José Andrés, Jaleo and the Full Circle to World Central Kitchen

Roberto Alvarez had to separate us. José, he ruled, gets the food into the window, and Harry makes sure it reaches the table. That was Jaleo in Washington more than thirty years ago, two young guys in one restaurant bumping heads, and if you know José, and you know me, that surprises nobody. It was tapas, lots and lots of tapas, so the rule was easier to say than to follow. I’m Harry Hayman, I live and work in Philadelphia now, and I am telling you about that window because I am getting ready to go volunteer with the organization José built from the same idea on a far bigger scale: World Central Kitchen, known as WCK, which puts hot meals in front of people in the worst week of their lives. I did not see the full circle coming. I can see it now.

Jaleo, Roberto Alvarez and the Window Between Kitchen and Table

Jaleo is a Spanish tapas restaurant, and it opened in 1993 at 480 7th Street NW, in the part of downtown Washington now called Penn Quarter. The restaurant’s own site says it helped turn that neighborhood into the busy place it is today. I can only vouch for the inside of the room. José and I opened it together, and we bumped heads more than once, which Roberto settled the only way that worked: divide the labor and put a window between us.

The public record of that year matches my memory better than I expected. The José Andrés Group’s history says that in 1993 two Washington restaurateurs, Rob Wilder and Roberto Alvarez, convinced a Spanish chef, then 23, to come to the city and open a new Spanish concept. From the floor, it looked like this. Roberto went off to get our chef and was gone for three weeks, and then a little Tasmanian devil came tearing through the door, and the rest is history, as they say. That same history notes that Jaleo introduced tapas to many American diners and that small plates have since taken over the restaurant scene. I believe it. I only know what it meant behind the pass: a great many small plates, and one person whose job was to get every one of them to the right table.

A Shelter Basement, a Nightclub Manager and DC Central Kitchen

We carried that work into a second kitchen. DC Central Kitchen is a Washington nonprofit that uses food to train unemployed adults for work while it cooks meals for local service agencies, and I have to be straight about the proportions: José gave it far more than I did, because I left soon afterward and came back to Philadelphia. In my time it was still running out of the basement of a shelter. ZGF, the firm that designed its new headquarters, says the kitchen worked from a shelter basement for about three decades before it moved into that building in 2023.

The idea was beautifully simple, and at the time it was close to revolutionary. Take food that would otherwise be thrown away, cook it into meals for shelters and nonprofits, and use the cooking to train people who could not get hired. ZGF’s project page traces it to Robert Egger, who was a young nightclub manager in 1989. Wikipedia’s entry on Egger says he managed nightclubs around Washington in the 1980s, and the DC Central Kitchen entry adds that he and his wife were talked into volunteering with a church group that prepared and handed out food from the back of a van, and that the first big food recovery came from President George H. W. Bush’s 1989 inaugural party. A nightclub manager, a van and a party’s leftovers. Nobody would have invented it.

Bob Egger, the guy who started it, ran in the same circles I did. The Childe Harold, a Dupont Circle saloon that opened in 1967 and hosted live music, and Clyde’s, which opened in Georgetown in 1963, tell you which Washington we all moved in. I am not sure he and I ever met.

We were young, and we were in the restaurant business. I remember being deliberate about what we had: this is our skill set, and there is no reason we cannot point it at people who have less as easily as at people who have plenty. José pointed it further than I did. WCK’s team page says he arrived in the United States at 21, settled in Washington and began volunteering at DC Central Kitchen, where he started to think big about philanthropy. On July 10, 2015, at the kitchen’s 100th Culinary Job Training graduation, DC Central Kitchen photographed him addressing the graduates and holding a Culinary Job Training Program certificate made out to him. In a 2023 interview with LEADERS magazine, José called Egger his good friend and mentor and repeated the lesson Egger gave him: charity should be about the liberation of the receiver, not the redemption of the giver.

From a Basement Kitchen to World Central Kitchen

José took the basement idea around the world. World Central Kitchen began in 2010, after the earthquake in Haiti, when he traveled there to see how his cooking could help. Its own history says he listened to the community first and then began organizing nourishing meals that people would recognize as their own food. The team page names the people who stood with him: his wife Patricia, and his business partner Rob Wilder with Rob’s wife Robin. Yes, that Rob Wilder. The José Andrés Group’s history gives him and Roberto the credit for bringing José to Washington in 1993, and today the team page lists him as cofounder and cochair of WCK’s board. I keep coming back to how short that line is, from one restaurant window in Washington to a network of relief kitchens.

The scale is hard to picture now. WCK describes itself as first to the frontlines with meals in response to humanitarian, climate and community crises, and its homepage counts more than 884 million meals served. José put the urgency behind that number in a line he gave 60 Minutes in 2020: the solution “has to be now.” A September 2026 message from the organization says it responded 48 times in 2025, which is close to once a week. The LEADERS interview explains how: local restaurants, food trucks and caterers do the cooking, so that after Hurricane Maria, in José’s words, “it was Puerto Ricans feeding Puerto Ricans.”

I did not have to leave my old city to see that model at work. In January 2019, during what was then the longest federal shutdown in U.S. history, WCK opened a Chefs For Feds kitchen on Pennsylvania Avenue, and its own tally says it served more than 100,000 meals to federal workers and their families in Washington, with hundreds of volunteers working 1,500 shifts. It came back in October 2025 for another shutdown. Not someday. Now.

What Preparing for a Crisis Means, and Why I Am Getting Ready

Before I tie on an apron, I want to understand the machinery behind the plate. That is why I am joining WCK’s upcoming session, Before the Storm: How WCK Prepares for a Crisis, where the team will explain how it tracks emerging crises, assesses conditions on the ground and decides when and where to respond. I will not claim to know more than WCK has said in public, so here is what it has said. In a May 2026 announcement about the Atlantic hurricane season, WCK says it starts monitoring storms as soon as they form. When the models converge on a landfall track, it steps up contact with people on the ground, and where it is safe it moves teams and supplies in before the storm arrives, because airports close and roads flood. It keeps Response Operations Centers in Washington, Ventura and New Orleans, and it stores the tools to build a kitchen instead of warehouses of food, so it can start cooking within hours. The September message puts the philosophy in a sentence I understand from a life around restaurants: WCK never knows when or where, so it cannot plan, but it does prepare.

And then? I get ready to go. WCK’s volunteer page says you start by creating a profile on its Volunteer Hub, and it says plainly that volunteer needs change with every response, so WCK cannot predict when it will need you. That suits me. I do not need a date. I need to be ready when the call comes. Wherever I can be useful, I will be: chopping onions, carrying boxes, washing dishes, serving meals, helping organize a kitchen. Thirty some years after two young restaurant guys volunteered in a shelter basement, one of them helped create the world’s kitchen, and I would be proud to tie an apron back on and do my small part.

Food Is a Human Right, and That Is a Fact

Everything above rests on one belief. Food is more than sustenance. Done right, it restores dignity, creates opportunity and rebuilds community, and sometimes a hot plate does what no speech can: it tells another person they have not been forgotten. DC Central Kitchen turned that belief into training and jobs. WCK turns it into a kitchen in the middle of a crisis.

I call the right to food a fact because the world’s institutions do. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well being, including food. The FAO’s page on the right to food calls it a universal human right and says governments and organizations carry ethical and legal responsibilities to respect, protect and fulfill it. The UN human rights office spells out what access means: food must be affordable, and it must reach victims of armed conflicts and natural disasters. That last clause reads like a description of WCK’s job.

So when I say food is a human right and should be treated like one, I am not being poetic. I am asking us to take that promise at its word. Full stop.

I can still hear José yelling “pick up” across a kitchen, all these years later. José, listo, my amigo. I want to hear it again, and this time I want to be the one who carries the plate.

Jaleo, Roberto Alvarez and the Window Between Kitchen and Table

A Shelter Basement, a Nightclub Manager and DC Central Kitchen

From a Basement Kitchen to World Central Kitchen

What Preparing for a Crisis Means, and Why I Am Getting Ready

Food Is a Human Right, and That Is a Fact

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