Epicurious Excellence: Jon Gray & Ruthie Rogers

0:03Only connect, urged the novelist Anne Foster. He wrote this more than a century ago. Today, those words resonate more powerfully than ever. Artists and creatives collaborating across disciplines, geographies, and perceptions are truly leading the way. So join us. Let's connect.

0:27Welcome to the third season of Chanel Connects. I'm Yana Peele, Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel. In this series, we bring together global changemakers from the worlds of food, film, art, architecture and beyond. Some are old friends and collaborators. Others are meeting for the first time. All are focused on what matters most and what happens next. And now we get to listen in.

1:07In this episode, food visionaries unite. Ruthie Rogers, the legendary chef behind the River Cafe in London, talks to John Gray, co-founder of the Bronx-based collective Ghetto Gastro. Both are committed to community and are champions of collaboration. Together, they discuss the intersection of culture and food, their legacies, and the power of partnership.

1:42It's great to see you. How are you? It's good to see you, too. It's so nice to see you. It's been a while. I know. It's been a while. The last time I saw you was when you were at our house. It was incredible. And one of my biggest memories was the kitchen. Oh, a kitchen. When people come into our house and they see this very open kitchen with four burners, you know. When I opened the River Cafe, I already had that kitchen. I wasn't a chef when I had the kitchen in the house. And it's amazing how you can do a lot with so little. What do you have at home? Well, I just moved into a new house, and all I have, my stove doesn't work yet because I had to disconnect the gas.

2:20So right now I just have an air fryer and a tea kettle. You can do a lot probably. Yeah, yeah. I make it work. I've been eating a lot of, like, horse mackerel, which is more sustainable than tuna. Like, preserved broccoli rabe, like, olive oil and peppers. I get, we have a purveyor, Gusti Amo. They do all of the Italian imports. So I just, I'll go grocery shopping at their spot. Where is it? It's in the South Bronx. Is it? So tell me about what you're doing with your organization. Yeah. And then how does that relate to the Bronx? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so like with Ghetto Gastro, the reason that it started was like food for me has always been like an escape for me.

3:02You know, my mother, we bonded over going to restaurants and eating out. She was one of those single parents that was going to school, working a job. But we spent our quality time going out to eat because she was an epicurious person. So I got it honestly from her. and as I was like a young adult going out to eat in Manhattan, I often saw, or like you heard like hip hop playing on the soundtrack of a restaurant, right? But then when you look around the restaurant, you don't see black or brown people dining and then you look in the kitchen, you didn't see many black or brown people working in the kitchen except maybe the dishwasher.

3:44Right. So I was like, all right, what's the way that we could that use food as a medium in a language to celebrate the culture of the Bronx, which is largely hip-hop, and also kind of create this pan-African idea of food, taking things from the past and bringing it into the future in a way that's entertaining and fun. So even when we think about social issues and being advocates that are activated, you know, we don't call ourselves activists, but we're advocates. we think about, all right, how do we sneak the medicine and the Kool-Aid? So it's like, how do we make this fun and entertaining but then deliver a message that's poignant?

4:23So it started at the beginning. How did you start it then? We started doing house parties in my apartment in the West Village. So my buddy Les, he was working at Madison Square Garden and they would be doing huge food buys for the arena, right? So a lot of that food would go to waste. So he would borrow some premium products from there. Then we'd go to the farmer's market. You know, we did these things called Freestyle Fridays. So we'd go to the farmer's market on a Wednesday, get whatever is fresh. He'll get the proteins from Madison Square Garden, and then we'll just cook a dinner. Well, I didn't do any cooking.

4:59That's why they called me the dishwasher. I'll handle the dishes and the drinks. And then we just invited friends, and the words started getting around, and people really wanted to start coming to these underground supper clubs and then brands started calling us and that's kind of how it elevated into the platform that it is now. Amazing. And the book, you've just done a book. We did just do a book. I just did a book, so we can both talk about our books. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was just recently gifted your book. Oh, the River Cafe Look Book. It's amazing. Yeah. And I was like, when I looked at it, I'm like, oh, we're speaking the same way.

5:32Our book was really trying to think of how we could inspire young people to cook. But actually anybody, any age. And the idea was that very often you open a book, a cookbook, and you see a recipe which is very long. And it might put you off actually making because it looks intimidating. It looks so many ingredients. And so we thought, what if we didn't put a recipe in until page 117? and we just put photographs in the beginning for the first sort of 115 pages of the food. And then somebody might say, I want to make that. And then they'd look up the recipe and then see what it was. And then if we had one recipe of food, we thought to make it kind of funny and a bit intriguing, we matched it.

6:13We went through the archives of the photographer and then matched the food. So it was kind of, you know, a fun idea. I love the pairing of the food and like the lifestyle photography. so it could be a river, a highway. A pink telephone next to strawberries. Yeah, it was incredible. That's a great project to do. And everybody learns different too, right? So for us, because my vocation is more of a visual vocation and my partners have the culinary background, I'm like, how do we tell a story with these recipes? So bringing in photographs, bringing in artwork from our friends to really tell a cohesive 360 vision with the Black Power Kitchen.

6:56So I definitely feel like our books are relatives. So tell me more about the book. So with the book, what we really wanted to do, because Ghetto Gastro is such an abstract project and concept, we wanted to approach it like if we were really trying to distill what the ethos is of our project, how do we put that between the pages? So we approached Black Power Kitchen like if this was our first book and our last book, how do we give the people enough? And it's really like when we started with the outline, we wanted to start with the Bronx, of course, which is our foundation, but also look back to Africa and how that connects with the different foods that are celebrated in different regions.

7:38So looking at the Caribbean, the South America, and then also because we don't have a restaurant, a lot of our stuff is international. So our travels have definitely changed our perspective. Like trips to Thailand, trips to Italy, trips to Japan have informed how we approach and cook. So we wanted to really celebrate all of these things. We did a chapter dedicated to our mothers, you know, because like the foundation of all of us are black women. So how do we celebrate them? So like we take people on the journey throughout the book and then the recipes support those stories. And we didn't mean to do it, but it turned out that the majority of the book is vegetable-driven, plant-based recipes, you know, because we wanted to really have the recipes serve the story.

8:26Yeah. And the big change that's happened, we did our first cookbook in 1994, and we would go on a book tour after, you know, trying to talk to people about the book. And everybody would ask questions, saying, you know, it's all very well for you to put capers and salted anchovies, but we can't get those ingredients. And now, with the Internet, you know, with online, you can order practically anything if you can afford it to be delivered. So I think that's really opened up access to ingredients in a big way. I mean, you still want the neighborhood shop. I think markets are really important, you know, that it's cheaper, it's more seasonal.

9:06You're not buying things that have been transported from halfway across the world. It's interesting. I was going to ask you about shopping in the South Bronx and what the food is like. Because, you know, when you look at the access that affluent areas have for vegetables, for fruit, for all sorts of food, where there is a kind of poverty of access in places like the South Bronx or in London, where there are no places where you can buy vegetables. You know, it's just, it's accessibility. What's incredibly unique about the Bronx is that the Bronx is the home to the largest food distribution center of its kind.

9:45So it all goes out. At Hunts Point, everything goes out, right? And you have communities that are dealing with the emissions from the trucks, from all the deliveries. But then, like you mentioned, they don't have access to the fresh produce, the vegetables, because it's all going to restaurants or bigger, different food distribution. So that's like the crazy catch-22 of the Bronx. And like you mentioned, it's one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States. Yes, I know. It always caught me by surprise because I thought it would be like in a rural area in the south or something.

10:19But it's in the city. That's right, in New York City. Which is crazy. You travel 50 blocks and you're in a completely different world. Different world. And that makes me think about you growing up in upstate New York in Woodstock. Did you grow up around a lot of farmers and around farms? How has that upbringing informed how you approach food? Yeah, it has. I think that both my parents, my mom was a librarian, my father was a doctor, and they came from families where immigrant families, Russia and Hungary, where food was important. So we had the luck to be surrounded by farms in Woodstock in Ulster County.

11:00And I remember I always say the story in the summer, you know, if we were making corn on the cob for lunch, we'd buy it in the morning, and if we were making it at night, we'd buy it in the late afternoon because you wanted it to be, you know, just picked. But I think it was a combination of being able to really see, again, the way food was grown. My mother was not a gardener. We didn't have a vegetable garden in our garden. But my partner, Rose, who I opened up the River Cafe with, her grandfather, I think, was president of the British Horticultural Society. And so she knew she had a very refined taste about wild strawberries or myrtles or, you know, that.

11:43So she, we had, the two of us came together. We'd go to Italy and we brought a pumpkin back, you know, and put God a seat for the pumpkin so the pumpkin could travel back with us. or we were very ingredient-focused, and we still are. How did you and... It's Rose? Rose, yeah. Another Gray. Yeah, Another Gray. Spelled it like how I spell my name. How did you and Rose meet, and then how was the restaurant and community with the studio? Yeah, well, that was an interesting question because Rose and my husband Richard went to high school, basically, together, and so I always knew Rose. She was older than I was.

12:20She had children who were older, but I always knew her, and we went to live in Paris because my husband built the Pompidou Centre, and she went to live in Italy. And then when I came back, I wasn't sure what I was going to do, having worked on the building. I was a graphic designer. And we knew that we didn't want to have an office in the middle of London that was just in a kind of tower. We wanted to have a community. And so Richard found these beautiful warehouses on the river in Hammersmith, slightly out of the center, about 20 minutes out of London. And they tore one down and made a kind of green space in the middle.

12:58And then people who made architectural models took one floor, and then there were people who did stained glass windows, and there were framers, there were designers. And it was a kind of community, but there was no place to eat. And so I remember we were looking at proposals for this little space that we had for a restaurant cafe, And I said, you know what, maybe I'll do it. And it was such a kind of shocking thing to think. And then I called Rose. And so we went and looked at this little site in this beautiful space. And we said, let's do it. And so we started together. And, you know, sadly she passed away in 2010.

13:39But, you know, we had a good 25 years together, you know, working together. That's incredible. It was a great partnership, yeah. I feel like the best things happen out of that type of organic curiosity. I agree. And just like, let's do a thing. Yeah, let's just, yeah, yeah. You know, and see what comes of it. How do you find working with a group of people? How do you actually do what you do with the people you work with? Because I think that's so, that's what I find in, you know, the restaurant. How you value people, how you draw them in, how you give them space, and how you give them discipline, really rigor as well.

14:18Yeah, for us, it's like we have a saying that we say, community builds immunity. So we feel like the more heads at the table, sometimes there can be too many cooks at the kitchen, but I think the nature of the partnership within Ghetto Gas Show is like, everybody has a different expertise that complements each other. Like me, I come in with like the creative, but like the visually creative. in that acumen and the business acumen. Pierre is super disciplined, and he likes to always work super hard. Les is very creative and comes up with flavors off the cuff. So I think all of our different gifts, like our strengths and weaknesses, balance each other out.

15:02How many people are there that work together? So the founding team is a team of three, but in terms of people that work with us to keep the engine running, We have, like, a team of 12 people. Right. Mostly women that really support the movement. And, like, we wouldn't be able to function without, like... Yeah. Because we're more chaos than organized, but we have a team to help organize the chaos. Right. River Cafe started with nine tables, you know, in 1987. And we were only open for lunch. And Rose would make pasta and I'd make sandwiches, and then I'd make pasta and she would make sandwiches.

15:39So we knew from the beginning that everybody would be kind of involved in the cooking in some way, whether you were washing your dishes, you would also, you know, prep the scallops. And if you were, you know, if you were a waiter, the waiters come in early and they prep the parsley or they chop the chilies or they grate the cheese so that somehow they have a knowledge and an interest in the food. And so it's based on a kind of involvement from everybody and a kind of family way. You know, so I think starting, for me, starting small is good. I think that's why we always had like a transient nature.

16:17I think because my background is not in restaurants and I've always been kind of a rolling stone. I'm like, let's just take the show on the road and really get to build community outside of where we're from. And also like change perceptions. Like early on in a career, like when we would say, for instance, we land in Italy, right? The custom officer is like, where are you guys DJing tonight? Are you performing? It was either like rappers or athletes. And then we're like, no, we're actually here to meet at the consulate and do something with the cultural team with food. And they'll be like, hmm.

16:52So I think this kind of subversiveness to challenge stereotypes and what people might expect when they see people that look like me and my partners, and culinary was like the last thing that they were thinking about. So being able to do that and travel. And now I think we're thinking a little bit differently, like to be able to have a place for people to come. We have a spot in Tokyo that we kind of use as a hub for collaborations and let other people come and use the space. But we're starting to think about maybe having like a little test kitchen in New York City. I was really interested after the pandemic.

17:32I don't know if you were, but the same feeling. But if you'd asked me, you know, what's important in a city, I'd say museums or obviously schools and hospitals and galleries and parks. And then when we had to close restaurants for six months and we opened again, people came back and they were crying. You know, they just somehow being out in a restaurant where other people were eating, seeing your friends you didn't know were there. The spontaneity of food brings people together. is real community. And it's also just a very human thing, right? We all have to eat. And like you say, the connection with memories and a dish, a smell, a taste, you know, the environment.

18:16Like when you put all of those things together, it's a very emotional, sensual, intimate thing. It is. You know, it's like a certain level of intimacy when you're breaking bread with somebody. So to then not be able to do that in that way, it was like... Yeah, it was hard. Yeah, very difficult. When you think about River Cafe and this idea that started like, all right, I think I'm going to do this. From graphic design to this to now having so many chefs, like restaurant chefs, and not just any chefs, chefs that are doing things to challenge the zeitgeist and change the world that are pretty much your offspring.

18:53How does that make you think about legacy and the work that you've done? Well, that's an interesting question. I think it's probably the thing that makes me most happy in terms of how not keeping, you know, so much the River Cafe as forever, but keeping that people leave us not only with a knowledge of Italian food. You know, we take all the chefs to Italy. If you've worked for us for a year and a half, we take you on a wine trip. And the importance of that is that a lot of people who've worked with us haven't been exposed to Italy. They don't come from families who can take them on family holidays.

19:26to Puglia or to Liguria. So I think that teaching where our food comes from is something they take with them when they leave. And you know that feeling when somebody comes up to you and says, Ruthie, I have to talk to you. And I go, okay, how long? When are you going? Where are you going? And I always say, well, as long as you continue to cook, you know, go. And as long as you know that you can always come home, if things don't work, you can come back. And also what really makes me happy is when people like April Bloomfield or Jamie or I can name so many chefs who have started on their own. And I think what they take, I hope, is the values of how you behave in a kitchen, that we don't shout, that we're polite, that we teach through hope rather than fear.

20:17that old-fashioned idea of a restaurant where people felt scared or intimidated by their head chef. All that is important to us because that's, again, you know, we talked about a civilized society. And I hope that the legacy of the River Cafe is not how to make the thinnest ravioli that tastes like, somebody said, an angel made it, but that, you know, the way we treat each other. Journalists call me up and they say, oh, it must be really hard being a chef. And I say, it must be really hard being a journalist because we're no different. You know, we have a profession and we have work that we do every day.

20:56And I think that's the values that I want people to take with us. They always say people don't remember what you did to them, but how you make them feel. Yeah. Or what you say, but how you make them feel. So I think you've definitely manifested that with the River Cafe. And then for me, when I think about legacy, so we're very, well, man, 10 years went by very fast. So we've been at it for 10 years. And I think some of our proudest moments are the same things. And because we don't have a restaurant, we're not bringing up many people through the ranks. But, for instance, I was in Japan recently, and these two brothers came up to us.

21:32And they were like, yo, we started a food magazine about youth culture in Japan that commingles with food. and we started the project because of Ghetto Gastro. And I'm like, wow. So I think the main modality is being able to look around, you see what resources you have, whether it's your friends, ingredients, vibes, culture, and being able to make something and celebrate that. So I think that could be within food. It could be outside of food. Our new focus is how do we create scale to then create the resources to have more impact within our community. And for us, that's the legacy we want to leave behind.

22:10Well, I think you're brilliant. I really do. I think it's such a kind of privilege just to sit next to you and hear what you're doing and, you know, the work that you're doing and the people you've inspired and the social implications of what you do. So I really, really appreciate you being here. The privilege is mine. Thanks. We got to do it again. We got to do it again.

22:37This was Chanel Connect Season 3. It's been great having you with us. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Revisit conversations from the first two seasons with guests including Tilda Swinton, Kehinde Wiley, G-Dragon, Keira Knightley, and Grimes.

23:12Thank you.