When I spoke with José Andrés, he was the founder of World Central Kitchen and the José Andrés Group in Washington, DC, and already one of the most consequential figures in modern global cuisine.
What Andrés speaks to in the book begins with his apprenticeship under Ferran Adrià at El Bulli in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He told me about a cold day in April with no reservations on the books, when the pastry chef saw no point in preparing the dessert cart and Ferran asked for the best one anyway. Maximum effort when the room is empty and only the brigade can see. Andrés has carried that seed into his own restaurants and his field operations ever since. He speaks just as directly about how he builds an organization. He hires people who are smarter than he is, people who could be his boss, and he flattens the structure so that ideas can surface from anywhere in the company rather than being filtered down a pyramid from the top.
“I am always hiring people who are smarter than me, those who could be my boss” José Andrés, founder, World Central Kitchen and the José Andrés Group
On creativity, he gave me a sentence I keep returning to: creativity is everything, and it blossoms only in a chef who is very knowledgeable about what came before. On perfection, he is equally plain. There can be very good, great and incredibly delicious dishes, but there is no perfect dish and no perfect recipe. Two cooks following the same instructions for caramelized onions, with different onions, different slices, different pans and different oil, produce two different dishes. Each adjustment must be learned rather than told.
In the book, José Andrés appears in Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, for the dessert cart story and the lineage it extended; in Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, for hiring above himself and flattening the organization; in Chapter 6, The Creative Act, for the relationship between creativity and deep knowledge of the past; and in Chapter 7, In Pursuit of Perfection, for his insistence that every plate can always be improved.
“Every plate can always be improved, so we must never get complacent and think that we have achieved perfection.” José Andrés, founder, World Central Kitchen and the José Andrés Group