We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  José Enrique’s plan was maybe to have a fund-raiser, with music. “People could have a little fun because it’s so overwhelming,” he said. But he also knew that he had a bigger role to play. “You need a cook who can feed you,” he said. “It’s kind of on us. Nobody else can do it.”

  José Enrique’s problem was that he was doing everything from scratch. He and his cooks were making fresh sancocho every day, and the printout they gave me of their ingredients was so long and detailed, it was like reading Morse code. When you cook with the urgency of now, you have to cook quickly.

  “Let’s do more,” I told him. José Enrique told me he had no more ingredients to scale up. They were cooking everything they had, because with no power and no refrigeration, the generator couldn’t keep up and the supplies were sure to go bad. His cooks would only briefly open the fridge door when they absolutely needed to. Without much diesel, they could only run the generator for a few hours a day.

  As we talked, our plan started to take shape. “Let’s start right here,” I said. We would grow José Enrique’s operations as quickly as possible by using his kitchen, serving sancocho outside, and making sandwiches in the forty-five-seat dining room, where the customers would normally eat. I knew from my time in Haiti and Houston that sandwiches were a quick and effective way to feed people: plenty of calories in a meal that was easy to store and transport.

  There was supposed to be a nighttime curfew in San Juan, as well as an order banning alcohol, but there we were, planning how to feed the people over cocktails, at night in the middle of the city. We decided to call ourselves what we were: Chefs For Puerto Rico. The name, and the hashtag, said it all.

  WE WERE JUST A COUPLE OF CHEFS, WHO KNOW HOW TO COOK, TRYING to feed the many. Across San Juan, and back home in Washington, people with far more resources and supposedly far more intelligence were only just getting going.

  On the same day I struggled into San Juan on one of the first commercial flights, two Trump administration officials visited Puerto Rico for the first time since the storm. Among them were Brock Long, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Tom Bossert, the president’s Homeland Security adviser. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters, “We’ve done unprecedented movement in terms of federal funding to provide for the people of Puerto Rico and others that have been impacted by these storms. We’ll continue to do so and continue to do everything that we possibly can under the federal government to provide assistance.”

  That was a fantasy. Brock and Bossert returned to D.C. the same day. According to the Pentagon, 2,600 defense department employees were on the ground across the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.6 On any normal day, there are many times that number of military personnel on the ground, between the U.S. Army’s Fort Buchanan personnel and Puerto Rico’s air and army National Guard.

  The Pentagon had deployed the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship, and its group of sister vessels ahead of Maria to be ready to deliver essential supplies immediately after the storm passed. By the time we arrived, five days after landfall, they had airlifted just 22,000 pounds of supplies to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. That’s the equivalent of about thirty thousand bottles of water for a tropical island of 3.4 million people.

  To put that into context, within two days of the catastrophic earthquake in nearby Haiti, in 2008, some eight thousand American troops were en route to deliver aid. Within 2 weeks, 33 ships and 22,000 troops arrived.

  The need for leadership and swift action was no secret. “We need to prevent a humanitarian crisis occurring in America,” Governor Ricardo Rosselló told CNN that day, warning that there would be a “massive exodus” of Puerto Ricans to the mainland if the island failed to recover. “Puerto Rico is part of the United States. We need to take swift action.”7

  Back in the White House that evening, American leadership took the form of a few tweets from President Trump, his first since Maria had devastated the island. “Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble,” he shared after dinner with conservative members of Congress. “Its old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated. Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with. Food, water and medical are top priorities—and doing well.”8

  According to a Trump official, the tweet was in response to the coverage of Puerto Rico he had watched on TV, not because of any meetings about the disaster that he had held that day. There hadn’t been any such meetings involving the president of the United States. At dinner that night, Trump did make some brief comments about the tragedy in Puerto Rico but spent most of his time attacking Senator John McCain for voting against his efforts to undo Obamacare.9

  Trump was right about the historical problems of the island in terms of finance and infrastructure. He was right about the destruction of the electrical grid. But it was not at all clear what he was doing about any of those challenges. And there was no earthly way anyone could honestly claim that the island was “doing well” with food, water and medical supplies. That much was obvious to me after one day in Puerto Rico.

  NATE AND I DIDN’T HAVE AN ARMY. WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE SATELLITE phones. But we did have a couple of hotel rooms booked at the AC Hotel near Santurce, and the Hyatt near the convention center, thanks to my board member Javier Garcia and my Puerto Rican friend Federico Stubbe. Sometimes you need to book extra rooms because there are unexpected guests to help or because the bookings mysteriously fall through. It was now 10:00 p.m. and I wanted to check out the AC first because it was originally part of a Spanish chain that I liked. But with the heightened security and the curfew, the driveway was blocked off when we arrived.

  “Are you staying here?” asked the security guard.

  “No. I’m meeting somebody,” I replied, not wanting to explain why we had rooms in two hotels.

  “We’re closed,” he snapped back.

  It took far too long to convince him we had a reservation. The atmosphere of fear was widespread, and it may have been irrational, but it was no less real. If anything, the lack of accurate information just heightened the fear.

  We finally made it to check-in, exhausted but inspired, after our first day on the island.

  “We have no rooms,” said the man at the check-in desk. “No rooms at all.”

  Nate urged me to head to the Hyatt, where we had another reservation for two rooms. But I wasn’t about to leave. When people tell me something can’t be done, that makes me all the more determined to get it done. Even when it comes to hotel rooms.

  My friend Bernardo Medina, a media and communications expert, was staying at the AC and met us in the lobby. He tried to call the general manager, who was staying at the hotel, but couldn’t reach him. After half an hour of back and forth, the staff at the check-in desk insisted that we leave. The security guys started making their move when the general manager appeared. He apologized for the delay; he’d been taking a shower.

  I explained patiently that I knew the man who built the hotel: Antonio Catalán Diaz, the founder of this hotel chain and also the NH Hotel Group. Antonio is a Spanish entrepreneur and we’d been talking for years about doing business together. This seemed as good a time as any to drop his name into the conversation. It worked. Somehow the manager found us two empty rooms, where we gratefully rested our weary bodies. Nate and I had no idea that those rooms would become our home for weeks on end, and how our bones would ache for those beds every day.

  WE WOKE UP EARLY ON OUR FIRST FULL DAY IN PUERTO RICO WITH ONE mission in mind: to get our hands on lots of food. I knew from my restaurant operation on the island that the biggest food supplier was José Santiago, so we drove our Jeep to his warehouse, twenty minutes south of San Juan. I was worried about how the business had survived the hurricane and whether they had electricity. Perhaps they might not be open
because the employees were still taking care of their families.

  On that car ride we saw for the first time with our own eyes the extraordinary gas lines. There were hundreds of cars parked, people waiting for a precious gallon of fuel for ten hours at a time. You could only buy $20 of gasoline at once, so people were lining up every day or two, and even sleeping overnight to stay in line. It felt like we were looking at an entire economy that had broken down by the side of the road. And I couldn’t help but wonder: If people were waiting that long for energy for their cars, what kind of energy were they getting for their bodies? It gave me flashbacks to Haiti, where I saw similar scenes, and even more instability caused by the lack of fuel.

  At José Santiago’s headquarters there was another long line of cars, as people waited patiently for their chance to enter the food distribution center. I saw some movement by the door, and realized the facility was operational but overwhelmed. Nate and I couldn’t wait for the line to move, so we jumped ahead. Once inside, I introduced myself to the grandson of the Spanish founder of the business, who shares Santiago’s name and serves as chief financial officer. As we were walking through the back offices, I noticed a picture on the wall of my historic navy ship, the Juan Sebastián de Elcano. I could recognize its four masts from a mile away, and it didn’t take much to trigger the memories of my year sailing the world on that majestic tall ship. As we talked about the ship, José told me of his family roots in the same northern region where I was born: Asturias, famous for its green pastures, its dairy and its apple cider. It felt like he and I were family, and I asked for a line of credit right there.

  “I am from Asturias. You are from Asturias,” I told him. “I won’t let you down. We will pay you for the food. You don’t need to worry.”

  We were handed a full catalog of supplies, printed on one long extended run of dot-matrix paper, which folded up to be three or four inches thick. It represented a world of food on an island struggling with hunger. Then, on the spot, José and I shook hands to agree to a $50,000 line of credit. Apart from the paperwork, he had one other condition: we couldn’t tell people publicly where we got the food. No photos for social media, and no talking to the press. He too was scared of the rumors of lawlessness and hunger, and feared a mob descending on the warehouse to loot its supplies. “We don’t want the word to get out,” José told me. I would have done the same in his situation.

  Before we arrived, we thought we would just buy a few items for that day’s lunch. Instead we walked around the place, twenty rows across and six shelves high, stocking up on the kinds of ingredients and quantities we’d need to scale up the operation at José Enrique. We brought huge trays of bread for sandwiches, and plenty of ready-made sofrito for the soup. We filled the Jeep from floor to roof, and happily spent around $5,000 on our first purchase. That would end up being a relatively small bill. There was so much food, I couldn’t see through the windows on the right side and needed Nate to tell me if the roads were clear.

  We drove over to the restaurant very slowly. The last thing I wanted was an accident, creating more trouble for the island’s hospitals. I had asked José Enrique to gather together the best people who could help put a food relief operation into action. We were late getting there, but our Jeep was full of ingredients for meals, so people seemed happy to see us. Seated around the sides of José Enrique’s dining room were some of the smartest restaurant people in San Juan: Wilo Benet, the chef whose Pikayo restaurant helped reimagine Puerto Rican food; Ricardo Rivera Badía of El Churry; and Manolo Martinez of Paella y Algo Más. Our organizer would be Ginny Piñero, a former lawyer, who knew Manolo’s son in Washington, D.C. She had no idea what was in store, and nor did any of the chefs.

  I walked in and started mapping out a plan, assigning tasks to everyone there. I propped up a flip chart under a painting of a giant green flower, while the team sat at some empty dining tables pitching in their ideas. I wanted them to feel some sense of ownership of this plan: I didn’t want to impose it on them, not least because I planned to leave by the next weekend. This was something they needed to own, and they stepped up immediately.

  At the top of the white sheet, I wrote in huge purple letters our biggest challenge: ENERGIA. Gasoline, natural gas and diesel: we needed them all. We couldn’t do anything without them. We assigned this challenge to Piñero, who looked like she was in shock.

  Next up was the energy we needed as people: ALIMENTOS. We needed dry goods and fresh goods, and especially water. We assigned this to Ricardo, whose experience inside the food business in Puerto Rico was second to none.

  Those two items filled up the left side of the flip chart paper. On the right, I wrote our next most important need: VOLUNTARIADO. We desperately needed volunteers: cooks, cleaners, people who could help prep food and buy ingredients. We needed coordinators of the volunteers, and we needed people to help with distribution. I assigned this task to José Enrique’s sister, Karla.

  That left our last, but connected, necessity: COMUNICACIÓN. How to get the word out about our operation? On an island like Puerto Rico, there was a powerful combination of old and new media. People relied on the radio, especially given how much time they were now spending in their cars. There wasn’t enough electricity to turn on their TVs. But they were also, like in every other part of the United States, busy with social media on their phones, if they could find a signal. We needed to be in both places. I handed that assignment to my friend Nate and Yareli Manning, one of a group of food truck owners who showed up from the start.

  The team sat there, focused on the ambitious plan in front of us. It was barely twenty-four hours since Nate and I had landed in Puerto Rico, with nothing more than a modest pile of cash and a desire to feed the hungry, yet we were already mobilizing a much bigger operation than we’d expected, and detailing the steps we would need to take to get even bigger, very quickly. We weren’t trying to feed the island; that would have been an overwhelming challenge. We didn’t want to make anyone feel anxious because they had more than enough problems already, looking after their family, their home and their business. We were just trying to double the meals being prepared, and double them again. We needed to grow and grow until we were feeding more people than we could imagine at that point. It was just like opening a new restaurant: we could reach our maximum capacity over time, scaling steadily but surely. That day-by-day approach to exponential growth seemed much more realistic than shooting for the moon.

  Ginny Piñero volunteered to be the point person for taking food orders, and we started receiving orders that day. She seemed to know everyone on the island and was well connected by social media to a wide network of Puerto Ricans. We took the most important organizational step of all by setting up a WhatsApp group that night, using our brand-new name: Chefs For Puerto Rico. That chat group would become our central intelligence agency for the next several weeks, a constant buzz of information, questions, demands and good humor. It was our team spirit and lifeline, tapped out on phones from the most disconnected parts of the island and the darkest corners of kitchens. It also worked with the faintest of cell phone signals, while phone calls and emails dropped in and out unpredictably.

  Sourcing supplies on a hurricane-torn island was never going to be easy. But Ricardo knew the inside workings of the restaurant networks in Puerto Rico, and could find people and products that nobody else knew existed. Ricardo is a big bear of a man, but with a quiet, no-nonsense style. In many ways he was typical of the Puerto Ricans who formed the backbone of our food relief on the island. He was a franchise restaurant consultant of many years, helping others to expand their businesses across the island. More recently he’d started his own El Churry franchise, expanding a successful food truck operation into full restaurants. He survived the hurricane at home in Caguas, with his wife, Luz, and two dogs, taking shelter in the bedroom as they heard their trees getting wrenched out of the ground and thrown into their neighbors’ house. The next day they emerged, along with the neighbors, t
o assess the damage and remove the branches that had fallen on their roof. For three days they were stuck in their neighborhood because the roads were locked with trees and electric cables. Ricardo was one of the lucky ones: his Internet connection survived the storm. So when his wife shared a Facebook post from the Puerto Rican governor’s office in Washington, D.C., he paid attention. They were looking for food trucks to head to the airport, where there were stranded tourists with no food, and Ricardo said he would help out.

  We immediately got to work with a new mobile kitchen parked outside José Enrique’s stricken restaurant. We unpacked the Jeep and set about our first official day of operations. We knocked out five hundred sandwiches and two thousand hot meals, and considered it a triumph to feed so many people from a broken restaurant on an island struggling to get back on its feet. We thought those were big numbers, but we knew we could do so much more. We just had no idea how much more was in store.

  That afternoon, I ladled sancocho out of a giant stock pot on the front steps of José Enrique’s beautifully pink restaurant. There’s normally no nameplate or sign outside the restaurant because it’s so famous. But now, behind me, was a simple sign handwritten by José Enrique, Hay Sancocho, telling everyone in the neighborhood that we had soup for them. The streets were full of people eating, talking, connecting. It felt like, in this small corner of San Juan, we were bringing the island slowly back to life, one ladle at a time.

  I had another chef friend across Santurce who also wanted to help but was out of the country, visiting Morocco when the hurricane ripped through. José Santaella is one of the very best chefs in Puerto Rico, who like José Enrique is reinventing the island’s culinary traditions. When I reached out to him for help, he said, “Go into my kitchen. Go into the freezer, find your food and use it.” The freezer had lost power, and was filled with a huge amount of the highest-quality food.