Chef Angel Barreto has multiple cooking accolades next to his name, including ‘culinary ambassador’ for the United States

When Angel Barreto was 31 and working 16-hour days as an executive sous chef, he had a mental breakdown. At the time, he was at Wolfgang Puck’s now-shuttered DC restaurant, The Source. Each night, Barreto would arrive home from the restaurant at 2 am only to turn around and be back at 9:30 the following morning. He said his burnout was less about the hours and more “a response to the super, super high pressure [of an] old-school kitchen where you got yelled at a lot,” he explained. “I was starting to train people like that, too. And I’m just like, it’s not good. It’s not what I want.” The experience changed the way Barreto worked. He’s now a James Beard-nominated executive chef at DC’s award-winning Anju and a partner in The Fried Rice Collective restaurant group.

At Anju, he does things a lot differently.

“We don’t yell at people here. We treat people well in the kitchen. The focus is on the food, but it’s also on the staff’s mental health,” said Barreto. In the employee locker room, there’s a poster from the Southern Smoke Foundation, a nonprofit that provides funding and mental health resources for those in the restaurant industry. Baretto said he underscores to his staff that a mistake is simply a mistake. “We’re not brain surgeons. We’re not saving people’s lives every day. It’s food. Our job here is to create a great guest experience, ” he said, recalling what he told them. “I want them to know they are heard and appreciated,” he added. He said his high staff retention rate is a testament to his caring kitchen environment. His awards are a testament to his culinary talent.

Soon after Barreto helped open Anju, which serves “eclectic Korean cuisine,” accolades started pouring in. In 2019, the Washington Post’s food critic, Tom Sietsema, called him “a talent to watch.” The following year, Barreto was a finalist for DC’s RAMMY Award for “Rising Culinary Star of the Year.” In 2020, he was a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation’s “Rising Star Chef of the Year” award, and months later, Food & Wine named him one of the country’s best new chefs. In 2022, the James Beard Foundation again nominated Barreto in two categories, “Emerging Chef of the Year” and “Best Chefs.” And this year, the foundation put Barreto back on its list, this time for Best Chef Mid-Atlantic. He is also a Culinary Ambassador for the United States.

a chef would not have been on his list if you had asked 7-year-old Barreto what he wanted to be when he grew up. Instead, he wanted to be a history teacher or politician – his interest in those subjects was sparked by his parents’ careers in the military. But food became a passion early on, as he found it in his grandparents’ kitchens. Throughout his elementary school years, Barreto moved about every two years. While his parents were deployed, Barreto and his sister would live with their grandparents in the summer. “I never really realized until I got older how central food was,” he said. “Politics always surrounded me, but I love food. Family and food were always pivotal keystones of my life.”

The daughter of sharecroppers and the last person in his family to physically pick cotton, Barreto’s maternal grandmother owned a farm in Florida. He said living there with her was a privilege. “For me, Florida was like the wild, wild west.” There were strawberry plants, banana and fig trees and a sugarcane field. Every morning, Barreto’s grandmother made him breakfast from her garden. With alligators and turtles all over the property, there was also turtle soup. Watching his grandmother make it is something he said he’ll never forget. “She grabs a stick, the snapping turtle bites the stick, my grandmother has a machete, cuts the turtle’s head off and turns into a soap,” he said, a tradition Barreto said she learned from her mother who was half Cherokee, half Black. “It impacted my life,” he said about his experiences on the farm.

In Chicago, Barreto and his sister were embraced by their father’s large Puerto Rican family, gathering weekly for Sunday supper. “One of the biggest love languages with Puerto Ricans, in general, is food,” he said. Whether they were in Chicago or visiting relatives who live on the island, “Every single family member would cook for us,” Barreto recalled. 

When the family settled at the military base in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, after his father landed a permanent position at the White House during the Clinton Administration and again during the Obama Era, food remained a central focus of Barreto’s life. In his last year of elementary school, Baretto remembered going food shopping at the base commissary with his mother to buy staples for Korean dishes she’d make for the family for dinner. It was the genesis of his adoration of Korean cuisine. “My mom was super inquisitive,” he said, noting she was stationed in Korea before he was born. “She would always love looking at recipes and trying new things and dishes.”

Still unaware of the pull food had on his life, Barreto took an office job when it came time to figure out what to do for a living. “I realized quickly this was not for me. And this was not what I wanted to do.” When he told his family he’d be going to L’Academie de Cuisine in Maryland to become a chef, they were “not very thrilled,” he said. “‘We worked so hard for you to get to a certain place. For you to take this service job, it’s like a back step,’” he said they told him. “They didn’t understand it for a very long time.” But he had to pursue cooking because “That’s just who I am as a person.”

When Barreto started culinary school in 2009, DC wasn’t quite the food city it’s become in recent years. “It was a ‘steakhouse city,’” Baretto said, and classes, taught by French chefs, were about cooking with aspic, butter and cream. While it was a tradition he wanted to learn, “I was already thinking about Korean food,” he said. In 2011, he took his first trip to Korea, then spent the next six years at The Source, finding ways to infuse Korean elements into the cuisine, serving up Korean-influenced dishes for executive Chef Scott Drewno to taste. Two years after Drewno left the restaurant to launch the Fried Rice Collective with Chef Danny Lee in 2019, they tapped Barreto to be the executive chef of their latest concept, Anju.

Five years later, Baretto’s creations, like Jjampong — crawfish, mussels, crab and tiger shrimp served in a spicy broth with wok-roasted veggies and wheat noodles — keep guests coming back and the accolades rolling in. The stuffing for his yache mandu, an impossible meat dumpling, marinates for a full day; then it’s folded into wrappers, crisped up and sprinkled with a confetti of chili crunch. But how crispy and light he makes his gochujang-glazed fried chicken continues to amaze diners and food critics alike. Baretto brines the meat with Korean long peppers, garlic, onions, salt and sugar. Before frying it, he gives it a double drenching, first in all-purpose flour, then in a combination of roasted soybean powder, potato starch and cornstarch. A drizzle of white barbecue sauce from Alabama tops it off.

As Barreto developed his recipes, honed Anju’s menu and crafted a “humanistic approach” to kitchen life “to break the cycle,” he said, he also rooted himself in Buddhism. Unlike his parents’ religions – his father is Roman Catholic and his mother, Baptist – “Buddhism was something that grounded me [and] that worked for me,” he said. So does his love of nature, which draws him out to DC-area hiking trails and into his backyard garden, filled in the summer with strawberries, bell peppers, herbs and more. While he doesn’t have a banana or fig tree, in his mind, his maternal grandmother is always out there with him — as are his father’s parents.

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

It’s an approach he works on every day.