What Food Teaches Us About Being Human (featuring Austin Butler) - Ruth Rogers

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0:33ready to try a pair go to viuri.com slash arch and get 20 off at checkout i think you're going to love them as much as i do that's viuri.com slash arch and get 20 off your first order exclusions apply visit the website for full terms and conditions not only will you receive 20 off your first purchase but enjoy free shipping on any u.s orders over 75 and free returns have a great day. Everybody has a story. The other day I was there on a Sunday lunch and it was so beautiful because there were some people, of course, who didn't know anyone, but there were some people, it was like a party almost, you know, people were going from table to table.

1:11And I think that's something we really missed in COVID when restaurants were closed was that spontaneous meeting of a friend, you know, you walk in and, oh, there's someone I haven't seen for a long time or come and sit with me for a bit. How are you? And I think we're all in a room happy to be together. If you'd asked me before COVID what was important in the city, I would say hospitals or bookstores or parks or obviously schools, museums. I'm not sure I would have listed restaurants, but I think when we didn't have them, people really missed them. I don't know what you do to people, but I'll tell you what you did to me.

1:44You brought me in. We made a meal together. We were eating the meal. And all of a sudden, I felt like I was transformed back into my house of my upbringing and we were talking about things that really moved me. And I brought up Jack Gruber, who's now passed. He was a Holocaust survivor. He always waved his hand in front of his food about the abundance he had now versus what was going on in the camp. And I'm bringing it up again today for a reason. There's something about you that you give to people and it's the generosity of your heart and it's the warmth of your personality, but it's the combination of all these things and somehow it ties back into their ancestral home.

2:24I don't know how you do it because you're doing it for people of all different walks of life and all different types of professions, but I feel like they come into your zip code, they come into your zone and they plug into what you are about, which is love and grace and kindness and generosity and obviously great food. Well, welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. I have one of my favorite people today. My podcast, Lady Ruth Rogers, who we simply call Ruthie. Anybody that's lucky enough to know her calls her Ruthie. So I'm going to call you Ruthie in this podcast, if you don't mind, Lady Ruth Rogers, fellow American.

3:05A renowned chef opened the River Cafe, which is still one of the hardest restaurants to get into in London. She opened it in 1987. And it's a name forever associated with Italian food in the United Kingdom, but also other dishes. But I will say this, in addition to becoming a dear friend, I was on your incredible podcast and Ruthie has a podcast called Ruthie's Table Four, which is one of the most intimate, most fun podcasts. And you have a list of luminaries that I cannot believe that come onto your podcast, which is a tribute. You being one of them. Well, you being one of them. You're being too generous to me, but you have several incredible cookbooks centered around the River Cafe.

3:52And this is the reason why I'm bringing you on today. I want to talk about those books, but I also want to talk about how I met you. I met you through Jason Fox. If you remember that, he's the Special Forces Navy SEAL. He brought me in, and then you were kind enough to invite me on your podcast. But I want to go into your origin story, if you don't mind, as you, you know, it was almost opened as a canteen to feed staff from your husband, Lord Rogers, who had an architecture practice nearby, but it morphed into one of the most famous restaurants in the world, your restaurant. So tell us the origin story.

4:31Well, the origin story, first of all, thank you. I'm so happy to be here with you. You are one of the great luminaries, if that name applies to the podcast. And we had such a good time. And what we found is that talking about food, talking about recipes, talking about one's childhood and how we eat opens up a whole area of memory. And it was a good conversation. We all loved you in the restaurant. We love when you come in. You always say hello to the chefs, to the waiters. you make contact, and that's important to us. So thank you, and it's great to be here. How do we start? Well, I come from upstate New York, from Woodstock, actually, and I went to London when I was in my second year of college.

5:21And then in the 70s, Richard and I moved to Paris because he was the architect with Renzo Piano of the Centre Pompidou, the Beaubourg. And to skip over quite a lot. There's a lot to talk about those years in Paris in terms of food, in terms of books, in terms of memories. We came back with the idea that we didn't want to have an architectural office in a building in the middle of the center of the city. We wanted to be somehow a community. Richard particularly wanted to form a community, found these warehouses on the Thames and bought them with his partners. And the one thing that was missing was, you know, the most important part of a community is a restaurant, a place to eat where people can sit and talk and think and dream and trade stories.

6:11And so we put the word out. I was a graphic designer who'd been working in the office in London and in Paris. And we put the word out that we, you know, were interested in doing a small cafe restaurant and the applications came in and I remember I was sitting with Richard and we were skiing and I said you know the only thing worse than not having a place to eat would be to have a mediocre one maybe I should do it and it literally was those sort of few words that changed everything in our lives uh to make again a long story short Rose Gray who is an old friend of ours and had gone to New York to work with Keith McNally.

6:52But now with Balthazar and Pastis, had a club called Nails. And she came back and she really wanted to also to work. Oh, we had a guest. Come and say hello, Austin. Come up. We have a guest. Austin Butler is here. He's staying with me. Can he come and say hello? Yeah, Austin. And he's a great. But Austin actually knows my son. And you know Anthony's son, do you? So Austin, you may remember my son. Oh, you're doing a podcast right now. Austin, you may remember my son, AJ Scaramucci. He absolutely adores you and says that you are somebody he hopes he can stay in long-term touch with. Yeah, yeah.

7:34Really, what a special young man you raised. I heard so many wonderful things about you. I'm so pleased to meet you. Well, same here. Same here. God bless you. I don't want to interrupt what you guys are doing here. See, she's the O positive friend, right? she's friends with everybody right exactly right we we all we all all roads point back to ruthie austin right so true isn't it right yeah she's the hub of it all i know what you're saying because that gave me a year okay all right i asked to see you good to see you yeah i just wanted to bring you that thank you so much it's so apropos that's so apropos to this podcast because that's you every every person that walks through the city of hunden come to see you either in your house or at your restaurant.

8:17I got to meet Tom. If you don't mind me name dropping, I got to meet Tom Ford in your house. I'm too big for his suits. I'm too wide. I can only fit in his sunglasses. He told me he would make me a suit. That was very funny. Take him up on it. Basically, we did the

8:40applications. Rose Gray came back from New York and she wanted to open a restaurant. So I got in touch with her and we went to look at this site, which is a tiny little space where the warehouses were. You could just about fit, you know, six tables in. And we thought, well, let's do it. You know, I'd never cooked in a restaurant. I was a home cook for lots of children. Rose had had very little experience just working a bit with Keith and Brian McNally. And so two women kind of out of the center, who were not professionals, but loved to cook and loved people, said, let's do it. You know, we bought all our kitchen equipment from, you know, used places.

9:26We went to buy tables and chairs from the reject shop. Richard helped us with the architecture, if you could call it that. We opened up a little place called the River Cafe where you could either have sandwiches in case Rose, you know, in which case either Rose or I would make the sandwiches or a pasta and maybe a piece of lamb and some cake. And we would just share the responsibilities. And very, very, that was in 1987, 38 years ago. And from there, we just grew very, very organically, very slowly to, I guess, on Sunday, we did 250 covers for lunch. And now we can fit in a lot more tables. We have 30 chefs.

10:16We have, altogether, we employ about 140 people. And we've written 13 cookbooks. But slowly. Okay. But there's something you're doing. you have a personal magnetism that it's hard to really explain unless you're in your presence. So how do we get this personal magnet? I know that you were a Woodstock girl. I know you're the product of the late 60s and the early 70s, but there's a level of authenticity that you have that it's not just the people in the UK, but it's people around the world are drawn to. Why is that? What is it about you? Well, that would have to be for somebody else to say. I can't possibly talk about myself.

11:01I think I was brought up with a lot of love. It's quite simple as that. My parents were, you know, very kind. They were very patient. I had a sense of family. It was a house in the country. My father was a doctor. My mother was a librarian. And it was a place where people gathered. People seemed to come to our house more than we went to other people's houses. and I think it was nurture. It was, you know, just a lot of kindness around me, I suppose. And then I entered into a family when I married Richard, which was the same. He came from an Italian family. He was born in Florence. His mother was from Trieste.

11:44And I think that that sense of community, social responsibility, and when people work for you, you take care of them in a way that is responsible, nurturing. We also obviously run a business which has to have rigor and has to have responsibility. But behind that are the values that I think we started when we were opening the River Cafe are still there 38 years later. You're working away. I mean, you are a perfectionist and it shows up every night. in the food that you're serving. But why do you think Italian food, I mean, I have my opinion as an Italian-American, why do you think Italian food resonates in nearly every culture?

12:34Is it just the taste or is there something to do with the value system behind it or a combination of the two? What do you think? I'd say it's probably a combination of the two that people learn to cook through their family. They eat at home very often. If they're not in the city center, they have a garden, even if it just has one lemon tree in Amalfi or an olive oil tree in Tuscany. I think that it's actually quite simple Italian food. It isn't masked. It isn't hidden under a very thick sauce, although I love sauces in French food. I think when you take a piece of fish and you grill it and you find the local herbs and you put them over it with some olive oil and lemon, the integrity of the ingredient has to be there because that's what you're eating.

13:29I remember one of the most memorable things I've eaten Italy, and I promise it's true, is when I had a bruschetta in Florence in November, and the bread was just perfectly grilled, and there was a tiny bit of garlic rubbed on it. but the really incredible taste in my mouth which I can remember was the olive oil and I kept thinking what else do they put in this olive oil why does it have that peppery taste and of course it had been on the trees just weeks you know and so there was a sense that you and I think that Italians really have um it's also very regional Italian food and I think that comes from the history of Italy not being united so you know if you were now it's probably different but if I was in Venice, it would be hard to have, you know, maybe cannelli beans that were grown in Florence with that chickpeas.

14:25Okay, say chickpeas that were from Puglia. And if you were in Florence, you might not get the kind of risotto you would have in Venice. And so I think that that dignity and that perfection of just local ingredients cooked in the season is so vital to Italian cooking and it's also forgiving it's generous you dish it out you make a pasta you make enough for you know if you're cooking for five you make enough for 10 you know if you're cooking um you know for 10 you've made enough for 15 there's more there's a room another seat at the table and i think i mean i think that goes through a lot of cultures i think you'll find that in greece you'll find it in france you'll find it in most places but there's something about the warmth of Italy that I think is very immediate.

15:14Do you? Well, I think you're expressing it really well. I bought some of your cookbooks on Amazon and I flipped through them with my wife. And she said something that I'd like to get you to react to. She said, wow, she said, I love this cookbook because less is more. Ruthie has figured out that it's simple base ingredients, less is more is that part of your style that's something that she identified is that something that you take with you in other aspects of your life it definitely is and i think the less is more might be from the architect mese van der roe you know who who was a great architect and the bow house and it was a reaction to the complexity of architecture and design before that saying you could simplify it to, you know, a few columns and sheets of glass and maybe one story that you had less was more.

16:13And in food, I would say less is more. And I think your wife is, you know, really expresses it. And it's, I often, we write the menu every day for whatever meal the chef is on so we do the lunch menu is written in the morning and the dinner menu is written the afternoon and very often when I'm there writing the menu I put you know whatever I design a plate uh with whatever it is and very often I'll just go and take one in one part of it off you know it's either it was a vegetable and the beans well let's just have the spinach we don't need the or if it's a carne crudo with a crostino, we don't need something on the crostino.

16:57It depends. I mean, obviously that, you know, food is also an explosion of flavors. It's contrast of flavors. So it can be both. I mean, I love your menu. I come in, the problem with your menu, I want to eat every single thing on the menu. I hope so. Well, it's not a very long menu. Well, that's my point. It's very simplistic, very big. You know, it's just great. Some of it's peasant food. Some of it is northern food. You know, it's a blend of the two. But I guess the question I have, is there one thing that's been on the menu from 1987 till today? If you had one thing, or if you mix up the menu and sort of try to change it every year or seasonally?

17:41well I think there are a few things I do think that the squid that we do which is the squid with the tentacles you flatten it and you score it and then when you put it on the grill it curls up when we do it with the red chili sauce and just a piece of lemon and some rucola I think that might have been there on the first day I think the lemon tart that we have was there on the first day a caramel ice cream and I think that But probably, well, the pastas change every day. But, you know, it's not on the menu every day, but a pasta that we go back to over and over again. When there are so many fancy and complicated pastas, we just love a pasta with slow-cooked tomato sauce.

18:28You know, for me, that's my go-to comfort food. And so I think the menu, it was fun because we had our birthday the other day, our 38th birthday. and we gave everybody in the restaurant a copy of the very first menu because we still had it. And there were some things we really had to laugh at, mostly the prices. But there was a pop of Pomodoro on the very first day to quite a few complaints from customers saying, I didn't come here to have a bit of bread and tomato. And now, of course, it's changed. Your ears must ring a lot. The cliche when people are talking about it, your ears are ringing. because I talk to you, lots of people that know you, and the most resonating thing that comes back to me from the people that know you and frequent your restaurant is they feel home.

19:18They feel like when they come through the door, the River Cafe, they're in their home. Literally, they've got a group of people that are fun. You do such a great job with your staff. I want to talk a little bit about that. But you feel so welcomed and you feel like you are now home and you're going to sit down and relax and have this great meal. So talk a little bit about that. How do you create that culture? Because I go to a lot of restaurants, Ruthie, and some of them are industrial. Some of them are mechanical. Some of them have great food, but they have like a time fuse on the table. They want to get you out of there pretty quickly to replace you at the table.

19:56But when people walk into the River Cafe, they feel like they have an extension of their own home. How did you manifest that? And tell us a little bit about how you talked to your staff about creating that atmosphere. I think, to me, that is the nicest thing that anybody could say. And thank you for that. I think, why do people go to a restaurant when you could eat at home, you could order in? There's so many alternatives. And so, you know, I think that people go to a restaurant because, you know, in a way, maybe there are many reasons. But for us, I think we want people to feel that they're going to be, they're going to leave, for me, happier than maybe when they walked in.

20:42They'll feel that they have been looked after. They feel that they have, of course, had something delicious to eat. and I think if you make an atmosphere where we welcome people we don't obviously have a dress code we don't say the way you have to be or look or behave or it doesn't matter who you are how much you're going to spend that you are in our home and we want it to be as welcoming as you would you know you and when somebody comes into my house we greet them at the door when they leave we take them to the door. When they enter, we offer them a drink. When we, you know, we listen to how they're feeling.

21:21And I often say to the waiters and the staff servers, as you call them, we don't know what these people experience today. You know, they may have had bad news. Somebody in their family may be in trouble. They may have had great news. You know, they may have had a promotion or their daughter might be getting married. They may have saved up for quite a long time to come to the restaurant. They may want to share something. So I think everybody, I always think that when I look at the table, when I look at the restaurant from wherever I am, I think everybody has a story. And I think everybody has a story.

21:59And for us, the other day, I was there on a Sunday lunch, and it was so beautiful because there were some people, of course, who didn't know anyone, but there were some people, it was like a party almost. People were going from table to table. And I think that's something we really missed in COVID when restaurants were closed, was that spontaneous needing of a friend. You walk in and, oh, there's someone I haven't seen for a long time, or come and sit with me for a bit. How are you? And I think we're all in a room happy to be together. If you'd asked me before COVID what was important in the city, I would say hospitals or bookstores or parks or obviously schools, museums.

22:44I'm not sure that I would have listed restaurants, but I think when we didn't have them, people really missed them. It's about our togetherness, I think. You know, you've captured all of that, all the elements. The food is about our togetherness. It represents a cultural totem for us. I feel like when people are sitting down to a meal, there's usually a generally relaxed setting, if you will. and i want to i want to add i want to flip it over to politics for a second but not to get overly political but just talk about a state dinner as an example or about how food helps us get along with each other or builds a closer bond to each other you know which could be from a state dinner to two heads of stages sitting down and having a meal together how that differentiates them from like saying being in a conference room ruthie where they're you know it's a little colder, isn't it?

23:36Yeah, I've seen that. You know, you see, I've been to one state dinner at the White House, which was, you know, it was with President Obama and it was incredibly warm and kind. I've been to dinners at the embassy here when there's, I have to say, when, you know, there's a president whose politics I appreciate. I find, you know, it's a very worrying time right now yeah no question well you know you know i feel that way so we share yeah i do we share that and it just is you know at a time when we just want to be you know together when we want to that's who we are you know we're people who welcome people we're people who take care of people we're people who respect and you know um are dignified and so this what we're going through right now is is deeply disturbing but i think when you are around a table when you have people sharing food when you have people passing food we we often like to do plates of food that you pass around you make eye contact you very often i always like to serve the person who's next to me before i take it for myself and that that kind of communication is saying we're here together we're taking care of each other and that i think is a value that is lacking today and we need i think it's there but we just need to bring it out much more.

25:02You've cooked for rock stars. You've cooked for presidents and prime ministers. You've cooked for award-winning Hollywood actors. If you're willing to talk about it, anyone from that whole group surprise you in a good or a bad way? You know, I think that, oh, tonight, I'm actually cooking for the Canadian prime minister, Mark. Oh, Mark. He's coming here tonight. Great, great, great, great friend of mine. You know, we started at Goldman Sachs together, Mark and I. So I know I'm in a party for 30 plus years. Yeah, it's his wife Diana's 60th birthday today. So we're having a birthday dinner for her here.

25:45Well, if you get a chance in my regard. Well, there you go. There's an example of a hell of a guy. What a wonderful guy he is. Amazing person. So we knew and loved him because he was the governor of the Bank of England here. um and I think you know sometimes you have a table of of um people you know well if you have people who love to sing sometimes you just start singing around the table and that's again a shared experience I think that um you know I look I can talk about the people who are you know either great actors or great singers but I think for me whoever walks into the river cafe and we say that to whoever it is, you know, comes to the River Cafe, we treat them as if they were, you know, they are the most important people.

26:33And I think it does depend a lot on how the atmosphere is of the people who work for you. How do you treat the people who work for you? And that's as important to me as a culture. You know, the people who serve at the table, the people who cook the food, the people who make the drinks, people who wash the plates. You want to make a place that everybody wants to come to, to work. And I always think that's why I go to work every day, because I think also if they know how important it is for me to work every day, they'll want to come to work. And it's treating people as individuals. It's as simple as treating through hope rather than fear.

27:15It's understanding what each person does best to his abilities or her creative talents. It's just using the River Cafe. If it's a home to the customer, we also want to be a family to the people who work there. Anybody in history that you say, geez, I wish I had cooked for them? Anybody mind? Yeah. Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela. So you didn't get a chance to cook for them? No, that was not a possibility. but you know for me you know to have had Mandela come into the restaurant would have been a huge honor and we did we did cook for someone the other day who was very close to him so there were a lot of maybe that also brings up images of him and I am I am a political person you know I think about a society and politics and big P of politics, you know, how, how we can govern, how we can tell the truth, how we can, you know, believe in people.

28:24Yeah. And right or wrong policy as opposed to, you know, I love about you, just common sense. You know, we're trying to make, make things better for people and raise living standards, which is important. You know, we don't want to have too many have not, have and have nots. I And it reduces people's ability to think that they can attain things, you know? So, so table four at the River Cafe, conversations about food and life. Tell us about the book. Tell us about what went into the book. We have this book. What is really nice is that we have actually at the moment we have two books. So we have table four at the River Cafe, which is coming out in March.

29:07And then we have this new book. Can I tell you about this book, which is a book that I just finished, which is actually been published. The Squeege Me, the lemon book. Yes, this is the lemon book. And it's a book that I did with Ed Ruscha, a great artist. And I've been asking Ed if we could do a book together for years. And he finally said, yes, Ruthie, if it's one ingredient and if it's not too big. So this little book, it says 50 recipes and every recipe has lemons as an ingredient. So, and he did these beautiful photographs of it. So that's come out. That's a very simple book that we've done.

29:46And as you asked the question about Table 4 at the River Cafe, that really is the story of the podcast, which we started. it was actually you know during COVID when we wanted to reach out to people who were you know not able to come to the River Cafe and I thought of doing just a recipe every day saying let's just read a recipe every day and and then a friend of mine Graydon Carter your friend said Ruth you're going to have to segue into a story why don't you try and think what more you can do with this so So in the first interviews, I think the first one we did was with Paul McCartney and all people who were so kind, probably had little to do during COVID.