Andy Angelino — Cooking with Purpose

Andy Angelino didn’t set out to become a psychiatrist. Which is a good place to start, because almost everything about him seems to have happened that way — by accident, or instinct, or by following a thread of curiosity until it turned into something with purpose.

He grew up in a Catholic Polish-Italian household where service wasn’t an idea, it was just…what you did. His mother was a labor and delivery nurse — bringing life into the world. His father sold life insurance — protecting it, albeit at the end, in a more subtle way. Somewhere between those two poles, Andy briefly considered becoming a priest. (The no-girlfriend clause, as he tells it, was a dealbreaker.) Then there was a moment as a young boy, after watching a cooking show — The Galloping Gourmet, for all you children of the 70s — where he wanted to be a chef — throwing every spice in the cabinet into bread dough just to see what might happen.

When his kids were young — kindergarten and second grade — he brought them into the kitchen and taught them knife skills — with real knives. He taught them not to just follow recipes, but to learn technique. “If you know how to cook,” he believes, “you don’t need the recipe.” His doctor-son Nick went through a vegan phase and even staged at a restaurant to better understand food from his clients’ perspectives. His daughter Maddie, once a picky eater, now leans in with curiosity. Both of them cook. Both of them belong there.

And to Andy, belonging matters.

You see it in the way he shops — farmers market every week, a loyalty to the people who grow and catch his food. A CSA introduced by a farmer named Pam. A pandemic-era discovery of Sitka Seafood Market after winning an Alton Brown, a longtime member, trivia contest (competitive, he admits, without apology). He tried a dozen direct-to-consumer options before settling on a few that reflected his own values — built on trust, quality, and a sense of connection that extends far beyond the plate.

For Andy, food is the way he takes care of people.

On Nurse Appreciation Week, he bakes — twenty or more loaves of zucchini bread, delivered to every nurses’ station in the hospital. He’s done it for so many years that he can recite the recipe to the letter. No flourish. No announcement. No expectation of getting anything back. Just a simple note: from Dr. Angelino.

He cooks for his colleagues — they call themselves the “Four Horsemen” — turning out meals that would make a restaurant kitchen sweat: filet mignon, dauphinoise potatoes, caviar with homemade chips and crème fraîche. During COVID, when the world shrank to screens and silence, he kept cooking on Zoom — making connection through a camera.

And when he’s not feeding people, he’s thinking about how to keep doing it after he leaves psychiatry.

Retirement, for Andy, isn’t an ending. It’s a question: what now? The answer, predictably, involves service. Becoming a fly-fishing guide. Working with veterans through Project Healing Waters. Taking breast cancer survivors out with Casting for Recovery. Cooking with World Central Kitchen.

He’s still feeding people — just in different ways.

Of course, there’s another side to all this.

The kitchen he built himself — every inch of it (well, everything except plumbing and electric) — is his happy place. Horror movies stream in the background (Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein holds equal ground with Insidious 1 through 5), something simmering on the stove, something else reducing, always a sense that something good — or scary — is about to happen.

And then there’s the water.

 Out on the water, things get quiet in a way they don’t anywhere else. Fly fishing, he says, is a place of meditation. 

Back in the kitchen, though, things are rarely quiet. When he’s not streaming horror films, he blasts Frank (Sinatra, of course) and practices his fox trot and swing.

There’s a garden out back — sweet, juicy cherry tomatoes in abundance, perfect for something simple and delicious. A one-pot pasta. Maybe a batch dried slowly at 135° for eight and a half hours because a YouTube video suggested it might work (it did). Those same dried tomatoes folded into a creamy Tuscan salmon over homemade pasta — one of the dishes guests now expect.

There are challenges and experiments, too. A “Faux ‘pino” — his quick take on cioppino when time is short but appetite isn’t. Spinach ravioli stuffed with seafood, made from scratch with his son for his hospital’s fundraiser. They won first prize…was there any doubt?

But if you ask Andy how he cooks, he’ll shrug a little. “Out of the pantry, mostly.”

Recipes from his favorite food writers are there when he needs them — Alton Brown, Ina Garten, Julia Child, even me — but they’re more like guideposts than rules. A place to start and not necessarily to stay.

Because what he’s really doing — whether in a clinic, at a table, or waist-deep in a river — is the same thing: Paying attention, being present, and taking care.

And if you’re lucky enough to sit at his table, you’ll understand it immediately. The food is extraordinary, yes. But that’s not the point. The point is that you’re there, and you belong.