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 you to be a cook.”
Almost 12 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. Nameless 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 make 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 hours later. “I didn’t like it. The grill was too hot, the kitchen was too small. I never thought I’d be a cook.” For two years he split his time between salads and steaks. For another two he ran the grill on his own.
After five years, Guardado quit for a better-paying job, this time in the kitchen of The Hay-Adams hotel, across the street from the White House. But instead of working the stoves, he was given a mop and a bucket. After 15 months on the graveyard shift, he managed a transfer to the salad station. Four weeks later, his mother became seriously ill. Guardado didn’t feel that he could stay away. And so, for the first time in more than eight years, he went home to his family.
After almost a decade in the States, Guardado’s English had improved very little. When he returned after his mother recovered, the best job he could find was cleaning floors and making sandwiches at a Georgetown bakery. At $6.50 an hour, though, it was hardly enough to support his wife and newborn daughter. He went looking for another job, landing on the cleanup crew at The Shakespeare Theatre, in downtown Washington. On his way to work one morning soon after, he passed a sign in the window of a vacant storefront next door. Jaleo, a Spanish restaurant just about to open, needed cooks. He applied and got a job—at the salad station.
Three months later, the chef approached him about becoming a cook. Today, Guardado is a sous-chef at the Bethesda branch of Jaleo.
In addition to Andrés, who saw him as something more than just another anonymous Latino, Guardado has a man named François Dionot to thank for contributing to his success. The president of L’Academie de Cuisine, a 27-year-old cooking school in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Dionot is also the owner of a restaurant and sensitive to the plight of immigrant kitchen workers.
“At Café Bethesda,” he says of the place he opened in 1981, “we have a black bean soup on the menu. One day, the chef gave her cooks, who are Latinos, navy beans and told them to use those in the soup instead. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t think it out. They were trained to do only what the chef had shown them.”
It was at that point, says Dionot, that he decided to establish a new course at L’Academie. Though cooking schools such as the Culinary Institute of America have responded to the growth of the Latino population by teaching their chefs-in-training enough Spanish to enable them to communicate with their staff, Dionot found no precedent for a course taught exclusively in that language. When it comes to opportunities for Latino cooks to learn, he says, “There is a huge void.”
When Andrés heard about the Spanish-language version of L’Academie’s eight-week course for professional cooks (which provides a foundation in basic French techniques), he immediately signed up three of his own, Guardado among them. “They are my best men,” says the chef, who also oversees D.C.’s Café Atlántico and Zaytinya. But they were also, he confesses, the “most unprepared culinarily.” Given their limited English, culinary theory and technique had always been out of their reach; instead, they’d learned by watching and repeating. Andrés’s own experience at cooking school in Barcelona had taught him the value of formal education. “It gave me the fire to be in this profession,” he says.
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