As a lunchtime crowd gathers at Jaleo, a tapas restaurant in Washington DC, its chef José Andrés can’t help making a quick assessment of those waiting for a table. “I wonder, why are they here?” he says from his seat near the bar. “Some people come because they need to eat. Some people come because they are tired and this is the first restaurant they found. But many people come because they’ve been here before or because someone else before them told them to come.”

The midday scene at Jaleo, along with the restaurant’s broader success – on a good day it can serve 1,000 people – validates the notion that Andrés had when he opened it 15 years ago. Born in Spain and trained by Ferran Adrià, the celebrated chef at El Bulli, near Barcelona, he says he arrived in Washington “with a very clear destiny and message that tapas was the mechanism and the vehicle to introduce Spanish cooking into America” – much the way sushi provided an introduction to Japanese food.