Best of Season Two: Part 2

28:09When I told my friends that I would be recording a podcast with Rick Rubin this weekend, the responses were rapturous. What? Wow. Incredible. And can I come? It was the same in the River Cafe the other day when Rick was there. Grown men trembled. Women found excuses to hover near his table. Chefs could barely grill the sea bass. Rick Rubin is a decades-long creative force with a voice and influence that carries immeasurable weight. Co-founder of Def Jam, winner of seven Grammys, as a friend in music told me, Rick is unique. Together with discovering, mentoring, creating beautiful music with artists such as Adele, Eminem, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Run DMC, and for me, most movingly, Johnny Cash, his values, principles, and kindness guide everyone he comes close to.

29:07Tell me what happens when you go into the studio. You've eaten, definitely. You've had something to eat. I've eaten before, and now, the way it used to work, for the majority of my life, I would wake up, do whatever I would do before going into the studio, but once I would go to the studio, that would be it until I was time to go to bed. So I would spend the majority of my time, which also means in those days working in New York, it would be a small room with no windows. And I would be there for as long as, you know, until the sun came up and then I would walk or take a taxi home. So the majority of my life, I would say for at least 25 years, was being in a small dark room.

29:50So I had very little life outside of a recording studio because I worked so much so long. Now I've found a way, and just through doing it enough, understanding what's important for me to be there for, what's not important for me to be there for. And now I tend to have lunch, go to the studio, work from maybe one till six. And what do you do when you say you work? Listen to music and then talk about what we can try next. Sometimes we do it right then, and sometimes we're making a list of things to try after I leave in the evening. It depends. I always have anxiety when a project starts because I never know what's going to happen.

30:26We don't go in with any script. I prefer to go in when we have songs. But then there are a million ways to present a song. So there's always this sense of what's going to separate this body of work from the rest of the artist's body of work and everyone else's work. And I don't know what that is going in. So it's a real experiment. and we come in and I'm nervous until something good happens, like, ah, and then if that thing that's good, even if it doesn't end up this way, if it's a clue of what the whole vision of the project can be, even if it's not what it is, I feel better. Because at least there's a solution.

31:08Even if it doesn't end up being the solution, there's a possible solution and that feels good. Because I was reading about the way you work and you said that you start with an empty sheet, that you basically start with nothing and then you move from nothing to what you're going to record that day or work in my own little way, in my own little restaurant. We come in with an empty sheet of paper and we write the menu. Of course there are things that we always know we'll have mozzarella and we always know that we'll have four pastas and we always know that we'll have two dishes on the grill, two dishes in the wood oven and two dishes to roast.

31:44But it does start with an empty sheet. Do you have a parallel in that? Absolutely. I come and we usually start by listening to any ideas that the artists have, whatever they are. It could be a song. They may play a whole song and then talk about how to do it or they may play a demo of a whole worked out arrangement of a song with musicians and everything. They may come in and with a riff, you know, just a little snippet of a song or a melodic idea or a lyrical idea. And then we talk about ways of fleshing it out and what are the next stages and what can it be. Sometimes they'll come to me with a whole body of work, like an album's worth of things that are in various stages of completion.

32:32And then we listen and see, is this a starting point that we could build off of? Or is this almost like a recipe that we could use to start from scratch? You never know. It really is. and then the experiments begin. We try different things. And I like the idea of, in the case of where someone brings in something, I like the idea of stripping back the elements and listening to what's there. And even if it wasn't done in an intentional way for the way that it's going to be used, sometimes you find very interesting things that if you were trying to do it, you might not do. It could be very interesting to listen to.

33:12It's also trust, isn't it? Yeah. That they trust what you're saying to them or they trust what your thoughts are. It's like if I gave you two dishes of food and I asked you to taste them and ask you which one you like better, the only right answer is the one that you like better. Do you know what I'm saying? There is no right answer. It's with taste. It's you taste this, you taste this, tell me which one you like. And music? There's no wrong. Same. What? Tell me what? There are no wrong answers in taste. It is, I've been lucky that when I'm true to my taste, other people have liked it. It's not the case for everybody, but that's the best chance we have is to make the thing that we love and hope that someone else loves it.

33:58If you do something that you don't like with the idea that someone else might like it, what are the odds that's going to be good? Yeah. Then no one might like it. At least I know I like it. You know, and I can go to sleep knowing it's the best I could do. I love it. If no one else likes it, it's okay.

34:21A certain person plays a guitar piece, and it's beautiful. And another person plays the same guitar piece, and there's this other magical dimension to it that you can't put a finger on. You don't know why it's, I don't even know if better is the right word. You don't know why it's different because technically it looks the same. But one of them you want to hear over and over and over again forever. And you're filled with wonder. And the other one, it's the same notes in the same order at the same speed, played with great dexterity. But it doesn't have this other life to it. And I would say the same with food.

35:02It's the same with the recipe, isn't it? I always say that a recipe is part poetry and part science. Yes. And that the science is the quarter of a teaspoon of baking powder or three tablespoons of sugar. And yet, as you say, the way it's stirred in, the way it's sifted, the way it's put in the pan. So I have a question for you. How difficult is it to keep the consistency of the quality of the food with different people involved over time? Yeah, that's a good question. I think that we have very few chefs, so it's not a big kitchen. And we don't have, like you do in Los Angeles when I was in kitchens, that you have one head chef and a lot of chefs on the line.

35:43So there is a kind of communication, really, of how you do it. But that is what I look for every time if you come to eat. My fear is that, you know, a grilled sea bass coming to the table going to be the way it was the night before. And, you know, and very often when you're on the pass, the head chef, I don't know how it is in music, but the head chef is the last person to see the plate that goes out. And it's tricky because sometimes you just keep sending it back to the chef who didn't quite get it right. And you're taking away their confidence. You're diminishing them and you're destroying them.

36:19But on the other hand, you know that you don't want to send something out. So it's constant, you know, judgment. How can you tell a musician who's just the one that didn't play the guitar the way, what do you do with someone who's played something that isn't what you want? It's difficult. How do you give that? I do my best to cast the people that can do the work. And if not, I'll do it again with someone else. Tell me about some of the musicians and their food. Is there a musician that you actually look at that you think of? One of the things that because the nature of the recording studio is this place you go to and sometimes you spend a long time knowing what you're doing and sometimes you spend a long time trying to figure out what you're doing or waiting for the thing to come that you're there to do but you don't know what it is yet.

37:07So eating in the studio is a standard. And one of the things about Shangri-La, the studio that I have in Malibu, is most studios have one runner, maybe two. And we have lots of runners. And when people come and order food, food comes very quickly, which historically in studio, you'll order lunch and it might not come for two hours. Whereas for whatever reason, at Shangri-La, it's very creature comfort oriented and we get really good food really fast. And sometimes we'll even have a chef because there's a kitchen. If you ever saw the movie The Last Waltz, the band are in the kitchen at Shangri-La.

37:43That's the studio. Well, you came into my house today and the first thing you said was, let's eat. Yes. He did, quite quickly. It's the habit. A friend of mine once said that his family had a rule that there should be no longer than 45 seconds when someone walks into your house that they have a drink in their hand. And actually what I think that does is actually it's very nice because it means you're stopping what you're doing and you're giving somebody something when they come in the house. Beautiful. And I think that means something. And so are there artists that you do associate more with food than others?

38:14What about Johnny Cash? Did he eat? Johnny Cash loved a restaurant in Los Angeles called The Ivy. And whenever he would come to town, we would always go together to The Ivy.

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40:37For me, it's Wolfgang Puck. I'm often asked who inspired Rose and I when we opened the River Cafe, and the answer is Wolfgang. Before he created Spago, the choice for choosing a restaurant was eat delicious food, but be sure to dress up and be prepared to feel intimidated by the sommelier chef or just the atmosphere in the room, or eat less well, but go out and have fun in a lively, exciting, friendly place. With Spago, Wolfgang taught us we could do both, and he turned the world upside down. He made pizzas luxurious, airport food delicious, wood ovens for cooking, and took chefs out of basement kitchens so diners could see them and they could see the diners.

41:19A few months ago, he came to the River Cafe for dinner with his family. To everyone working there, it felt like a visit from the gods. For me, it was a visit from a man I love but rarely see, a man who is close to my heart. Thank you. Tell me about your family. Did you grow up with good food? You know, it's very interesting. My mother was a chef, a professional chef, but she didn't own a restaurant. She worked for a small hotel on a beautiful lake in Carinthia, which is the southern part of Austria next to Italy and Slovenia. And so she was a good cook, and my stepfather was a coal miner and totally crazy and alcoholic and everything.

41:58And my mother was like an angel. I don't know how the young and the young get together, but it's impossible. And when I was 14, I had to decide what to do. Because the school made you... Yeah, the school finished at 14. I was finished with school. And we didn't have the money to go to Vienna to study. I actually wanted to be an architect. Did you? Yeah. But then we didn't have the money to go. So then my mother found me a job as an apprentice. My stepfather said, cooking is not a profession for men. man, you should be a carpenter or you should be a mason or you should be a mechanic or whatever.

42:35Cooking is for women. And he said, you're good for nothing because I hated to help him and everything. So I still remember when I left, which was 50 miles away, where I was starting my apprenticeship. I was 14 years old. I went to the train station with the little suitcase. And then I take the train. And as I was walking out the house, he said, oh, you're good for nothing. You're going to be back in a month and cry for money and everything. And I said, I'm never coming back. At age 14? At 14, yeah. And then I go there, I started my apprenticeship, and the chef there was as crazy as my stepfather.

43:13So I went from one to the next. And, you know, what do you do? What did he do? He was in the kitchen. In the kitchen, yeah. He was drunk all the time, too, and screaming like crazy, throwing things like crazy. Like, it happened in the old time more than we think. Yeah, more. And so like three or four weeks into my apprenticeship, on a Sunday, Sunday lunch was always the busy day, and I was doing the potatoes and making the mashed potatoes. That was like my job, peeling onions and carrots, washing the spinach. And we ran out of mashed potatoes. We ran out of potatoes. And at the end of the service, he screamed like crazy.

43:50Oh, you're good for nothing. Go back home. So he told me, okay, you're fired. Go back home to your mother and everything. I said, I cannot go back home. with my special with my stepfather yeah so that was probably the worst day in my life so i went on the thing and i said i'm gonna jump in the river and kill myself and i was 14 years old you know i did not say i said i cannot go back home so i was standing on the river there looking down and say what will happen if i die you know what is happening or what is hell or what and it was All these thoughts were going through my head. And then after a while, I said, you know what?

44:29I'm just going to go back to Mo and see what happened. So I went back to the restaurant. Back to the restaurant. So I went. I couldn't sleep all night. I went really early to the restaurant. Then the apprentice who was above me came and saw me there. I said, oh, you're back. He was so happy. He said, I don't have to peel potatoes. So he hid me down in the vegetable cellar. And I was peeling potatoes there. And after a few weeks, the chef comes down and sees me there and starts screaming, what are you doing here? He said, get out of here and screamed and everything. And then I said, I'm not leaving, I'm not leaving.

45:01And then he called the owner. The owner had a little more empathy and sent me. They had another small hotel in town. And they said, maybe he goes over there. And they had a lady who was the chef. And she said, just do your job and be quiet and don't do anything stupid. and everything will be fine. And sure enough, I stayed there for three years, did my apprenticeship, and after that I left for France. When you think of your own children, don't you? We think about how we treat a 14-year-old, how you treat your children. I saw you the night you came in with your children. And I saw the parenting, I saw the love, I saw the kindness, patience.

45:41And then you just think what you had been through. It's interesting, we had a young woman who worked for a very famous restaurant in London. and she said that she was once taking souffles out of the oven and the chef came over and put a frying pan over her head and said if these souffles don't rise, this frying pan is going to be on your head. And I said what you should have done is put the souffles back in the oven, got your coat, left the restaurant and gone to the police. You should go to the police because that is abuse. But, you know, it's somehow that idea that somehow because everybody's under pressure in a kitchen, it's okay.

46:18It's not okay. It's old-fashioned and it's wrong. Yeah, physical abuse, emotional abuse is totally wrong. And I think one of the lessons I learned from them, I said, I never want to be like my stepfather and I never want to be like the first chef I worked for because I think they did the opposite. And I said, you know, if somebody makes a mistake, somebody does something wrong, I'm going to show them how to do it right. And sometimes it takes more than once. But you want to teach people. And I think for me, that was really an important part. And later on, I opened a cooking school. So I had to teach people.

46:54And so you got on the train and you went to France. So then I went on to France. I went to Dijon first and worked in a restaurant called Trois Faisons. How old were you then? I was 17. 17. Yeah. So I have a son now, 17. I said, wow, if he would go tell me tomorrow he's going to work in Mexico City or somewhere, I would say, I don't know, not by yourself. I'm going to send a shout out for you. and so I went to France and then I was working there and after like a year or so I started to speak French I didn't speak it at the beginning and then we had a party at the restaurant and it was because we got a star in the Gid Michelin right the restaurant had a star it just got a new star it didn't have one but it got a star yeah and then I took one of these red books looked through it and I said oh shit it's one star two star three star restaurant so I said I'm not going back to Austria before I don't work in, at least in a two-star, hopefully in a three-star.

47:49So I wrote to Bocuse, to Trois Gros, to La Serre, La Tour d 'Archamps, all these famous three-star restaurants. The first one who said yes was Raymond Tully at Beaumagnier in Provence. Oh, Beaumagnier. Yeah. It's an amazing restaurant. Beautiful on the hill. Yeah, yeah. He was the most amazing personality. Not only, he started cooking when he was like 50, professional, when he was 50 years old. but he was so passionate about the ingredients. He had a lot of land there too. He had six gardeners who brought like the best cavallon, melon or strawberries or peas or green beans, really small, you know.

48:25So it was really an amazing experience to have somebody at that age. He was already 70 years old, but he was so passionate and, you know, going back and forth in the dining room. And then he used to come into the kitchen with Elizabeth Taylor. And all of us young guys looked at her and said, oh, my God. One time he came in with Marcelo Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. And I said, oh, Jesus Christ, I want to feel like him. So I stayed there for two and a half years. And he was the first person, actually, who respected me and says, you know what? He made me feel good.

49:07Last night, after dinner in the River Cafe, I sat with the chefs. Usually, we talk about the evening service, what happened, who came, what we cooked. But this time, knowing he was coming to the kitchen today, we spoke about our guest, Yotam Ottolenghi. They've all, the chefs, read his books. They've all eaten in his restaurants. And like me, love his food. In short, they were thrilled he was coming. We both live and work in cultures far from where we were born. Today, we will talk about separation and connection, Eastern and Western, family and friends. I did read that your first word was, was it the Israeli word, the Hebrew word for soup?

49:50Well, it is. They're kind of the little dumplings that go into the soup, so it has the word soup in it. It was something I think my mom used to spread on the table while we were waiting for the food, and I just used to kind of grab them and eat them. And so going back then, starting at the very, very beginning, tell me about your early childhood, in terms of food as well. So I grew up in Jerusalem, and the food in Jerusalem at that point was... Can I just ask you, were your parents born in Israel? My parents were born in Europe just before the Second World War. And they immigrated with their parents as little kids just before the war in 1939.

50:35My mother was from a German family, so they were German Jews. And my father, they were an Italian family from Florence. Really? Yeah, so my dad was born in Florence. And they met in Israel? Yeah, they met in Israel years later. Yeah, yeah. And Jerusalem was, so I grew up in a very kind of a non-traditional Jewish home, very secular. Food-wise, like we had pork, which was unheard of, you know. My mom had that butcher in Jerusalem, the one and only one that sold pork, but it was under the counter in the brown bag. She used to come and buy a ham. And we used to get ham sandwiches for school. but we were not allowed to say what's in our sandwiches and we were not allowed to share it with friends.

51:24So the cover story was that it was a turkey. It was a very pink turkey. Brave woman to come from Germany. She was from Germany, so she probably had pork in Germany. She was not going to give that up. Yeah, they were very secular, you know, and so they just had to have pork. But the stories about these things, they sound quite innocuous, But actually, it was a big deal. So that butcher, when people found out that he was selling pork, his shop was vandalized, and you'd have people put glue in his locks so he couldn't open the shop the next day, et cetera. In Jerusalem, food is not a neutral stance.

52:09All those decisions, all those things that happen have political implications. What year would this have been? So I was born in 68. So we're talking about the 70s and 80s. So as late as that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. So the food culture of the city was the food of the immigrants from wherever they came, the Jewish immigrants, but also the Palestinian population, which had such a rich, wonderful culinary history. And I feel that I grew up in this world in which we ate very European food at home. My father was cooking traditional Italian dishes, and my mom was kind of an international cook but with a very Germanic approach to cooking.

52:50But outside, you know, when we went out, we used to have Palestinian food, Arabic food, and that's the mix that I grew up having. And I always thought that I was quite lucky to have been exposed to all those kind of foods from quite a young age. Could your father find ingredients that he wanted for Italian cooking? Yeah, he could. So first of all, they used to have food, like they like I remember my grandparents because they couldn't really separate themselves from their Italian background so they used to have food sent to them so we had to we used to get like anchovy paste and olive oil and and biscuits and and and cookies and things so they always get these packages of Italian produce that arrived in Parmesan yeah so they lived about an hour from where we lived in Jerusalem they lived in a suburb of Tel Aviv and I used to come to their house as a kid with my with my dad and the smell was just completely different it smelled of italy in so many ways so they kept the italian connection going on and we used to travel in the summer because they had a house in the hills outside florence that we used to go to when i was growing up so we we had a lot of a lot of that so in between the italian and the palestinian and the german influences i've yeah i just kind of had all that because i often think that i often say that in my history as an interviewer that many of the people, especially immigrants, talk more about their grandparents' food than their parents.

54:16That if you've moved from your culture to another culture, the mothers probably try and adapt. So if you have a family from Ghana, coming from Ghana to London, the mother would try and still remember her food she grew up with but would try to adapt. And the children completely adapted and would have the food of their friends. But the grandparents, when you went to their house, they would cook the Ghanaian food or the Italian food. And my mother-in-law left Italy for London pre-war. And her father, who was kind of Florentine, aristocratic, would send her candied oranges every month, you know, that she craved those kind of Italian, the Italian food of your culture.

55:00Totally. And the only difference is that in Israel at the time, there wasn't like a cuisine as such. because it was just so early on and it was just so new and so young. So a national cuisine has not evolved. The Palestinian food was extremely evolved, but what people would call Israeli food is something that evolved later. But when I was growing up, there was the food that Polish Jews would have cooked or Russian Jews or Libyan Jews or Moroccan Jews or Iraqi Jews. Each one had their own cuisine. But I always like to say, like, in Jerusalem, it was like survival of the fittest. You know, like the best food from every culture would surface.

55:41That's lucky. Yeah, that's really good. So you would have the Sephardic and you would have the Ashkenazi. So you'd have the Sephardic, you know, salads and mezes, and you'd have, like, the babkas that would come from the Ashkenazi food. And in some ways, like some restaurants in Jerusalem these days, then when you go, that's what's featured, you know, like the best of every culture that makes up the city. Did your parents take you to restaurants? Did you go out? Yeah, so we didn't have great restaurants in Jerusalem in the way we have now. So this whole revolution in food has not happened yet.

56:19So when we ate out, we used to go to Palestinian restaurants. So the war just happened not long before, the 1967 war in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem. So in some ways, this is the pre-traumatic times. You know, it was all very new and obviously it was complicated, but it was relatively peaceful. So I remember we used to go travel a lot into the West Bank. We used to go to Annapolis, to Jericho, to Hebron, to have meals. So we used to go to Jericho and have like incredible meals. What would you eat? Oh, we would have these spreads of delicious things that you find, Some of them you'd know and some of them you wouldn't.

57:02So from, you know, like hummus or Labané, you know, the strained yogurt, but you'd also have like local herbs that'd be sautéed in garlic and olive oil. They have incredible, so they have wonderful oranges. So you'd have orange juice freshly squeezed. A bit like Seville, like they have some of them that are cooking and some of them mostly for juicing. Because it's so hot and humid, it's like perfect for citrus. and lamb on the grill. So they had to cook lamb on the open grill and rice dishes like makluba, like upside down rice cakes and bulgur salads. And olive oil, right? And amazing, wonderful olive oil.

57:42Wonderful olive oil. And great freshly baked breads, pita breads and other variations on that thing because the Palestinians cook their bread in a taboon, which is that kind of ceramic oven, earthenware oven. So all that was there, and I really have a really, really strong memory of driving down to Jericho and just having all these wonderful foods and coming back, but also in Jerusalem. I have such strong memories of these flavors. It's a question that I ask everyone. If there's a food, we know people that we turn to for comfort and places we go for comfort, but if there's something that you would want to eat is there food that you reach for when you really need comfort?

58:29So I have to say that from all the things that I've had it's things that my father used to cook or my Italian grandmother she used to make and it's not just because I'm at the River Cafe I'm saying that she used to make gnocchi alla romana and it's the one smell that I have as, you know, people talk too much about, you know, those, you know, moments of childhood, but this is really one that stands so strong in my mind, in my head, that is the thinly spread semolina gnocchi on a tray dotted with butter and cheese, and it would go under the grill, and since they did get great cheese from Italy, and they had great parmigiano, and she would put that under the grill and it would just melt.

59:16And that kind of semolina, soft, milky, with a grated melted cheese on top, it's just such a childhood flavor, and that is definitely the one that brings the most comfort to me. And I've never managed to do it as not even remotely as good as she does. Well, we'll try and make it for you. If I'd known, we would have put it on the menu today. Do you have it on the menu sometimes? Yeah, yeah. I love it. Especially we have it on very often when we have white truffles. because it's one of those delicious recipes. It's delicious without white truffles, but it does take because it's almost like a cheese souffle.

59:53That's right, it's like a cheese souffle. But with semolina, they are so delicious. So we're going to go ahead and have lunch in the River Cafe now without gnocchi romana, but the next time we do, we'll definitely have them together. I'll take you up on it. Yes, let's do it. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Great time. Thanks.

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