José Andrés, now a Marvel Comics hero, on how Spain’s egg obsession goes beyond tapas bar tortillas … Plus, a party bus with purpose, the messiness of paying influencers, Jenn Harris’ restaurant of the summer and big James Beard wins. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with Tasting Notes.
You’ve got to break some eggs
José Andrés, egg lover.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
José Andrés was in a pensive mood when he arrived at the Los Angeles Times Test Kitchen late last month for our “Chef That!” video series. His friend Aglaia Kremezi, the “Greek grandmother” behind his cookbook “Zaytinya” and his seven Mediterranean restaurants also called Zaytinya (including one here in Culver City), had died the week before and he was feeling the loss.
“You need an anchor in unfamiliar seas,” he said in the lovely remembrance he published the next day on his “Longer Tables” newsletter, “and Aglaia was my anchor.”
Anyone who has paid attention to Andrés over the years — through his frequent appearances on morning news shows and late-night TV, his nearly 40 restaurants and bars, and, of course, through his high-risk humanitarian work through World Central Kitchen — intuits that this is a man of many emotions. He feels the weight of the world in a profound way that propels him, unlike the majority of us, to take real action, pushing through government bureaucracies to get basic food to people in times of crisis.
Yet he also exudes the joy, generosity and humor of a carefree man. Consider the viral video of him and and the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl at the recent BottleRock Napa Valley festival when Andrés gives the crowd advice about what to do if the “beautiful police [in] Napa, doing their job, stops you.”
“Don’t tell them you’ve been drinking,” he said, holding the tapered neck of a long-spouted porrón pitcher filled with cava, or Spanish sparkling wine. “Tell them you’ve been supporting the local economy.”
Variant cover of the Spider-Man comic book series “Meals to Astonish,” guest starring chef José Andrés.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Some of these seeming incongruities within Andrés may be part of the motivation for Marvel Comics turning the chef into a superhero in for its “Spider-Man: Meals to Astonish” series. They also come through in his newest cookbook, “Spain My Way: Eat, Drink and Cook Like a Spaniard.”
Simply for the range of its recipes it’s a fascinating collection.
For young, aspiring chefs or anyone who wants a little restaurant magic in their home kitchens, he slides in a few fancy chef techniques — including the spherification process used to form the liquid olive made famous at Ferran Adrià‘s elBulli — among his more accessible recipes. Because in addition to being the home of elemental wood-fire-cooked paellas, Spain is also known for creating some of the world’s most technically challenging, cutting-edge cuisine. The vanguardia, as Andrés describes it in the book.
A similar push-pull is seen in the cluster of egg dishes he shares in the book. The flipping technique for his classic, beautifully molten-on-the-inside Spanish tortilla takes a good amount of practice to master. But the very next recipe is a so-called “lazy tortilla,” served at Madrid chef Sacha Hormaechea‘s restaurant Sacha, in which packaged potato chips replace the cubed and cooked potatoes and the eggs are presented like an open-faced omelet — no need for flipping.
He demonstrated this recipe a couple of days before he came to the paper on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” with one “my way” high-low modification that he also includes in the book — several dollops of caviar.
Given that Andrés had just cooked a tortilla on TV, we asked if the chef would show us a recipe from a lesser-known family of Spanish egg dishes — huevos estrellados, which is basically olive-oil fried eggs, or huevos rotos, broken eggs.
“To really understand how Spaniards eat,” he writes in the book, “you need to understand our obsession with eggs.” He points to Diego Velázquez‘s 1618 painting “Vieja Friendo Huevos” or “An Old Woman Cooking Eggs.”
“A shallow pool of olive oil, a hot cazuela, an open flame, a long spoon and a careful eye — this is all the vieja needed to fry her eggs,” he writes, “ and it’s all you’ll need too.”
To demonstrate this style, he shared his recipe for Huevos Venta El Toro, based on a dish served at the small family-run restaurant Venta El Toro at the southern tip of Spain outside of Cádiz, with further inspiration from the historic Casa Lucio in Madrid (they break the eggs so the yolks spill picturesquely).
“It’s eggs, which are fried with potatoes and different beautiful things that come out of a pig,” said Andrés once the cameras were rolling, his melancholy temporarily subsided.
José Andrés’ Huevos Venta El Toro or olive-oil-fried eggs and potatoes from his cookbook “Spain My Way,” made in the L.A. Times Test Kitchen.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
“The potatoes are like my mom would cut them — this beautiful imperfection,” he said, holding up a few of the irregularly cut batons. “There’s no two pieces of potato alike.”
Then, as he frequently does, he went on a tangent: “I don’t know why they call them French fries,” he said. “Because we have better olive oil than France does. Yeah, potatoes fried in olive oil are the real thing. Nowhere in the world fries potatoes like Spain, period. Controversy! Bring it on!”
Chef José Andrés during a recipe demonstration in the L.A. Times Test Kitchen. (Mark E. Potts / Los Angeles Times)
The potatoes are fried twice — first at about 200 degrees. At this stage, he says, “You can make the best mashed potatoes with these potatoes.”
Sauteed onions come next and then Andrés says, “My friends, you need pork.”
We brought him a selection of Spanish dry-cured meats from La Española Meats in Harbor City, not far from our El Segundo offices: Jamón Ibérico, morcilla (blood sausage) and chorizo. These were briefly sauteed and set aside while Andrés performed the cook’s juggling act of frying the potatoes a section time as he also cooked the eggs.
“C’mon, José!” he said to himself as he managed the multiple pots on the stove. “You can do this!”
To fry the eggs in the proper Spanish way, he put about a half inch of olive oil in the saute pan — we didn’t have a Velázquez-worthy clay cazuela handy — and tried to keep the oil from getting too hot. Because you are essentially poaching the eggs in the oil. Instead of achieving crisp edges, the idea is to keep the whites soft and luscious. “If you have the oil higher, you’re going to lose control.”
He put the freshly fried potatoes into a serving pan and gently added the eggs on top followed by the sauteed onions and a scattering of the three meats.
“These are my favorite eggs in the whole world,” he said as everyone in the room came closer to try a taste of Spain for lunch. Then, even though he was late for another media appearance, he spotted a bowl of uncooked eggs and was at the stove again, giving us a quick off-camera tutorial for yet another way Spanish cooks fry eggs. This time he wanted the oil hotter than what he’d just used for Huevos Venta El Toro.
“What we’re doing now is getting a big shoe,” he said of the egg white, letting it spread in the oil around the yolk. “You want the sole to be as crispy, crispy, crispy as you can get it.” He removed the egg from the oil, let it cool slightly, then set it in a paper towel and draped a piece of the Spanish ham on top.
“It becomes an egg taco,” he said. “You can add foie gras, caviar, anything. It’s good for a party. An amazing big bite.”
Now it was really time for him to go, though he was reluctant to leave.
“We can keep going,” he said, as he was escorted out the door. “I can do five more techniques.”
If only there weren’t others wanting their own José Andrés moment.
Also …
Daisy Miles owner of Daisy’s Black L.A. Food Tour, takes guests on a party bus tour of the city’s little-known Black-owned restaurants.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
And we have winners …
“We’re bringing it home!” Stephanie Breijo said to me over the phone on Saturday night as the newly named winner of this year’s Jonathan Gold Local Voice Award at the James Beard Media Awards for her L.A. Times stories “These street vendors used their aguas frescas to fight tear gas at anti-ICE protests,” “Follow the red sauce to Burbank’s best Italian deli” and “After the Eaton fire, Bernee restaurant closed for good. This weekend it’s reborn as Betsy.”
Robert Lopez also checked in from the Chicago ceremony with one word — “crazy!” — after he won the James Beard investigative reporting award for his two-part series: “California’s Child Farmworkers: Exhausted, Underpaid and Toiling in Toxic Fields” and “Lax Oversight, Few Inspections Leave Child Farmworkers Exposed to Toxic Pesticides.” The project, for which Lopez spoke with 61 farmworkers as young as 12, was published in The Times in collaboration with the nonprofit news site Capital & Main.
In the dining and travel category, Francis Lam, writing for Condé Nast Traveler, won for his personal look at Hong Kong’s constant reinvention. Of course, he had some strong competition from his fellow nominees: restaurant critic Bill Addison for his extensive “101 best restaurants in California” project, and food editor Daniel Hernandez for his feature story “The myths and realities of gentrification in Mexico City. Should you still visit?”
In addition, the paper’s branded-content arm at L.A. Times Studios won the commercial media award for “The Theory of Spice.”
Many more awards were given out to cookbook authors, video producers, podcasters and other journalists. (See the full list here.) And on Monday night, we’ll learn the winners of the Beard Foundation’s Restaurant and Chef Awards, which includes nine great L.A. restaurant and beverage establishments. Also, L.A.’s Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights will receive the foundation’s impact award; Othón Nolasko and Damián Diaz will collect the humanitarian of the year award for founding No Us Without You LA; Inglewood’s Serving Spoon diner will get the America’s Classics award, and chef Nancy Silverton will receive the foundation’s lifetime achievement award. Oh, and for good measure, Silverton was also named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2026.
