Chef José Andres is a busy man. Aside from overseeing over two dozen restaurants and releasing his Longer Tables podcast and Substack, this month alone he is releasing a new cookbook—Zaytinya: Delicious Mediterranean Dishes from Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon—and debuting a new show on Prime, Dinner Party Diaries with José Andrés. When he chats with Condé Nast Traveler, it’s between calls as the founder of his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, which is currently fighting to deliver food and aid to Gaza. It’s understandable, then, that his idea of a vacation has changed as he’s gotten older (and his empire larger).
“My present answer may be more boring… I like to go to a place and not move,” the chef and humanitarian says. These days, his family goes to the same places over and over. “My body wants repetition: going to the same bakery, the same coffee place, where you have mundane conversations about non-important things. Establishing those relationships with the local people is what [I] give more value to.”
Andrés seems fundamentally incapable of mundane conversation, of course. Below, the chef discusses his recent encounter with a mandarinfish in Micronesia, the beauty of a Spanish beach in mid-winter, and how a single bite can transport you.
Why he’s so fascinated with the food of Greece, Lebanon, and Turkey:
For me, it’s because I grew up in Spain, on the other side of the Mediterranean, where the same ingredients were done in such a different way. In Spain, we love chickpeas, but we make them very differently than Lebanon and Greece do. It’s fascinating! We love zucchini, we love tomatoes, but in Spain we’d make a gazpacho. We have the same ingredients—like olive oil!—but at the end it’s so different. This is the beauty, for me. So close and so far.
His approach to airplane food:
Obviously, if I’m upgraded to first and flying on Emirates or Air France, and they have caviar, I’m not going to say no to that. It doesn’t occupy much space in your stomach, it doesn’t have many calories, and it’s not bad with a glass of good Champagne.
If I’m with United or Delta, I try not to eat. Sometimes I order the food if I see something new that looks interesting, even though nothing really surprises me anymore. But I will order only to see it. I will even tell the [flight attendant], “I only want to see it,” and they will look at me, like, “You want to see it? Well, we need to give it to you.” And I say, “But if you need it for somebody else, I don’t want to take it!” It becomes a very funny conversation. You cannot take the professional chef out of the traveler, you know?
How he spends his flight time:
The plane is a perfect time to catch up with a book—I read manga—or movies. If I am on Air France, it’s my moment to catch up with the best French movies, which I sometimes have a hard time finding on any other platform. The French make great movies. I just watched Marguerite’s Theorem. And then, I am a very bad player, but I play mahjong.
