Hail to the chef: White House cook dishes on presidents’ food secrets
Chef Andre Rush served as a White House chef for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump — and knows their gastronomical secrets.
Two of the commanders-in-chief enjoyed noshing on hamburgers.
“Like with Trump . . . he liked burgers,” Rush, 49, told The Post. “But also at the same time, Bill Clinton loved burgers as well. It just wasn’t talked about because social media was not present at the time.”
Barack Obama was forced to eat on the healthier side.
“He didn’t have a choice, he had that big ass garden, so everything had to come from the garden,” he said. “You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to implement things with kids and healthy eating’ and not implement yourself.”
Obama did have a cheat food — pizza. “Of course … [because he’s from] Chicago. And he did make his own chili, which I kind of enhanced,” Rush said, laughing.
Bush “never wavered” from Southern-inspired food.
“He was a Texan. He wouldn’t change that. He had his own barbecue sauce that he did,” Rush said. “He stuck to his roots and that’s where he was at.”
Rush started working at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in 1996 and served four administrations through 2019, but had some deployments in between.
He served in the Army for 23 years and achieved the rank of master sergeant.
His 24-inch biceps went viral on Twitter in 2018 — after someone snapped a photo of him at the grill during a White House Ramadan meal.
Former CNN White House correspondent Kate Bennett put the photo on Twitter and approached Rush.
“She’s laughing and she says, ‘I’m going to make you famous’ . . . I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ She’s like, ‘Go look at your Twitter.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t have Twitter.'”
Rush is now partnering with the United Services Automobile Association-established effort Face the Fight, which launched on Thursday, to raise awareness and support for veteran suicide prevention.
Its mission is to break the stigma around seeking help and to cut the veteran suicide rate in half by 2030.
“The reason why it’s so important to me is because I have PTSD and I’ve lost a few people through suicide,” he said. “I lost one of my soldiers literally hours after talking to me, contacting me on the phone.”
The combat veteran, who was deployed to Iraq, and Afghanistan, was working as a chef at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. That day, he lost friends he regularly worked out with at the gym.
“I lost my guys,” he said. “I don’t talk about that a lot.”
To remind him of his mission, he does 2,222 pushups each morning — based on the fact that an average of 22 military veterans take their own lives each day.
“I wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning. I meditate, I do the pushups,” he said. “It’s not my workout. I literally do my pushups for my cause.”
The Mississippi native, who grew up in public housing, became interested in cooking from watching his mother but hid it from his father.
“My dad was a person that said, ‘Boys don’t cook and the men go to work and they don’t go to school.’ That was an old Southern mentality,” he explained. “But I snuck and cooked with my mom.”
He never told his father of his calling until the year before he died.
“My dad passed away about three years ago, and he found out that I was actually a chef about four years ago,” he said. “He only looked at black-and-white TV, no social media, no internet. When I told him this, he cried, and he was like, ‘I would have loved you anyway.'”
In February, Rush debuted his Tubi show “Kitchen Commando,” where he works to save struggling D.C. restaurants.
In one of the episodes, he did an ornate ice carving of a seahorse, which even managed to impress Chef Gordon Ramsay.
“He said, ‘Did you buy the ice carving?’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean, did I buy it?'” he recalled.
“He was like, ‘No way you did that in that amount of time.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I did that. I did it in 30 minutes.’ He’s like, ‘Get the hell out of here.'”
