Ab Rogers, Designer

13:11Ab Rogers:I don't know how he got them out of Italy. and to Britain, but for her having the candied fruit. But you can imagine coming from Parmesan cheese and olive oil and anchovies and garlic to a country where it was just a very, very different level of and type of cooking.

13:28Ruth Rogers:But she had this amazing house that Dada designed her, this kind of super experimental house, his first kind of real vision of the future of his architecture. That was until 68. 68, yeah. This kind of yellow box where she would cook her childhood food and with this incredible generosity and precision in how she would cook. And for me, I always really remember the carrots. Then the carrots would take four hours and she would kind of turn them over each one individually. She almost knew them by name, each slice, by the end of the kind of carrot cooking. And you would have this orange olive oil that had been kind of touched by this very, very slow cooking.

14:02Ab Rogers:Italian vegetables are never undercooked. Everything in Italy is, you know, the vegetables. Even that, yeah, you can have raw, you do. But I think that the difference between a blanched vegetable in French cooking or other cooking, and then the Italians, which just cook them for a very long time, they do it because of the olive oil. I think they get away with it. So tell me more about the influences in your cooking. You said Dada. Dada.

14:33Ruth Rogers:And then, you know, I grew up with Rose and her kids. We were all very much.

14:38Ab Rogers:That would be Rose Gray, who was my co-founder of the River Cafe.

14:41Ruth Rogers:Who was, you know, who moved to Florence in when I was like 14, 13. And we would go out there and all that they would do there was cook. And she kind of demanded everybody in the house to be cooking. I don't know how you could make a tomato sauce so collaborative. And she always wanted to push. And like you were saying in my introduction, she always really wanted to push the boundaries. And if she was going to use chili, she wants to make you cry from the heat. You know, she kind of, she was, she was experimental. Not when she was hip, but in those kind of periods. And the whole house was so bohemian in a way, kind of going there as a teenager.

15:14Ruth Rogers:It was like, anything could happen. And food was the absolute glue that operated around that.

15:19Ab Rogers:And she was taught to cook by Dada.

15:21Ruth Rogers:Yeah.

15:22Ab Rogers:She always said that, you know, there were about five friends of Richard who lived in South London, Wimbledon, Cheam, that area. And they were friends of Richard. And then what they really loved was being taught by Richard's mother, Dada, your grandmother, how to cook. And so there was, and actually if you went to Rose's house or Sue's or, you know, Georgie Walton's house or Wendy Foster's, there was, you could tell that they'd been taught by Dada. There was a consistency.

15:51Ruth Rogers:Because her food was about approach. I mean, she didn't do that many dishes, but the way that you learned, you could apply it to anything. As you say, you talk about the vegetables or we talk about, you know, the salad or the ice cream. you know, which are extraordinary, but all still trying to recreate many years later, or the Christmas cake that you make every year. But in a way, the really interesting thing for me is the kind of creation of this quite humble food that you make so exquisitely. And something I find fascinating in your cooking is the more noble your guests, the more humble the food that you serve them.

16:22Ruth Rogers:So you have the American ambassador for lunch and you give them tomato pasta, which is, you know, kind of the peasant's food, but you make it so perfectly. And it changes all the time, whether you're using Parmesan or you're not using Parmesan, the different tomatoes you're using, the time of year. But it's always, you know, it's, it's, Eva D 'Aricna says in design that three materials make a palace. And I think, you know, that's quite true in a lot of these dishes. I just ate the targa with tomatoes outside and that's two ingredients. Maybe we add salt, three, but it just, it's this kind of poetry in your, in your mouth, the kind of fish to the field, which is fabulous.

16:57Ab Rogers:And also when you have few ingredients, if you just have two ingredients, they better be good. Well that is true. There's no masking them, you know, that Batarga has to be graded a certain way. Did they slice it or they did that one? It's a ribbon. Yeah, you did the ribbon. Do you like the ribbon? I quite like it graded. We'll go have a comparison. Okay. So you had Sue, you had me, you had Dada, you had Rose. And then Lucia. And then tell, so Lucia Bartolini was your cousin. She's married to.

17:25Ruth Rogers:Lucia was married to Richard's first cousin. And she was this kind of extraordinary, short, completely energetic cook who would spend no money. But she would barter with the local farmers and she would drive off in the morning for 40 minutes to get this very fresh pacorino that had just kind of been set. And she would drive back across and you would have that. And she'd be so excited to bring you this and this bread. And she would have huge fights with the other chefs in Florence because their food was being too complicated. And it was always trying to be, there was just a real activist. I remember this meal where she had given the farmers three ducks and she'd given them and she'd specified their diet, these three ducks.

18:07Ab Rogers:Oh, she gave them as ducks to be fed.

18:09Ruth Rogers:And then for six months, they fed them and grew them. And then she came and picked them up and she did this whole meal devoted to the duck. So you start with duck soup, then you have duck ravioli, then you have roast duck. So how you can take one animal and it influenced the whole meal. And I kind of love that. linear story that starts to be told. And how we can use, you know, food to really tell stories. And that almost has kind of conceptual art in some ways where we sow in these other narratives.

18:37Ab Rogers:So there are five women in the sense that you grew up with these, you know, the importance. And no wonder your memory is so strong of food, you know, that you had these very different views in the way people cook, but a kind of quality and also a sense of that food was a way of bringing everyone together. Do you remember going to restaurants?

18:56Ruth Rogers:Yeah, I remember going to Chinese, going to Mr. Chow's, to kind of go to Chinese restaurants, Pizza Express.

19:03Ab Rogers:Yeah, a lot of that.

19:04Ruth Rogers:Definitely, with you and Richard. And going to restaurants, yeah, in Paris.

19:08Ab Rogers:Yeah.

19:08Ruth Rogers:I also remember those holidays where we would live in a boathouse and you would cook, you know, sardines. I mean, it was a very, it was not a lavish existence.

19:17Ab Rogers:That was in Filacudi, wasn't it?

19:19Ruth Rogers:Filacudi, we lost the house.

19:20Ab Rogers:We had the keys to the house. We had a map to take us to the house. We had three children. I was pregnant. and it was boiling art. And we stayed there for three weeks and we never found the house. No. And so - I know where the house is now. I have found the house since. Yeah, I've found the house. It does exist. So we stayed in this room, which we thought was going to be one night and ended up being sort of three weeks. But I think we did eat, you know, we ate from the sea, we ate from the land. Yeah, completely. And so I think that probably part of your childhood and growing up with that exposure.

19:48Ruth Rogers:I mean, Richard couldn't cook, but he would gather. We'd go to sea urchins. We would get prickly pears. We'd be covered in splinters.

19:54Ab Rogers:Yeah, there was a time that, I think it was you, that had been going every single day down to the harbor to try and fish and catch a fish. And every day we had this little fishing rod. I think maybe it was Rue or it was you. And we'd stand there for hours. And one day we just thought we can't go on any longer. So we bought a fish, a little fish in the fish market. And then you dove down underneath the fishing and attached it to the fishing rod. And he pulled it up and he said, there's my fish.

20:22Ruth Rogers:And Rue would say, what's they doing down there? You go, don't worry, it's fine. It's just swimming. It's just swimming.

20:26Ab Rogers:And so they attached it to the rod and he pulled it up. Of course, what he didn't really caught it onto was that it was a dead fish. And so then he was so prattled. It was a sardine.

20:37Ruth Rogers:So it was this big. It had been gutted.

20:40Ab Rogers:And we brought the fish back to the house. And then by that time, Rue was so attached to it, he wouldn't let us cook it. And so he slept with it.

20:47Ruth Rogers:For three nights. And we were all sleeping in one room. So it started to really, really smell. and this dried freckly fish and we had to persuade him to let the fish go and he was going to go back to his mom he wasn't well, his mom was going to make him better maybe he had to go to the hospital and we launched it back into the seat and this rigor mortis completely stiff I don't think you'd get away with that now

21:09Ab Rogers:because the whole idea of honesty and treating children as adults

21:16Ruth Rogers:So as a pizza genius I know pizza shop orders come from well, everywhere With Genius by Global Payments, online orders actually sink straight into your kitchen. It's as simple as pie. And with digital menu boards, your specials, your prices, your brand, always front and center. It's one system, ready for game night crowds. Any night of the week, really. Big league reliability for any business. That's genius. When you go to a city and you think, what is the culture of food going to tell me about

21:51Ab Rogers:the culture of the country, the city? The market. Yeah.

21:55Ruth Rogers:So what do you look for in a market? I love the market. We want to look what the locals are eating, what the locals are doing. And I think, you know, for me, Thailand is fascinating. You have some of the best food I've had in my life. You have these fish, which are barbecued, but in this kind of salt and flour, you have fish that you cannot recognize. I might get obsessed with fish, particularly because they're such strange creatures. and we don't see them most of the time because they're under the water. But then you have 77 different types of mangoes. We talk about mango as if it's one thing.

22:21Ruth Rogers:In the same way, I guess, with apples, you have all these different rices. You have these great pioneers who are trying to bring back all the heritage growing that has been lost along the way. And when I work in Thailand, I eat in the canteen in the morning and you eat this, it's all blood and guts because it's incredibly inexpensive. but the taste is fantastic. And if you're getting up at six in the morning to spend all day on site working, you want this kind of high protein, this high iron, this high kind of toxin thing. I mean, it's superb.

22:54Ab Rogers:Your work has taken you to, well, Japan?

22:57Ruth Rogers:Yeah. In Thailand, we work with Wonder Fruit, which is a big festival, and it has an amazing food culture inside it and a food culture for the kind of workers, which I find really interesting. And how we treat our workers is so important. The canteen. You know, Sophie ran the canteen here, which was which was fantastic you started this as a canteen itself at the beginning which is really amazing and such so kind of privileged the um the the office team here is the best canteen in london yeah well you also judge you judge you judge a society by the way it feeds

23:28Ab Rogers:its pocket poor the way they feed hospitals and you've done a lot of work in hospitals you know this is this brings back the immersion of you know architecture design food cooking servings

23:40Ruth Rogers:We're sociologists, I think as designers, I think, you know, the dad was very much a kind of sociologist in his way. His architecture, his cities were for humans. The manifestation was a building or a street, but it was really coming from how can we improve people's lives as the human. And I think that's what we're, you know, and food is part of that. And Richard was really interested in trying to put the restaurants in the street and how that would ignite and bring people into the street. and how, you know, Barcelona did it better than London, what we could learn from that and transforming into that.

24:11Ruth Rogers:Tell us about your work with hospitals. I mean, I think, you know, having designed a lot of very high-end fashion shops and very high culture museums and restaurants, etc., you know, we started working in Maggie's. We designed the Maggie's Centre.

24:25Ab Rogers:Tell everyone what Maggie's Centre is.

24:27Ruth Rogers:Maggie's is a cancer centre which sits outside the hospitals and it's really designed for the patients to energise them. if the hospital makes them impotent maggie's empowers them and there's these you know they're extraordinary architectural buildings that are designed around the needs of the human so it's very important to about the texture if you have had chemotherapy then you're very uh affected by by cold material so we try to everything you touch is made of wood everything is handmade it's really about the circadian rhythm how light gets in the space smoothing off corners so you really it's like it's a form of church in a way so it becomes this anchor you walk out of the hospital in this car park and you come to this oasis you know we work for an amazing landscape gardener p ordoff who designed the high line who created this incredible garden so you totally forget one that you have cancer or not you forget you have cancer but you forget the trauma that you're in and you give you a moment and you really see people in this space laughing and it's not because we're incredible architects we are good but it's because the brief is amazing and the whole network is amazing and the staff is amazing and the architecture becomes part of that support system so we developed a theory which is the third carer which is in the the doctor and the nurse is the primary the family the friends the secondary how the building can really care for you and part of that care goes into food so Maggie's is designed around this this centralized kitchen where people come and cook and we'll come and cook a tomato sauce and when Maggie's finished they invited us to the donors dinner Maggie's is completely paid for by donors, fund raising, there's no government money.

26:00Ruth Rogers:And we felt very indebted to these people. They'd given us this amazing opportunity to do this amazing thing. We created this building, which took eight years, in many conversations with the patients, the users, with the staff. So we said we'd only come to the meal if we could cook it. So we set up this meal. Our building is seven shades of red. So we proposed to do seven courses of red foods with seven different red wines. And then we had all these very generous donors there who would come for kind of half an hour. And then they stayed for four hours. And then actually getting, you know, telling their drivers to hold on and getting quite drunk.

26:34Ruth Rogers:And this whole thing became this really convivial experience. And it is that power of food, you know, which goes back to you serving humble food to noble guests that brings people together and sets you an edge. And I think there's a generosity in your cooking, which for me, I've really learned a lot about, which is making everybody feel welcome around that table to joy in this generosity.

26:57Ab Rogers:So the link between food and design, food and architecture, food, the people, because you have a system in your office, isn't it, too? Yeah.

27:06Ruth Rogers:Where everybody takes a turn to cook. Is that right? Or more now, I find myself cooking because I find that they're drawing, I'm sketching. And I think as a kind of a love back to them, it's nice for me to cook. And I will cook and dictate letters at the same time, be dyslexic. Dictating is a much faster way of getting a letter out. So you can do that kind of multi-dimensional thing. You've designed schools, as you were saying, Maggie's centers.

27:32Ab Rogers:Have you a kind of instinct or a feeling about restaurants?

27:38Ruth Rogers:We should start by saying I think your restaurant is the most beautiful restaurant in the world. and I have spent a bit of time with Dad kind of designing and helping along those lines.

27:46Ab Rogers:You have, you are, you are.

27:47Ruth Rogers:And I think Dad's clarity of vision on that, you know, this notion of the reflection, the open kitchen, and the way that it's just scaled up over the years. And yet the absolute DNA has never changed. And I find that really fascinating. We might, you know, add in a few extra objects, but you've gone from 40 covers to 120 covers. You know, I think, I mean, I had the great privilege to work with Heston on a few projects. And we did the little chef transforming the kind of most grotty foodery into this kind of super cool, fast restaurant. We'd go to the toilet and the toilet was signature about eating food.

28:22Ruth Rogers:And we were converting people that would go to use the toilet and not eat in the restaurant. And then we designed the fat duck for Heston. And in designing that, it was fascinating because we took this very high-end restaurant and we lost covers. We went from 42 to 40 covers. And we, you know, had staff that would go there and just stand in the room and just watch the different services going on because it's such a precise thing. And each guest is going to be there for four hours. We said there should be no art here. The art is the food. We need you focusing on the table. We made sure we had perfect kind of access between the kitchen for the staff to perform.

28:59Ruth Rogers:And then we made this chair. And this chair needed to support you for four hours of dining. And in four hours, you need to keep your diaphragm open because you're going to eat 13 courses. And this chair also had to work for different sized people. So Yosuke in my office is Japanese and tiny. And the designer we were working with is kind of very, very large and stuck. And so we would test the chair on them. And it was really about this kind of reductive design. It is all about the meal. We had this light that would change through from warm to cold and go for a whole spectrum. So as you went through the 24 hour cycle in the Fat Ducks 13 courses, the kind of light would change and focus on it.

29:37Ruth Rogers:And it was just about pulling the people together and the chairs would sit there. And differently when we designed Pizza Express, again, we'd spent three, four days working as Pizziolas there and kind of looking at how the system worked. And we really bought the chef into the center of the space. And one of my proudest things that we got him a 10 % pay rise because now the pizziola is not a guy at the back He was he was much more a performer And he needs to be more more proud and we really dealt with the acoustics and the kind of flexibility of the space We made it brighter and the whole transformation between you know bright daylight and coming cozy at night You know and we would we created these little boosts so you could have your own party Inside and I know you know I love that you never play music but that people would go there they could have their own party on these booths, plug their iPod in, and the next door person wouldn't hear them.

30:32Ruth Rogers:Acoustics for me are really, really interesting, how we can play with acoustics, with colour, with texture. We want the murmur. Maybe the murmur is too loud sometimes. You don't want silence. You don't want silence.

30:46Ruth Rogers:So as a pizza genius, I know pizza shop orders come from, well, everywhere. With Genius by Global Payments, online orders actually sink straight into your kitchen. It's as simple as pie. And with digital menu boards, your specials, your prices, your brand, always front and center. It's one system, ready for game night crowds. Any night of the week, really. Big league reliability for any business. That's genius. Did you ever think of doing one or the other?

31:19Ab Rogers:you know, that obviously you would be a designer, an architect and cook, but did you ever think that actually maybe this would be something you'd want to do all the time?

31:28Ruth Rogers:I think as a passion, it's quite nice not to commercialise it. And I have to say, when I've done kind of restaurant projects, I find the transactional part complicated. I find it because I like the kind of whole generosity. I love designing these projects. And at the end of the day, I'm saying to me, well, you know, we did a gallery in Lisbon at the end of it. Matteo asked us to do the opening of his gallery. And he said like 60 people in a square. 60 became 70, 70 became 150. So I said, okay, well then you need to give me some labor. I had his wife, Saru, who's an amazing art historian, a brilliant glass artist, a steel artist, and my scientist friend.

32:10Ruth Rogers:And the five of us cooked. And the scientist friend, Ash, who works with the mind. Neuroscientist. He's a neuroscientist and a neurologist and he's very precise so he does the meringue. The artists are very labour focused so they can cut, cut, cut. Chihuahua made mayonnaise with 60 eggs done by hand, not a single one curdled. 60 eggs, 60 yolks of stirring. And the menu was, we started with asparagus, we wanted people to, when they peed after the meal to remember the meal. Yeah, the smell. The whole idea, the idea of the asparagus. We then made this kind of very black stew of cuttlefish with a little bit of rice in a kind of Spanish style.

32:49Ruth Rogers:And so you had these kind of very smart artists from Madagoa, which is the gallery, eating and they would get black drops on their shirts and they're kind of the black and the white and their black lips that you get. And then we did a kind of meringue and fruit scenario, which you kind of performed and came with a big knife and crashed. So yeah, for me, more than comparing it to actors, it's kind of art. It's like the design. It's that same. But I think with food, we can handle everything. We can go to the supplier. We can go to the kitchen. We can control everything. With design, we're sending out drawings and we have to control everything, but we're controlling it in a more remote way.

33:31Ruth Rogers:It's less instinctive. Your work of art when you're designing last, Richard's Building's last,

33:37Ab Rogers:Do you feel that the impermanence of all that time and all that you do to cook would make you want to keep doing things that do last?

33:45Ruth Rogers:I love the ephemeral elements of design. And when we do the festival, we design, you know, we spend all year kind of designing. It lasts for four days. And the key to it is that it kind of evaporates because we don't want to leave chunks of steel knocking around. We want to create structures which kind of the termites come along and they eat them and it disappears. And if we're talking about sustainability, which is such an important part of cooking and our designing and our world and our future, you know, so drew a dad in so many ways, we need to look at kind of reversible structures. So I really enjoy the ephemeral nature of architecture.

34:16Ruth Rogers:You know, I really don't believe necessarily in permanence at the moment. I don't know, you know, permanence is such a big word. I think we need to design with cathedral thinking. We need to be designing long into the future, but we need to be aware of our, you know, of things needing to disappear at certain points. I mean, what is the future of this material? You know, concrete, plasterboard, they never go anywhere. The world ends up just full of old sheets of MDF and plasterboard and concrete. So we need to work with the more sensitive materials that when it's life, you know, like Stucco in Mexico or in America, you have to keep it upkeep it continuously as soon as we stop up keeping it it returns to the earth and i really love that kind of that that metaphor what about when you had children did that change

35:01Ab Rogers:some of your ideas of how you wanted to communicate with your children through food i mean when i had

35:06Ruth Rogers:jay it was covid and she was like three and i would sit on the floor and cook with her and she liked to eat everything you know and now she'll eat lots of things she won't eat but she still really cooks with me and we would you know we'd make pasta with her i would get her to separate an egg and make a mayonnaise and she you know she can do that and stir around and kind of emulsify and i think there's something really in in enabling and empowering going back to the kind of this thing of getting your family to cook together because as a kid you want a purpose you want a job and to suddenly be responsible for cutting the the eels or cutting the the carrots or whatever it is it makes you feel part of this performance if you're going to go back to a part of this creation of art.

35:47Ruth Rogers:And I think, you know, I'm not the easiest of cooks, but I love cooking with my kids now, Ella, Lula. We'll go to Cornwall for two weeks and we'll do nothing but cook. I mean, we'll wake up in the morning and talk about what we're going to eat and we'll spend the day getting the food and driving around, going off in the boat, barbecuing, etc. We'll make things as difficult as possible. And I think I also learned that from Rose, why make it easy when you can make it more difficult because it's you know it's it's not about short cutting corners it's about you know really devoting the time and i think that's also true of design and if a design i really believe that we need to design more and build less we need to think more we need to kind of go through the the process of the intellectual process of what is it we're doing and how we're going to do it and it's that kind of labor that i think gives great results be it in food or in uh in design

36:37Ab Rogers:We go to food for different reasons, but if you did need, and as your stepmother, I hope you don't need it very often, if you think about the kind of food that if you need comfort, what in all your life of food, of your memories or what you're doing now, is there a food that you would go to for comfort?

36:56Ruth Rogers:it i mean i think a piece of toast cold with butter so it's congealed and cantabarine anchovies on top you know so you have this crunch and you have this salt and you have the softness of the butter and there's a chemistry between that which i find phenomenal should you go have some yeah

37:14Ab Rogers:thank you very gorgeous

37:18Ruth Rogers:Ruthie's Table 4 was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton and Zad Rogers with Andrew Sang and Bella Salini This has been an Atomize production for iHeart Media

37:33Ruth Rogers:Game night rush or any night of the week really Genius keeps every order moving From online ordering to your kitchen to the front counter Big League reliability for any business That's genius.

37:48Ab Rogers:This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? When you think about discovering small brands, what store pops into your mind? Well, it should be Walmart. Seriously. Walmart has thousands of small brands, and they're all in one place. Just go online or in-store, discover, and shop. It could not be easier. Every one of these brands has a real story and real people behind it. They're true American success stories, and you can find them all at Walmart. Discover thousands of small brands at walmart.com today.

38:22Ruth Rogers:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.