Bernardin found that out when he vacationed with Andrés in what turned into a never-ending meal. Ripert gained 20 pounds. In one week.

“We were starting the day early, around 8, and going to the market, and José knew everybody,” he recalls. The first drinks started around 10 a.m., paired with tapas. Then, it was back to the market for more groceries, more snacks, and then it was time to cook. “Drinking, eating—we were having lunch around 3 o’clock in the afternoon,” says Ripert. After a quick nap, the Falstaffian adventure continued with more drinks, more snacks, before it was time to cook once again, resuming their dining around 1 o’clock in the morning.

“I never recovered,” says Ripert with a laugh.

Relaxing with a Fuente Fuente OpusX off his back patio in Maryland.

“I think there’s nothing better than a long lunch finished with a long cigar. And usually we have one, two maybe,” says Andrés. He also smokes quite a few cigars on the golf course, even though he says he’s not great at the game. “I slice it all the time, and you’re looking for mushrooms in the forest, but I forget everything and light the cigar and just walk the course.”

Andrés obviously knows how to enjoy life, but all the time he spends in disaster areas has taken a toll on him.

“It’s bittersweet,” he admits. “I don’t know how much longer I will be working . . . People that work on these missions, they need breaks. You pay a toll—not only emotional, but physically . . . . You start the days early and you go to bed very late.”

“Family, friends, I don’t have too much time for them. My business . . . I’m amazed my business still runs well . . . I’m only as good as the people I have around me, and lucky for me I have very good people who cover me up. Sometimes I wish I had the life of a sports guy, you have your career, you retire at 30, 35. This never ends! The emergencies never end, the restaurant never ends.”

A pause. A puff on the cigar. “You feel sometimes you are only putting a finger in a wall full of holes.”

Source: https://www.cigaraficionado.com/article/feeding-the-world