Famous Spanish chef mocks Marjorie Taylor Greene for her wacky 'gazpacho police' comment

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is being relentlessly mocked after saying that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is using the “gazpacho police” to bully and harass Republicans in Congress. The far-right GOP congresswoman confused the Gestapo, Adolf Hitler’s secret police in Nazi Germany, with “gazpacho” — a Spanish tomato soup that is served cold. And some of the mockery is coming from someone who actually grew up in Spain: chef/restaurateur José Ramon Andrés.

On Wednesday, February 10, Greene complained, “Not only do we have the D.C. jail which is the D.C. gulag, but now, we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens.”

Greene’s comment got a blistering response from MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who told viewers that she is “so relentlessly stupid that she actually thinks gazpacho is the name of Hitler’s secret police.”

Andrés, who is originally from Asturias, Spain but now lives in the United States, was nowhere near as cutting in his response, although he did have some laughs at her expense.

The 52-year-old español, whose gazpacho recipe was published by the Washington Post in 2018, tweeted, “Dear @RepMTG the Gazpacho police was created by me in 1993 to make sure that no one will add Tabasco or jalalpeño or strange things to my beloved soup! Please don’t blame anybody else but me…stop by for a glass anytime. Don’t forget your mask and vaccination card!”

Andrés, a Gen-Xer, was born in Asturias in 1969 but moved to Spain’s Catalonia region — which includes largely Catalan-speaking Barcelona — with his family when he was six. As a teenager, he attended culinary school in Barcelona before moving to Los Estados Unidos in the early 1990s.

Andrés, who now owns restaurants in Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and other U.S. cities, has been a United States citizen since 2013.