“Ramon Martinez is head chef of Jaleo, Jose Andrés’ award winning tapas concept in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, DC. Jaleo was the nation’s first critically and commercially successful Spanish restaurant and helped to launch the small plates craze in America. Martinez works closely with Andrés on menu development and helps to maintain quality control for all three Jaleo restaurants.”

I met with Ramon today; he is personable, funny, has great energy and is very passionate about food.  He is originally from Barcelona, Spain.

I stole of few of these question’s from JDS’s interview with Spike Mendelsohn.   Ramon and I are both talkers; we did stray from the actual questions at times.

JAY: What is your guilty food pleasure?

RM:  Hamburgers.  I eat at 5 Guys or Ray’s Hell Burger every 4 or 5 months.   5 Guys for the fast food fix and Ray’s for a more upscale burger. When you move to America, the diet is different, and if you go with the flow,it is easy to let oneself go and get fat with alcohol and food.  I’ve seen it happen to other Spanish chefs and I gained 10 pounds here in 2 months.  Now, I watch what I eat.

JAY: Do you enjoy the French fries too?

RM:  No, I don’t order them, but I do occasionally eat patatas bravas or the chips at the restaurant (Jaleo) or at home because I prefer them to French fries.

JAY: What else do you enjoy cooking at home?

RM:  At the restaurant I taste our dishes (instead of having lunch) and at home for dinner I eat simply; an example of this is al dente boiled vegetables with olive oil, and some fruit (especially pineapple, which I love) and maybe yogurt.  On my 2 days off, I eat out and and enjoy myself; I eat less healthy when I eat out.  When I am entertaining at home, I cook traditional dishes like paella and cannelloni.  My favorite paella to cook includes botifarra (Catalan sausage), Iberico de bellota (acorn-fed) pork ribs, and artichokes.  I love artichokes and even put them in omelets.

JAY: What dishes do you miss from back home?

RM:  I miss my mother’s and my grandmother’s cooking.  After lunch (when I was a kid), my mother would already be prepping for dinner.  I have such enjoyable food memories associated to their cooking.  Dishes like my Grandmother’s pig’s feet with sofrito and potatoes; the meat was falling off the bones.  (Ramon makes a slurping sound.)  I can smell this one soup that I love before I’ve entered my Mother’s door.  The soup contains pig’s feet, ham bones, ham scraps, chicken feet, meat balls, blood sausage, parsnips, turnips, cabbage, celery, etc.  When I was a kid, the 5 of us would each have a bowl of broth in front of us, which the items from the soup were all served on a platter.  We would them fight over which items we wanted.

JAY: That definitely brings back memories of my mother making beef soup with marrow bones, pieces of beef, sweet potatoes, carrots, corn on the cob, potatoes, etc, when I was a kid.

What are your favorite DC area restaurants:

RM:  2 Amys, Citronelle and Yechon.  Yechon is a 24-hour Korean restaurant in Annandale that has a great seafood pancake.

JAY: Any ingredients you don’t like?

RM:  Spam.  The frozen peas we have in Spain. Canned vegetables, especially canned artichokes.

JAY: Have any interesting stories about customers?

RM:  I wasn’t here, but someone fell asleep at the wheel and drove through the front door.

JAY: What is it like working for Jose Andrés?

He is amazing.  He gave me an amazing opportunity to learn about different foods in the company.  I can learn about Greek food (Zaytinya), molecular gastronomy (Cafe Atlantico) and Mexican Food (Oyamel).  I’ve even helped out in the restaurant in Los Angeles.  And, we went to Valencia on summer to learn how to make paellas on wood fires, an opportunity that most chefs in Spain would not have.  Andrés is a big name in Spain, but here he is like the Ambassador of Spanish food.

JAY: What are you excited about on the Jaleo menu?

RM:  You have to try the paellas, especially the one with iberico de bellota pork ribs.  We also have iberico de bellota ham and cured products on the menu.

-JAY