Dana Strong on running Sky Group, chicken soup every day and global cuisine

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1:08Students used to come up to my husband, Richard, showing their architectural portfolios, saying, I'm sure you're too busy, Lloyd Rogers, to take a look at this. And his response was always, I'm not busy at all. One of the busiest people I know is Dana Strong, CEO of Sky Group, she's one of the most powerful people in global media, leading a team of thousands across news, sport, film, and television. But somehow, Dana always makes time for talking, for friendship, for her family, and for me. One of the most special things for me is breakfast with Dana at my home, in the kitchen table, sharing toast, coffee, stories.

1:54Our mutual friend, Tim Davies, director general at the BBC, told me this morning that she's a rare American who truly gets the Brits. He says she has a European soul. Today we're together at the River Cafe. I'm sure it's a busy day for her, and it is kind of busy for me too. But for now, I have all the time in the world to spend with this woman I adore, I respect, and I love. that's so nice thank you so much such a pleasure to be here don't you think how people always love to tell you how busy they are and we are, we are all running and then they're the people who actually make you feel like they have all the time in the world and that's you, we kind of get it rarely that breakfast it's special when we manage it we just do it, wherever we find each other at a party or you having lunch you kind of hone in on the important things And I'd love to talk about working and being a female, being a woman, the position you're in.

2:56Because again, you know, what Tim Davies said this morning is that there are a group now, which is very exciting, of women in media. How many people do you employ? Do you know? How many people like globally or sky? Yeah, it's about 35 ,000. 35 ,000, okay. I went sat next to Bob. I was having dinner with Bob Iger. I said, you know, Bob, I really employ a lot of people here at the River Cafe. It's really nice of you to give me your advice, but, you know, I'm kind of okay, because I employ 145 people. I said, how many do you employ? It was something like 220 ,000. Okay, Bob, anytime you want some advice.

3:36But it is kind of little microcosms. Probably, you know, they're big companies, big problems, but also small groups are also, you know. I've worked in all sizes. You've done it all sizes. So the Australian business was more around sort of 1 ,000 people. And when I was in the U.S. briefly, it was 110 ,000 people. And then here it's 35 ,000 people. So I've worked at all different scales. And it does require something different of you in each one. But what's glorious about the smaller size businesses is you can really see the impact of if you make a change, a decision, a change in a process, an investment, you can see the impact to your employees and your customers very, very quickly.

4:21And so I'm very grateful for learning my business, my craft, on a small scale of 800 to 1 ,000 employees because you apply the exact same principles at a larger scale and just never losing sight of how important these small decisions are because they can really become quite impactful, frankly, to your customers and your employees, and learning that at a small scale is essential. And you know this from if your team isn't on your top game on a given day, you can see the impact in the restaurant. I mean, I'm sure that very rarely happens with your team. No, it does happen. You know, and that is, I always, well, conversely, if I go to a restaurant and the waiter is grumpy or annoyed, I sometimes think, well, are they paying you enough?

5:09Are they? Right. As you say, listening to you enough. Are you having to do, are you tired? Are you hungry? Did you have lunch before you started working? If you have people who are, in a way, taken care of to perform, then they perform as well. You can say it's good for them, it's good for us, but it's also good for business. It's also good for business. It's a kind of business skill. I think we share that philosophy, really creating the right environments where people feel they can be their best selves and really thrive. is that's the point of doing what we do, in my view, is creating these environments so that we bring the best out in people and allow them to really succeed and have wonderful, fulfilling lives.

5:51That is the joy about what we do. I love mentoring young talent. I love mentoring some of the folks on my team and helping to create future leaders. You know, everybody needs something different, I guess you would say. So what I like to do is help tune into their brains. I like to understand how their thinking process works and also understand what they're really good at and maybe what's an objective to develop. And help to explain, you don't have to be good at everything, actually, but you do have to understand where some of your weaknesses are so you can hire around that or challenge yourself.

6:28If that's just a muscle that isn't going to develop as good as some of your other muscle memory, that's okay. But you have to then hire around, get the skill sets. You've got a diverse team of skills around you. So I really like to hone in on the person and understand what is their ambition, where do you see yourself in five to 10 years, and more like your lifestyle, even your family, the whole package. Because we can all say what the target job is, but that's rather silly, actually, chasing a title. Actually, it's what does the picture of your life look like? What's happiness for you? And then let's kind of sit back and talk about how we can help create that for you.

7:09What are the things you would need to learn or put in place, experiences you would need to have in order to have that picture for your life? You are there as the woman that we're looking at who can run this empire and create new shows and do new things with sport. And how does food play into that role? So in the day, how food fits in for me is it's just fuel until I get home from work. And I need to make sure that I'm not having something that's going to weigh me down or make me sleepy. And so my lunch is the same every day. I make homemade chicken soup. You make it. I make it. And then we kind of put it in containers and I take it into work.

7:53work and then a fresh tossed salad and sliced avocado. And so I do this, yeah, I make homemade chicken soup and we do the same thing every day. Do you have breakfast? Yeah. For breakfast, it'll either be like a protein kefir yogurt or a protein shake or something super simple, but always a bowl of blueberries. I always have blueberries and nuts kind of hanging around so that you can just, and sliced apples, so you can just kind of do that all day long. And so I really think about my Monday to Friday as making sure that I can stay focused and I can stay alert and really present. And so I don't have ceremonial meals, I guess you would say, during the day.

8:41It's really all about the dinners. If somebody's in town from somewhere, New York or Texas or wherever you, they say, can Can we have lunch? Yes. Do you say yes or do you say let's have the meeting and not lunch? I will usually move it to a breakfast if possible. And if we have lunch, it's literally always at the River Cafe. Oh. And I'm honestly not just saying that. We should make sure we have chicken soup. We should have chicken soup and salads. Note to self, we're going to make it. Actually, we always do have chicken soup. So I'll always have the risotto if I'm here. I'll do a sort of whatever salad kind of light food you have to start with, and then I'll do a risotto, and that's my lunch hack if I'm at the River Cafe.

9:26Today you actually made a recipe that you chose, which was a nettle risotto which you had yesterday for lunch. Would you like to read the recipe? Nettle risotto with telegio. So we would do 300 grams of nettles, 200 grams of unsalted butter, one red onion, peeled and finely chopped, one head celery, finely chopped, and a garlic clove, peeled and finely chopped, 300 grams of risotto, and 200 mils of suave classico, 750 mils of warm chicken stock, and 250 grams of telegio cut into cubes, one centimeter. And the way you put it together is you do, in boiling water, cook the nettles for about four minutes, drain and pulse them so they get into a smooth paste.

10:13And in a large pan, you melt half the butter, gently fry the onion, celery, and garlic until they're translucent, and then a little bit of season. Add the rice to this and fry for about five minutes. Add the wine and let it become absorbed by the rice before adding the stock a ladle at a time. And then it's key to slowly stir until the stock is absorbed and the rice is cooked, and this will take about 15, maybe 20 minutes. And when the rice is all cooked, you season and stir in the nettle puree, add the cubes of telegio, stir it until it all melts, add some olive oil on top if you like, and serve.

10:48Thank you. Thank you. Good. I always order the risotto here. Do you? Yeah, it's just absolutely my favorite. It is a process. Funny enough, I used to find when I would come back from work and everybody would say, sit down, you know, and relax, I'd find actually sometimes making a risotto, as you said, if the onions were chopped and, you know, you had the herbs, everything ready in a way, the stock boiled, that actually, because of that process that you have to do it step by step, you ladle the chicken stock in and it kind of relaxes you. It's a nice transition, actually, from work to home, actually, that process of it.

11:30Sometimes sitting down, do you find that that sitting down after work, I don't know, somehow it doesn't happen right away. It's better to have a transition moment. Yeah, whether it's going for a walk, a workout, making a little something in the kitchen, but something to sort of break the cycle. What time do you usually get home? Is it always different hours? It's always different. I tell you, it's always different. It's anywhere from 6 to midnight and anywhere in between, just depending on whether I'm at a game or whether I'm home for family dinner. Monday nights is sort of my ritual. So we're home for Monday night family dinner every Monday.

12:03Oh, tell me about Monday night family dinner. Monday night family dinner. So I am a very predictable eater on Monday nights. I like roast chicken. Roast chicken is my favorite food, I think, on the planet. Did you grow up with roast chicken? Is it a memory or is that? You know, actually, my memory is a little bit more veering towards Italian food because my dad was an Italian chef. And so I don't mean as a living, I mean as a hobby. And so all of my food memories from youth are fancier than that because my dad would magic up, you know, whether it was veal saltimbucca or homemade fettuccine alfredo or my favorite.

12:41I still remember when I was 11 years old, my dad made duck consomme one night and I can honestly still taste it. You know, it was just so special. It was really, really extraordinary. He used to make this homemade sausage bread, too. It was like homemade bread with swirls of homemade Italian sausage kind of through it. So at every slice, it was like the savory treat. It was extraordinary. Yeah, we really were very lucky. What was his job? What did he do as a career? Dad ran a hospital pharmacy. And so we lived in Chicago at that time. And so he was the hospital administrator that controlled all of the pharmaceuticals and all the drugs.

13:19and I would go help him a couple days a year to, you know, stuff envelopes and do the thing that you do when you're following your dad to work. And cooking was the way that he expressed his creativity and his love. Did he ever wanted to be a chef? Absolutely. Really? Oh, that's interesting. Absolutely, he wanted to be a chef. I think my grandmother was a chef. My grandmother had her own catering business. And my dad just grew up in the kitchen, always loved cooking. And we even, he had his own garden. So I'm a terrible gardener, but I would help him grow the tomatoes and the green beans and the zucchini.

13:55And every year we would harvest the tomatoes and we would make a winter supply of tomato sauce, basically, to get us. And then you store it, you know, in the jars and do the thing. That's very, I mean, that is very Italian. But he was an Italian. He was an Italian. Yeah. Yeah, he's mostly German. And did he go to Italy? Did they go to Italy? Did they go to Italy? Did you know he never went to Italy? As a boy, he never tasted a pizza until he was something like 17 years old. He grew up in Chicago? He grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania. Right. And a neighbor asked him as a favor, would you go pick a pizza?

14:31You know, I've ordered this pizza. Will you go pick it up and I'll give you a dime or whatever it was at the time. And every Friday night he delivered this pizza. And after months of just smelling it and wishing he knew what it was about, they invited him in for a slice. And he basically describes it as the moment that changed his life. It's rather cool to remember the first time you ate a piece of pizza. Can you imagine how impactful that would be? And his mom was in catering, and she didn't, wasn't. That wasn't her kind of cooking. She was more of a German kind of cook. She was really about roasts and about big family meals.

15:06Did she cater for parties? Do you know, by the time I was born, she was already old enough that she wasn't doing that anymore, but she was catering for parties, and she was catering for family dinners and just as a way to help with the income. And why do you think he didn't become a chef? Do you think it was just that he was? You know, it's funny. I think it was, you know, that American dream and always striving for the next thing. And so my grandfather worked in the GE plant and my grandmother helped, you know, had catering to help with it. And I think dad's dream was you take it that next step.

15:43And so my mom and dad met at pharmacy school. Actually, my mom was the first one to go to university in her family. So great for your mom. Did she cook? To have a husband, I was going to say, that loved cook. So mom could cook, but dad really was the one. If you were having a special meal, it was dad. It was dad. My mom's specialty was homemade apple pie. She could make an amazing apple pie. Did she leave you the recipe? She did not. It was always in her head. And it's one of those things that you always think you're going to have more time. Yeah, I do. It's such a, you know, you always think you're going to have more time to ask the questions, to write down the stories, and then all of a sudden it just takes you by surprise.

16:29Yeah. Paul McCartney describes his mom, and I think he was a lot, well, I know he was a lot younger. I think he was 14 or 15. And when he was talking about the recipes that he loved, was his mother, a month or weeks before she died, taught him how to make simply, I think, potatoes with green beans. And it's just that passing on of something. And people have come in with their cookbooks. Quite a lot of people I've talked to, Tom Hollander, we were just talking about, Jeff Goldblum, Chris and Scott Thomas, came in with recipe books that had been passed to them when they were leaving home to go out into the outside world.

17:06Did your dad, do you have his recipes? Dad gave me his pots and pans and his knives. Oh. So he had extra cooking supplies. And I've been cooking since I was probably nine. And so he helped give us some proper knives and proper copper pans and things that would get us through the early stages of our 20s. And so we were talking about the Monday night dinner with the roast chicken. That's how we started this conversation. So we're skipping now how many years to say, well, there's another family occasion of cooking. And tell me who cooks it, who sits down for it. I'm Ruthie Rogers, and I want to close my eyes and imagine a Monday night dinner at your house.

17:51So we share partners, a similar trait in our partners. They're both creative. They were both architects. And I think you know that architects are typically Renaissance men. They can do pretty much anything, including cook. So Mark is an unbelievable cook. Yeah, he is. He's a really, really good, and we have a lot of fun together. It's almost like a choreography, a ballet of our own in the kitchen where he will make the mains, whatever that will be on the night. If it's roast chicken, he'll make the roast chicken, and I'll do kind of everything else. We like roast potatoes tossed in olive oil and cooked until they're a little bit on the crispy side on the outside, steamed broccoli, and a fresh salad, and usually the salad will have grated fennel in it.

18:35I really, really love fennel. So a mix of leaves, a lot of herbs, and so it needs to have mint and basil, chives I really like. And if you've got a little bit of coriander or cilantro, I can never remember which one it's called in which country, and dill, that just kind of really picks it up. And just tossed in simple olive oil and salt, and sometimes will, I don't know if you've ever done this trick with your salad dressing, If you roast fennel seeds a little bit, toast them, and then you toss it in with some apple cider vinegar, some olive oil, a pinch of salt, and it really picks up the salad.

19:13It really... It's good to have another recipe for the podcast. I'll come make it for you. Will you make it for me? I think actually making a salad is not easy, do you? Making a salad... I always test here, you know, when we put people on the cold section. I think sometimes making a salad can be the hardest thing to do. So I'm asked universally when we go to somebody's house for dinner and we say, what can we bring? They say, Dana, will you bring one of your salads? And so that's sort of my, that's what I'm famous for. An open kitchen in the River Cafe means we as chefs are able to talk to our guests dining in the restaurant, sharing how we cook their food, where the ingredients come from, as well as hints and advice for cooking the recipes in the books.

19:56And now we're bringing that same ethos to our podcast. A question and answer episode with me and our two executive chefs, Sean Winoan and Joseph Trevelli. All we need is to hear from you about what you would like to know. Send a voice note with your question to questions at rivercafe.co.uk and you might just be our next great guest on Ruthie's Table 4.

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21:09If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping or restocking fees. Every penny back. Upgrade now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50%, and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. Did Mark fool you by his cooking? Was that part of his? Because we think it's quite sexy for men to cook, don't we? Maybe we're not anymore.

21:49We used to, you know, because now every man cooks. But there was a sort of, yeah. I've also, again, talked to people who say they can remember the first meal that their boyfriend or girlfriend cooked for them. So believe it or not, Mark and I started dating when I was 18. And so we didn't really have access to a kitchen for which we could. So we were in college. And a very close friend of mine honestly set us up on a blind date, believe it or not. And then we've been together ever since. And was eating out, eating, cooking? Was it a big deal then? It became a big deal in our 20s once we were working, and so we had spare change to go out to have a meal.

22:30Where were you living at the time? We were living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because he was going to graduate school. For architecture. For architecture. And I was so lucky because I was surrounded then with architects. So I was working, and the weekends we would get to have so much fun making meals, and all of them could cook. Yeah, we would cook on the weekends, and then we'd go. And then we'd go out to a bar and, you know, have some fun in the city. And it was just a really fun time in our life. And that was your college years? That was my 20s. Oh, that was when you? Yeah, my college years, we were in Philadelphia, actually.

23:05What's that great, the dish that everybody has in Philadelphia? Philadelphia steak? The cheese steaks. The cheese steaks. Yes. Do you like that? I used to like that. Now that you have European soul. Because it is an interesting concept. Cheese is both cheesesteaks and french fries with cheese on the french fries. A lot of cheese. Yeah, a lot of cheese. Yeah, interesting. It's actually delicious. It is delicious. It really is delicious. I've never had one. It's really, you're going to have to come to Philadelphia. I'll take you to a cheesesteak. Do they have it outside? Yeah. It's interesting how in America, we always think about Italy and France being so regional in terms of what you'll have in the south of France, the north of France, or the west of France, or Italy, certainly.

23:44And I don't think that the United States really has that much, Except the South, I think, has regional food that we really think of the gumbos and all that. But I think there are cities that really associate pizza in Chicago or cheese steaks in Philadelphia or I don't know what California would be, maybe more Mexican. Gumbo is a big dish in our family. Oh, how come? Believe it or not, my dad, for whatever reason, my dad is famous for his gumbo. I grew up in Florida for a number of years, and that's where we learned. What age was that? I was 12 to 18. Oh, I see. Formative. And so those are the years where I really learned how to make grits, how to make gumbo, prawns, shrimp became a huge part.

24:29So in Florida, they have shrimp trucks. So they go out and get fresh shrimp in the morning, and you can be just driving along a major street, and you can pull over and get a kilo of prawns. It was absolutely a fantastic place to grow up, actually. And you had to cook a dinner on every Wednesday? day? So my family, we all kind of shared responsibilities. And I was particularly willing to do so because I would then sometimes my mom would give me a dollar. And I just really, frankly, enjoyed saving up money and then buying the things that I wanted to buy. So every Wednesday night was my night. For me, it would have been one of my favorite things to cook was a slow-cooked chicken meal where you had the rice uncooked on the bottom of the roasting pan and then you had sort of quarters of chicken cooked on top with some chicken stock and flavoring and you just put it into slow cook for a couple of hours and then all you had to do is steam some vegetables and it's super easy.

25:27Did your brothers have a day as a week with all three of you? Jim would do Monday night by recollection but after he became like 15 I think he pretty much gave that up. Yeah, and that was homework. Yeah. Do you think this formed you in your ambition and your focus and to be who you are today? Do you think somehow your mother giving you a night to perform and your father teaching you? I think so. Giving you a dollar, giving you a dime. Always had a lot of responsibility, and I enjoyed it too. And I think they expected a lot of me, And I think that that then does really form your ambition, your confidence, I think, you know, between that and playing sport.

26:15I was doing track at a very young age. So, you know, the 100 and 200 meter. And then dad taught me tennis. And then I did gymnastics for years and competitive gymnastics. And then I got a little bit too tall for that to be, you know, because it's once you get tall enough in gymnastics and you're doing aerials on the balance beam, it's really quite scary. And so I just got to that point where it was better to pivot. And so then I went into football. Soccer, sorry. Yeah, and so I played football from the time I was 13. And I was always defense. And I absolutely loved it. You loved it. Absolutely loved it.

26:59It sounds like a really kind of great childhood and family. I had a great childhood. With values and with participation. And a lot of love. And your dad taking you to work and a lot of love. And when you went out into the world, well, then you met a man who loved that. Did he come from a very strong family as well? Mark grew up in the Midwest, and he has a family of five, so three boys, and then mom and dad. Very tight family growing up. And very similar values, actually. Very, very similar values. And then you went to Australia for going through the kind of early years. Was Australia early or was that?