When Angel Barreto he was 31 years old and dealing 16-hour days as a sous chef before he had a mental breakdown. At the time, he was staying at Wolfgang Puck’s now-closed restaurant, The Source. Every night, Barreto would drive home from the restaurant at 2 a.m., only to show around and return at 9:30 the next morning. He said his burnout was less about the hours he was working and more about “a reaction to the very, very high pressure at the old school where you were yelled at a lot,” he explained. “I also started training such people. And I just think it’s not good. This is not what I want.” This experience modified the way Barreto worked. He is currently a James Beard Award-nominated chef at an award-winning DC restaurant Anju and partner in Fried Rice Collective restaurant group.

In Anju, he does the whole lot completely in another way.

“We don’t shout at people here. We treat people well in the kitchen. We focus on food, but also on the mental health of the staff,” Barreto said. There’s a poster in the worker locker room for the Southern Smoke Foundation, a nonprofit organization that gives mental health funding and resources for people working in the restaurant industry. Barreto told his staff that the error was simply a mistake. “We are not brain surgeons. It’s not every day that we save people’s lives. This is food. Our job is to provide guests with a great experience,” he said, recalling what he told them. “I want them to know that they are listened to and appreciated,” he added. He said the high staff retention rate is proof of the caring atmosphere in the kitchen. The awards are confirmation of his culinary talent.

Shortly after Barreto helped open Anju, serving “eclectic Korean cuisine,” the accolades began pouring in. In 2019, the company’s culinary critic: Tom Sietsema called him “a talent to watch.” The following yr, Barreto was a finalist for DC’s RAMMY Award for “Rising Culinary Star of the Year”.” In 2020 he was semi-finalist of the James Beard Foundation’s “Rising Star Chef of the Year” competition award, and a few months later awarded him the title of one of the winners in the country best latest chefs. In 2022, the James Beard Foundation again nominated Barreto in two categories: “Emerging Chef of the Year” and “Best Chefs”. This yr, the foundation included Barreto on its list again, this time for The best chef in the Mid-Atlantic. It can also be Culinary Ambassador of the United States.

Chef would not be on his list in the event you asked 7-yr-old Barreto what he desired to be when he grew up. Instead, he desired to grow to be a history teacher or a politician – his interest in these subjects stemmed from his parents’ military careers. However, food became his passion quite early, as he found it in his grandparents’ kitchens. Throughout elementary school, Barreto moved around every two years. While his parents were deployed, Barreto and his sister lived with their grandparents during the summer. “I didn’t really realize how important food was until I got older,” he said. “Politics has all the time surrounded me, but I really like food. Family and food have all the time been key pillars of my life.

Barreto’s grandmother, the daughter of sharecroppers and the last person in her family to physically pick cotton, owned a farm in Florida. He said it was a privilege to live there along with her. “For me, Florida was like the wild, wild west.” There were strawberries, banana and fig trees, and a sugarcane field there. Every morning, Barreto’s grandmother prepared him breakfast from her garden. There were alligators and turtles throughout the property, and there was turtle soup. Watching his grandmother do it’s something he said he’ll always remember. “She grabs a stick, a snapping turtle bites a stick, my grandma has a machete, she cuts the turtle’s head off and she makes soup,” he said, following a practice Barreto says she learned from her mother, who was half-Cherokee, half-Black. “It had an impact on my life,” he said of his experiences on the farm.

In Chicago, Barreto and his sister were embraced by their father’s large Puerto Rican family, which met weekly for Sunday dinner. “Overall, one of the greatest love languages ​​of Puerto Ricans is food,” he said. Whether they were in Chicago or visiting relatives living on the island, “every family member cooked for us,” Barreto recalled.

As the family settled on the Fort Belvoir military base in Virginia, after his father received a everlasting position in the White House under Clinton and again under Obama, food remained a central theme in Barreto’s life. Barreto remembers going shopping with his mother in the base’s canteen during his senior yr of elementary school to purchase basic supplies for the Korean dishes she was preparing for the family for dinner. This was the genesis of his love for Korean cuisine. “My mother was very inquisitive,” he said, noting that she was stationed in Korea before he was born. “She always loved looking at recipes and trying new things and dishes.”

Still unaware of the impact food was having on his life, Barreto took an office job when it got here time to work out the right way to make a living. “I quickly realized it wasn’t for me. And that wasn’t what I wanted to do.” When he told his family he would do it Cooking Academy in Maryland to grow to be a chef, “they weren’t thrilled,” he said. “We worked so hard to get to a certain place. Taking this job in the ministry is a step backwards for you,” he said he was told. “They didn’t understand it for a long time.” However, he needed to take up cooking because “that’s who I am as a person.”

When Barreto entered culinary school in 2009, DC was not yet the food city it had grow to be lately. “It was ‘steak town,'” Barreto said, and classes taught by French chefs focused on cooking with jelly, butter and cream. While it was a practice he desired to learn, “I was already thinking about Korean food,” he said. In 2011, he made his first trip to Korea after which spent the next six years at The Source, finding ways to introduce Korean elements into the kitchen, serving Korean-inspired dishes to the taste of executive chef Scott Drewno. Two years after Drewno left the restaurant to launch Fried Rice Collective with chef Danny Lee in 2019, they tapped Barreto to be the executive chef of their newest concept, Anju.

Five years later, Barreto’s creations like Jjampong – crayfish, clams, crabs and tiger prawns served in a spicy broth with wok-roasted vegetables and wheat noodles – are keeping diners coming back and winning acclaim. The stuffing for his yache mandu, an unimaginable meat dumpling, marinated all day; it’s then rolled into wrappers, crisped and sprinkled with crispy chili confetti. But how crispy and light-weight his gochujang-glazed fried chicken is continues to amaze diners and food critics alike. Barreto brines the meat with Korean long peppers, garlic, onion, salt and sugar. Before frying, he dredges it twice, first in all-purpose flour after which in a mixture of roasted soy powder, potato starch and cornstarch. The whole thing is topped off with a bit of white Alabama barbecue sauce.

As Barreto developed his recipes, refined Anju’s menu and developed a “humanistic approach” to life in the kitchen, “to break the cycle,” he said, he also rooted himself in Buddhism. Unlike his parents’ religion – his father is Roman Catholic and his mother is Baptist – “Buddhism was something that grounded me (and) what worked for me,” he said. So does his love of nature, which pulls him to the climbing trails around DC and his home garden, stuffed with summer strawberries, peppers, herbs and more. Even though he doesn’t have a banana or a fig tree, he believes his maternal grandmother is all the time there for him – as are his father’s parents.

“My grandparents on both sides have always been my biggest supporters,” Barreto said. They were also the ones who gave him the best advice. “Just be happy. Life is short. Enjoy the moments. You don’t want to live in regret.”

It’s an approach I work on daily.