Chef José Andrés, 55: ‘Life Has Given Me So Much I Love’

What does the title Change the Recipe mean to you?

Very often things don’t go as you plan: Like in the kitchen, you’re following a recipe and suddenly you realize you don’t have all the ingredients or equipment, and you feel defeated. But you have to adapt to that situation. You have to add or do something else, and eventually that recipe will be successful. We are all trained to plan. Everything is planned. And sometimes it seems that there’s no more room for improvisation. We should all feel free to improvise. We are a very creative species.

In the book, you write about changing the recipe of a meal you were cooking in Haiti to adapt to local tastes. What else have you learned while helping people around the world?

When you go to poor communities, it seems that somebody is always coming from the outside, imposing a solution rather than listening more to the locals about what the response or solution should be. It’s important that people take care of themselves — obviously, you are there helping, but in the end, you’re giving them a voice, giving them dignity. You’re the wind behind them. You don’t need to be the boat.  

Andrés hard at work during a food relief effort in Puerto Rico following 2017's Hurricane Maria.

Eric Rojas/The New York Times/Redux

You are involved in so many projects. How do you juggle them all?

It’s a busy spring and summer.

I’m going to take a big break soon. My wife and I are celebrating 30 years of marriage in January, and we are going to do El Camino de Santiago, the St. James Way [a 500-mile pilgrimage from France to Santiago, Spain]. We’ll have our daughters join us sometimes.

Fantastic. Some cities in Spain, like your native Barcelona, are getting overrun with tourists. Do you have advice for people wanting to visit?

They should go in January. I always tell people we all should be traveling to places in the low season, when nobody goes, because it’s a time when you can feel like a local. You’re going to have a little coffee and it may be raining, but you are in this little place that is all for you. Those moments are very magical. Anywhere you go.  

What do you usually do for fun or to relax? 

This time of year, I like to plant in my little vegetable garden — I call it the deer and squirrel garden. I like to read manga. I like to play video games. I like to watch documentaries. I like to scuba dive. I like hunting. I do it once a year or twice a year. I like photography a lot. I’m very bad, but I love it. I like to play golf. So I have hobbies, but I am very lucky because my profession really doesn’t feel like work.

Why doesn’t it feel like work?

I think if you do everything with joy, it’s like, “OK, this is not work; this is fun.” I like cooking. I love to go to the farmers’ markets anywhere I am. I love to go to a new bar that nobody knows in a city, to discover it like you were Marco Polo. I like to go hunt for mushrooms when I have the time and I’m with the right people, so I don’t kill myself with the wrong mushroom. Life has given me so much I love. I love cookbooks, especially old cookbooks and old memoirs or personal diaries. Sometimes I find diaries from the American Civil War. You know when people say we cannot travel to the past? It’s not true.  

What’s for dinner tonight?

I have some friends coming over, journalists from different countries — we met in Ukraine in the last few years. They are in [Washington] D.C. today, and I told them to come to my home, and we’ll open a bottle of wine. I will cook beef cheeks with some morel mushrooms, and we’ll talk about the past and crazy moments we’ve lived together in this adventure of life.