People of DC big news! Today after a dream of 30 years I’m announcing we will open @bazaarbyjose in the Old Post Office! Building longer tables in the heart of our nation’s capital, welcoming people from across the city & the world?? I’ll share more soon.. @WaldorfAstoria @cgi_mg pic.twitter.com/CFf4QOmRzw
— José Andrés (@chefjoseandres) June 13, 2022
And that reminded me — I never got around to posting a couple of great articles about a good man.
From GQ, “Cooking on the Frontlines with Chef José Andrés”:
… “The people were amazing: random people who believed they had to do something, which was beautiful to see,” Andrés told me, a few weeks later. He was calling from another border crossing, Przemyśl, where WCK continued to feed a steady flow of displaced Ukrainians as they boarded buses bound for processing elsewhere in Poland and across Europe. Unlike a hurricane, he said, after which things get at least incrementally better each day, war was a steady drip of disaster. “Sometimes it can be very quiet here and then, all of a sudden, chaos.” He hummed a snatch of “Ride of the Valkyries.”
By then, Andrés had spent nearly four weeks sending out messages from the Ukraine border and inside the war-torn country itself. Many were the signature selfie videos that have become a vital part of WCK’s storytelling and identity, and are often among the first images on the ground that the world sees following a disaster. We saw a bakery in Lviv turning out thousands of loaves for refugees sheltering at the train station; chefs in Kyiv making cabbage-and-potato-stuffed pyrizhky to send to orphanages; the food hall in Odesa, turned into a food donation and distribution center; WCK’s signature giant paella pans repurposed for massive batches of borscht and applesauce; 18-wheelers filled with flour and other staples, headed to areas of fighting too intense to set up cooking operations. “Everywhere we go in Ukraine…food is at the center of resistance!” Andrés tweeted.
Look for the Helpers Open Thread: Chef José AndrésPost + Comments (22)