The Rise of Jose Andres

Featured in The Wall Street Journal (January 28, 2009)

By KATY MCLAUGHLIN

In 1991, a young chef named José Andrés arrived in the U.S. from Spain with $48 in his pocket. At the time, hardly any American diners even knew what Spanish cuisine was.

Today, Spanish food is one of the hottest things in high-end dining. Last week, Mr. Andrés's newest restaurant, the Bazaar by José Andrés in Beverly Hills, Calif., received the only four-star rating for a restaurant in the Los Angeles area from the Los Angeles Times. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow co-stars in a public television show in which she and celebrity chef Mario Batali eat their way through Spain. Spanish chef Ferran Adrià has arguably become the most celebrated figure in global haute cuisine.

No chef has benefited more from -- or contributed more to -- the Spanish boom in America than Mr. Andrés. For nearly 20 years, he has worked to become "the face of Spanish food in America," he says -- a Spanish hybrid of Julia Child and Wolfgang Puck. In the process, he has tried to change the way Americans see his country's cuisine.

Mr. Andrés's empire -- which includes eight restaurants, a partnership in a Spanish-product import company, Spanish cookbooks and TV cooking shows in the U.S. and Spain -- is expected to see more than $40 million in gross sales this year, says Rob Wilder, chief executive officer of Mr. Andrés's company, ThinkfoodGroup. With the November opening of the Bazaar, a 417-seat restaurant in the $230 million Philippe Starck-designed SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, Mr. Andrés expanded outside the Washington, D.C., area for the first time. His Washington restaurants Jaleo and Zaytinya are popular hangouts for Capitol Hill staffers and lobbyists.

At his avant-garde Washington Minibar, reservations often book up a month in advance. The 39-year-old chef says he has only begun to expand.Spanish food's path to prominence in the U.S. has been rocky. Throughout the 19th century, European and American travel writers published reports disparaging the humble peasant fare in Spain. Alexandre Dumas, who authored an 1847 travelogue, described garbanzo beans as "hard bullet-sized peas, quite beyond my powers of digestion." Spanish food remained so misunderstood that when author Penelope Casas was promoting her 1982 book "The Foods & Wines of Spain," a primer for the American audience, she "had to start by explaining that Spanish meant from Spain, not from South America or Puerto Rico," Ms. Casas says.

Things began to change in the early 1990s. The Barcelona Olympics put Spain in the spotlight. New studies began to emerge touting the benefits of a "Mediterranean diet," which spurred new interest in Spanish food.

By 1992, the Zagat Guide listed 16 Spanish restaurants in New York (today there are 29). But many of these served mushy paellas, fruity sangria and cheap food blanketed with garlic. The public understood little about the cuisine, says chef Teresa Barrenechea, who opened a Spanish restaurant, Marichu, in Manhattan in 1994. "People would ask, 'Is it very spicy?'" -- an eye-roller for Spaniards, who eat very little spicy food, Ms. Barrenchea recalls. Mr. Andrés was mortified when he arrived in America to find Spanish restaurants making paella with Uncle Ben's parboiled rice, he says.

Mr. Andrés's cooking career began at 15 when, as a failing high-school student, he entered culinary school in Barcelona. A stint at Michelin-starred El Bulli from 1987 to 1989 was seminal. He met Mr. Adrià, whom Mr. Andrés calls his "master," and witnessed the birth of Spain's avant-garde cuisine.

A spat with Mr. Adrià changed the course of Mr. Andrés's life in 1991. The argument started when Mr. Andrés was tardy for a meeting in Barcelona. "I can't stand people who arrive late," says Mr. Adrià. Mr. Andrés stormed away, made a few calls, and soon found himself headed for a new job as a cook at a Spanish restaurant in New York. He planned to stay for six months, he says.

In 1993, two Washington, D.C., restaurateurs, Roberto Alvarez and Mr. Wilder -- spurred by the growing interest in Mediterranean cuisine -- decided to launch a Spanish tapas restaurant in Washington. They heard about Mr. Andrés, who was hopscotching from job to job in New York, La Jolla, Calif., and Puerto Rico, and hired him. Their restaurant, called Jaleo, was a success from the beginning.

The partners then hired Mr. Andrés to run the kitchen of Café Atlántico, an existing Latin Caribbean restaurant and, over the next 11 years, a slew of new restaurants offering variations on a tapas theme. By 2004, the team had three branches of Jaleo, as well as Zaytinya, which serves Turkish- and Greek-style small plates and Oyamel, which serves "antojitos," the Mexican version of tapas.

In 2003, Mr. Andrés used some of his own money to convert a corner of Café Atlántico into Minibar, a six-seat counter serving avant-garde creations. The concept made Mr. Andrés part of an elite cadre of chefs serving inventive, Adrià-style cuisine. That year, he won the James Beard award for the best Mid-Atlantic chef. In April 2005, Mr. Andrés began hosting a popular cooking show in Spain, and landed a lucrative deal as a Kellogg's spokesman there.

Soon, upon Mr. Alvarez's retirement from daily operations of the restaurants, Mr. Andrés was able to renegotiate terms with Mr. Wilder and essentially take over the company that had once employed him.

Mr. Andrés's ascent was aided by his close association with Mr. Adrià, who in the past decade has become the undisputed star of the global haute-cuisine scene. The tiff in the Barcelona bar is now long forgotten and the two men are "like family," says Mr. Adrià.

In recent years, Spain's avant-garde cuisine has inspired American chefs, including Grant Achatz at Chicago's Alinea and Wylie Dufresne at wd~50 in New York, to create an American version of the style. A top Philadelphia chef, Jose Garces, is making his name with restaurants that serve Andalusian, Basque and Catalan cuisine. Tapas restaurants are now found in Kalamazoo, Mich., and Omaha, Neb.

Among some of his peers, Mr. Andrés is known as a rule-breaking scene-stealer. "Maybe a Spanish grandmother would sit at Jaleo and not recognize what she is going to eat," says Ms.

Barrenechea. But Mr. Andrés's unconventional cooking is "very attractive to the young people," and therefore good for promoting the national cuisine, she says.

Mr. Andrés says he hopes to open branches of Jaleo and his other concepts in as many as 20 cities and to partner in future SLS hotels. He has commissioned designs for an enlarged version of Minibar, which he hopes to open in late 2010, and says plans are in the works for an additional avant-garde restaurant with a strong Spanish theme.

"I hired him to work for me when he was 23, and now I work for him," Mr. Wilder says. "It would probably sound good to say that Roberto and I had a master game plan. But in fact, only José had a master game plan."

Write to Katy McLaughlin at katy.mclaughlin@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W6