Bonus: Catering for 700 at the Tate Modern's 25th anniversary

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0:48That's why over 200 ,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. You are listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair. A week ago, we were at the Tate Modern cooking a sit-down dinner for 700 people to celebrate their 25th birthday. I'm here today with Sean Owen and Joseph Trevelli, executive chefs of the River Cafe, to tell us how they did it. I can say that I was there 25 years ago for the opening date when the Queen opened it.

1:30It was such an amazing idea to have this new museum in the Turbine Hall, to have a museum that was a fixture of London. It was a power plant on the south bank of the Thames, far from the Tate, far from the National Gallery. And it has become now an incredibly successful, happy place to go to look at great art. So they wanted to celebrate their birthday. they wanted to have a sit-down dinner for 700 people. I remember when we heard that we were going to be cooking for 700, thinking that I should put my poker face on and just think, yeah, of course we can do it. Yes, Ruthie, yes, we can definitely do it.

2:11And it was, you know, it's just a really fun, different challenge. I think for Sean and I it was quite nice. We've been working here for about 25 years, just about as long as the table has been open, and obviously it's like framed a lot of our experience in London being able to go there. So it was an honour, of course, massive honour. It was. I think we wouldn't necessarily have done a 700 sit-down dinner for many people, but for the Tate, it's just like, well, we have to do this, you know. And they also came saying that they really wanted us to do it, you know, that they felt a connection with the Tate between the River Cafe, they all ate here.

2:45Richard was chairman of the Tate for five years in the 80s and I think there's a deep connection. One of the first meetings when we sat down, they were really keen on having something that was very pure, River Cafe, strong colours. They were looking at it through their lens of how they see art, I guess, and had planned the room and how the room was going to look and they wanted a menu. I was saying to the waiters on the night of the event that the starter was basically red, the main course was basically green, and the dessert was basically yellow. And that's exactly how it was. It was like three strong colours.

3:29So the red was tomato risotto, the green was a sea bass plate with salsa verde and spinach and peas, which are just phenomenal at the moment, and then the dessert was lemon tart. Lemon tart, yeah. And not to forget our special, what we're really known for at the River Cafe, canapes. Yeah. there's always the things Italian, very Italian with French word what is the Italian word for canapé? one of the first challenges we came up with was how to do bite-sized canapés that people in a smart event would want to eat without spilling food on them obviously because we're mostly known for robust sort of cooking it doesn't lend itself to canapés per se What was really nice about the canapes is we were told, you know, you need, you know, half the amount of canapes that there are people because people just don't take canapes.

4:25They come round, you know how it is, and you just don't take it. But we just kept sending them and they kept going, you know, which was a really nice beginning to the event. You know, it's like, so we were going to make 300 of everything. The first one, we definitely sent out at least 400, 500 of them. And it just kept going. And that was the... The first one we did was a smash-braw beans that we normally would serve on a mozzarella plate at the River Cafe on a bruschetta, but we made it, like, micro-sized. We made some panisse, which is like a chickpea pancake that's similar to farinata that you can deep-fry, cut it into a tiny disc about the size of a 20p piece, maybe?

5:03Tiny, maybe a little bigger, maybe 10p. And then we piped, it was very un-River Cafe, we piped broad beans onto the top so that was like a post that we did some polenta that we made solid polenta and then we cut that out into more discs that were bite size and spooned um devon crab that was marinated with lemon juice and chili olive oil fennel seeds on that we did a peat setter with um telegio plain telegio and thyme because it had to be kind of neat and then we did um prosciutto with figs that was um it seemed like an easy canapé but maybe with retrospect we maybe wasn't the most seasonal item we've ever tried to do in and also you know the figs were good i was i was worried being june instead of august but they were good their figs were ripe and the saltiness and the being able to have something that wasn't We just had to order them about two weeks before to make sure they were put in perfect.

6:07Yeah, we had standby peaches if the figs weren't going to be good enough, but they turned out to be good. They were good. Some people ask me, had we ever done 700 before? And I think the largest sit-down we did probably was about 350 when we went to Rome to do a wedding. And so the, well, when would you say you started feeling the challenge of it? When would you say, before we go into the food? The day after, yes. Yes, exactly. And what was the process for getting ready? How did you feel that? So we were trying to, one of the things we were trying to work out was how to staff it. Because in trying to think of the numbers, we had to, how we do any event, 100, 200, 300, would be to break it down into manageable chunks and then multiply it back up again.

6:53And so I was thinking that for every 100 people you might cook for, you might need seven chefs. but so we realized then we needed a six chefs wasn't it we needed 40 42 chefs so we needed 42 chefs to do it comfortably and with panache and make it look easy because um that's how we roll we need 42 chefs okay and bearing in mind the river cafe was also open and functioning you come the cafe as well we're like okay that's our entire brigade so fortunately we've got our river cafe luminous pink telephone with all our ex-chefs numbers on so we started instantly texting old chefs we not that they're old they're all young still but to see if they were available to help us and um really nicely i would say all of the 20 people we asked all came back and said they'd help so then we realized that we we had our little logo hashtag getting the band back together not that you can search it on any social media if we that'd be really organized but we realized we were going to have 42 chefs um from you know 25 30 years of the river cafe which is really nice one of them said michelle said to me you know ruthie when i worked with you it was in 2003 and i was single and i was kind of you know running around london and she said um I now have a child in university so you know the idea that 2003 was 22 years ago and she was there but I thought one of the very moving things was to see how happy they were to be together you know that it was like a reunion it was a reunion but it was like generations of yeah you know that we child and I was the only people that worked with everyone and all of a sudden and it It was actually really nice to do a reunion around an activity.

8:49You know, the activity was cooking for 700 people. It was amazing. So happy. Incredibly happy. Really happy. All the photographs. So if I was listening to this and I thought, OK, I'm going to do a sit-down dinner for 700 people. Ask us. Yeah. What was the process? How did you, you were sitting up in an office, what did you say, one day a week for the last two days a week? you know the time that you spent from the beginning what was the process that you would say that you could tell it's a good story well I went into my kind of classic sort of form which is to go into list writing which was really like taking it to another level but there was one point where I had so many pieces of paper that I was panicking trying to understand the amount of paper that we had and so then we were like maybe someone was like maybe you should type it up but I was like I can only read my own handwriting.

9:46So me and Joseph, we tried to break down each dish to start with and think about how much risotto we'd need to make. So we had to make, you know, one bag of rice makes 15 portions approximately at the River Cafe. We needed to have a standard recipe. So then we knew that if we needed to make 700 portions, we'd need to make 45 bags of rice, which is 45 kilos of rice. so it's a kind of small light person's weight in rice and then we needed 240 jars of san mazano tomatoes to do it which was like a lorry load and just seeing these things because you can plan it all out and you can be like okay so it's 60 grams of peas each you know the way we don't actually work like that here it's just you know we eyeball everything really but we knew that we had to be more precise for this amount of covers but then you don't know what i mean 200 kilos of spinach looks like you know it would it would fill this room easily you know so then we had to then we had to arrive here the day before and work out how to manage that where to put it well and 26 126 kilos of peas that needed to be potted i remember when i did say to you peas you know And you said, you know, you both said, yeah, we're doing peas.

11:11And so there was no sense of let's do something on a shortcut to get it done in an easier way. I mean, was there? We were, yeah. We were helped massively by our suppliers. That's the truth. And I think those relationships that are very old really paid off, you know. Especially Natura. Particularly Natura. I mean, literally. Tell us about Natura. Well, first tell people what Natura is. Natura is our main vegetable supplier. And we've worked with Natura since they began, haven't we? Yeah, that's right, yeah. And they import directly from the Milan market. And, you know, for the last probably 20 years, you can get, like, the best, this is like advertising, free advertising, the best Italian produce, the peak stuff.

12:00And really, really, really kindly, they, in their office, agreed that they'd pod 200 how many kilos of 200 kilos of peas not quite but you know getting there it was such a monumental effort and so kind and then they prepped all the spinach for us and then they like manually and then we got the whole lorry load of it delivered and we opened the back doors of the lorry and it was just peas and spinach and we were like oh my god i've got to cook that now and we're like okay get some pots on it was really it was because we cook as if we were at the river cafe we didn't cook like we were in a mass production kitchen so we did it exactly as we do here but just took like five hours to blanch that much spinach as opposed to five minutes and making the risotto took you know it took like four or five hours to just you know get that amount of onions and celery and garlic chopped we needed like 15 kilos of grated parmesan so once you start going up the quantities it it started to like i was getting really stressed and i was just souping everything up into hours and saying to ruthie do you know how long it's going to take to cut the lemon tart if it takes 10 minutes to portion and i was like it's gonna take five hours it did yeah and it did it really did i said two of them five hours and i said well maybe if you'd had four of you it could have taken two and a half hours but they wanted to cut yeah they really wanted to do it you know they do say cooking is repetition but we really saw it in this case bella was amazing because in fairness she put um that she actually put on her instagram and the recipe for 50 lemon tarts yeah which is really cool because that's about how many liters of lemon juice and zested lemons and yeah i mean i really want to say again that notura just to can you imagine their office you know they're you know they're a sizable company in london where Everyone decided to, you know, I was sent pictures of them on their desks, next to their computer with people potting peas.

14:05They all did it. And apparently it was good team building also for them. I felt like it was just really throughout quite a positive experience. So we knew that the challenge of doing this dinner had all sorts of challenges, but there were no, I have to say, there were no kitchens that we could use. So what we looked at was doing the kitchens in the meeting rooms around the space that were there. Basically at the bottom of the turbine hall, there were the tables. And then if you think of that, around the circumference in a way were these meetings rooms to take the food out. So can you describe the challenge of how you cooked in some way there was no extraction and no kitchen?

14:51well we were massively helped by this company called the last supper who organized huge events i think for them it's even for them it's a big event but they'd certainly do more big events than we do and they um were just impeccably organized and so when we arrived in there are three kind of classrooms adjacent to the quite big classrooms adjacent to the turbine hall And in each one, they'd set up for us a kitchen with, you know, two long tables each, just four normal induction tops and three ovens each, you know, electric ovens. But efficiently, cleanly, quite basic. And the fact that they were the mirror of each other meant that we could get the whole team together and explain to them, this is what's happening.

15:41you know you're all going to be doing this at the same time when we were going through the kit list though because we were trying to make you know have all the kit right but then when you have so for every kitchen with four inductions and four trestle tables and two ovens but then actually what we actually needed was 24 inductions and you know 48 tables so as soon as it and then everything was coming in in these massive quantities so on the face of it it was sort of a simple meal for 120 in a kitchen just to be specific how do you make a risotto for 700 people really genuinely you think about how you make a risotto for seven people and you just multiply it times 100 you multiply it times 100 honestly that's what that's what we did and i think my suspicion is that some of the early meetings that other people that were involved in this kind of size of kind of slightly or maybe i thought that we were approaching it a little bit like how do we just scale up a dinner party to such a but that is what we did and it and it really worked but we did we had the guys making the risotto working in pairs weren't they so they had to make 15 bags 15 bags of rice is that how much they did each 15 bags of rice between the two of them yes but because they were such good cooks each team making the rice and they've all river cafe trained so we trust them implicitly to know and we had a standard recipe for the for the one bag rice and then the 15 bag rice for each person to to work on and then they everyone knows exactly exactly what they're aiming for but um i think sean touched on something really crucial there i think what was great was having really good um staff that we could we trusted often they'd come to me and they'd say what do you think and i said well actually you know what you let's work out together what time you're going to put the sea bass in the oven or you told me you know how we went around every little parcel like so how what's your view of how you're going to send this out and we all let them put a little bit of their knowledge and into it and i think that really helped so we're talking about scaling up this is about you know taking as you say risotto for seven or risotto for 700 but what you also just touched upon in terms of the people that you trust to do it and the people you worked with so there wasn't that frustration or there wasn't that kind of concern which gives you confidence do you think it all comes down to the the people that you chose to or not all of it but a lot of it comes to the people yeah because they all know the house style so there was no explaining to do that everyone knew those dishes so they could just all of them could cook that for 10 all of them could know how to cook that for 100 and they all they had to do was work in each team was only cooking for 120 so actually that's quite manageable for them as chefs and then me and joseph were working across all of it which was quite funny because we were working down the corridor we were just passing each other the whole time but then also really nicely neither one of us had to take the sole responsibility for it which i actually wouldn't have liked to take the responsibility on my own for that because there was so many questions and we ran into problems when we had the van our vans came in but they wouldn't let us stand on the floor of the Tate Modern Car Park unless we had high vis on but none of us had taken high vis because we hadn't anticipated needing it and uh and so there was a there was a bit of like confusion and then Joseph was dealing with them and then he was and I was you know like one of us could deal with one issue trying to get some high-vis another one we could deal with another issue but on your own it would have been would have been too much I think I thought it was going really well you know and we were sending out the main courses and as I say Shia and I were running between all these kitchens and I've realized that we'd sent out 700 main courses in 18 minutes and I just and at that point I was like hey that's it this has just gone really well I mean I wasn't to be honest I wasn't anticipating it would be quite that fast and I was really you know we were incredibly pleased Maria told me last night that she had 350 letters and 99 % of them mentioned they've never had food like it so I will give credit right now to the two of you because I think it all it all filtered down you know it all came across and so I think you really have to pat yourselves on the back say how fabulous you are the best no you are no you really you really are and I think that You know, the best ingredient that we've had for this whole thing has been the two of you.

20:19Multiply that times 700, and we'd be really lucky. Thank you.

20:26Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair.

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