In October 2003, Nicolas Jose Guardado was profiled by Gourmet Magazine when he was the Chef at Jaleo. Below is the summary digest from the magazine:
October 2003
Profile of Chef Nicolas Guardado at Jaleo
A young man from El Salvador, working mops and salads, joins Jaleo in DC after jobs elsewhere. Chef Jose Andres sends him and two others to a finishing school for Hispanic chefs. There he learns the French technique, and innovation. He had been trained by formula, no changes were possible. Cook it exactly as we tell you. Now he can create and understands the "why" of what he does so well.
After working with salsa pincipales, he masters salsa veloute, salsa bechamel, salsa espagnole, etc. Now he has the tools to cook anywhere in the world.
When he left El Salvador 20 years ago, Nicolas Guardado could speak English as well as he could cook. Which is to say, not at all. But look at him today.
Nicolas Guardado had been working on salads for nearly three months when the chef approached him. “I want to talk to you,” he said. Fear ran through Guardado’s veins. “I thought oh ‘God, why? What did I do?’” He now says.
Guardado, who had been working in restaurants for almost a decade, was expecting to be fired. For him, it would be just one more in a string of short-lived jobs. He had so few expectations that he was startled to hear the chef, José Andrés, say, “I want u to be a cook.”
Almost twelve million people work in the restaurant industry in the United States (only the federal government employs more). Eighteen percent are of Hispanic origin, laboring behind the scenes, struggling to make ends meet. Name-less and faceless to the people on the other side of the kitchen doors, these are women and men-many of whom speak little or no English-consigned to the menial tasks that made every restaurant kitchen run. They are, for the most part, the pot scrubbers, the vegetable peelers, the water pourers, on the lowest rung of the restaurant ladder. On that day in 1993, Nicolas Guardado became an exception to the rule. This is his story.
When he was 20 years old, Guardado left his parents and seven sisters in Usulután, El Salvador, to make his fortune in America. “When I came here,” says the 39-year-old, “I had no idea about anything. I didn’t even know how to cook an egg.”
He got his first job, on a friend’s recommendation, with a Washington, D.C., company that made tofu. His days there were spent cutting the bean curd and submerging it into icy water. “In the winter,” he says, holding out his fingers and shuddering at the memory of the cold, “they kept the door open. My hands-you can’t believe.” He stayed for 13 months.
His next job was cleaning floors at a small restaurant in the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. “I had zero English when I went there,” Guardado says. In the kitchen, though, that wasn’t a problem; the other employees all spoke Spanish. Nearly a year passed before he was promoted to the salad station. Someone eventually showed him how to work the grill, and to make extra money Guardado would take it over when his shift ended, at 11 P.M., until the restaurant closed, two to three times a week.
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October 2003
Gourmet Magazine