Chef Jose Andres on World Central Kitchen's Relief Efforts + Time at Home with His Wife and Daugh…

Chef Jose Andres joins RACHAEL RAY this Friday, May 1 to talk about the work his relief organization, World Central Kitchen, is doing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic; he also opens up about making the most of time at home with wife and daughters.

Andres tells Rachael that it is a blessing to be able to spend time with his girls, ages 21, 18 and 16:

“My daughters are in this age where before I know, they’re going to be graduating…and they move into their own lives,” he says. “And I think these weeks, and probably few weeks ahead, that we’ve been spending so much time together, cooking every night together, I’m really taking it like a blessing.”

He also gushes about his wife, Patricia:

“My wife keeps me always in check,” he says. “She calms me down instantly. She’s my whisperer in my ear, she’s the one that helped me become a grown-up man when I was still a little boy when I began going out with her. She’s the one that helped me become a husband, I’m still not very successful but she puts up with me. She is the one helping me be a father but sometimes I fall short, and makes me look like the best dad when sometimes I’m still the little boy. She’s very much my everything.”

Rachael and Jose also discuss World Central Kitchen’s ongoing relief work to feed people during the coronavirus pandemic, and their model of funding restaurants in local communities so they can feed their neighbors and keep their workforce employed.

“We believe in shorter walls and longer tables. Right now in World Central Kitchen, we have more than 500 restaurants that are partners….We are able to put those donations that we centralize through WCK, we put them through the restaurant communities in places like Harlem, Queens, Little Rock, Oakland, Newport News, you name it. And we are able to put the restaurants up on work. They’re not going to retire with that. But instead of staying at home, the restaurants are opening, they’re part of the solution, they’re able to hire some of the people that want to help, that want to work…and then we are all part of the solution,” he explains.

“And then a few months from now, when everything goes back to normal, we will look back and we will say, that in one of the darkest moments of America, America as a whole came together and everybody did their part. And that’s the beauty of what one day we will all be able to tell our grandchildren and others. That we all came together to make sure that America was taken care of, in this case, in our case, one plate of food at a time.”

Jose’s full conversation with Rachael will air Friday, May 1.