David Chipperfield

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:30They're kid-proof, pet-friendly, and built for everyday life. Plus, changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space, whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment. Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200 ,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa. Visit washablesofas.com today and save. 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 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 and 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.

1:35All 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.

1:57David Chipperfield and I have been friends for so long that this morning I had to ask him when we met. He reminded me it was in Paris. Richard was building the Pompidou and David was a student. The light has shone bright since then for this Pritzker and Sterling prize winner, the Neuss Museum in Berlin, Hepworth, Wakefield and many others. A few months ago David asked me to see the work his foundation is doing on the food markets in Galicia, their crucial role in sustainability, the economy, and culture. And so here I am in northwest Spain, about to talk to him in front of an audience for a special live event.

2:33David's introduction to Galicia was 33 years ago on a visit to Corrobedo, a small seaside village where he and his wife, Evelyn, created a home. Now they have a small bar in the middle of the village. David is as passionate about Galicia's farm-to-table culture as he is about its people. For him, it's all part of the same conversation. Conversation that I am so excited and grateful to be having here with him in Casa Rio.

3:09David and Evelyn think that I went to have my hair done today, but really what I was doing was looking for an apartment to live here because in the last 48 hours, having never been here before, I've been in bars at 11 o 'clock at night. I've eaten a pig's nose and a pig's tail and a pig's ear. I've met ambassadors and artists and fashion designers. And I've seen really what I've seen here in the last 48 hours is the connection here in Casa Ria. it could be in the market, it could be meeting someone who is going to sell us their fish. It's just a constant, constant flow of connection and engagement and empathy and fun and interest in the people who live here.

4:01And I'm in awe of what they do and I feel so lucky and happy. And the only emotion I feel right now is that I don't want to go home. Thank you, Ruthie. and thank you everybody for coming it's a really impressive group of people tonight so thank you for coming Ruthie has been instrumental in changing the food culture of London your interest in where food comes from and sourcing food because you talk a lot about that when I hear you talking a lot about where you get your tomatoes from galicia has this food culture it has this food production culture it has this small scale production we've got many here and we at the same time we've seen that enormous migration of young people from the rural because it's a hard life the parents want them to go away and go to university doesn't matter what they study and there isn't enough development of those agricultural industries into the modern world.

5:12So we've got no new model. We've only got the old model, the antique model of small-scale farming. And that is tough. And this is a topic that we're interested in in a way. How do you keep young people interested and how does the administration, in a way, put confidence in that? I'm encouraged by a lot of really good you know thinking about food about small farms about farmers about young people I think the exciting thing is also that I was talking to we buy our tomato in jars for the winter to cook tomato sauce in Puglia and he was telling me today that a lot of the people from Puglia young people because how do you keep young people wanting to stay in the communities where they grew up and of course you want them to go explore the world but you also know how important the culture is.

6:06And he was saying that people, young people have gone to Milan to become bankers or work in industry or work in tech. And it's starting to come back because what draws them back is the quality, the quality of food that they can do. It's exciting. They can make jarred tomatoes in beautiful jars with beautiful graphics and make them interesting. and then they can experiment. In Mexico, we have so many friends who are making, their parents were traditional, made mascal or tequila, and they're doing it in a different way. The wine producers that we work with in Italy, they're Renzo's generation. They were farmers who made wine.

6:50And now these young, they're now in their 40s or 50s, decided when they inherit it, they go to California and France and Bordeaux and see how to make wine in a different way. came back and changed the wine production into great wines. And so I think if we can encourage people to work because food and farming, agriculture and production is so exciting. One might say very superficially here that the margins get very small now and therefore the hospitality is very tough because bars and restaurants can't afford to pay their staff that much. And I think they pay them very fairly and reasonably in general.

7:39But it's a very long day. It's a very hard business. It's tough. We glamorize being a chef. We think, oh, it's passion to be a chef and work in a restaurant. But for a lot of people, it was either going in the army or going to be a chef. and then if you became a chef it was so hard because you had to be there at four in the morning you had to soak the fire you had to be bullied by somebody who told you what to do and then everybody woke up and said wait a minute, we don't have to be like this you can come into work at nine you can work five days a week you can be fed, you can use good ingredients you can be taught you're not allowed to be if somebody bullies you, you go to the police there was a whole way of making actually working in food in a restaurant something that people wanted to do and i think it could be the same with farming do you get staff easily because do they want to work in i hope they do yeah you know it's been you know we have had how many people do you have about 120 but we have a shop we have a cafe cafe and we do off-site you know we do um we you know we do events and that but i think whether you have 12 or whether you have 100 it's the way your culture again back to the culture what makes somebody want to be an architect you know what makes somebody want to be a fashion designer you know what draws you and i think farming is a real struggle as you know it can rain when you need sun and it can have sun when you need rain and it can be nobody buys corn anymore it's very hard you're working in wine is wine is like farming they have a bad rain and then a hail and then And, you know, we know that.

9:22So how do you make it, though, part of something that you want to do? A few people say we're just not willing to pay enough for our food. And that's one of the problems. A lot of the restaurants here, they are very fixed in prices, you know. And it's a much flatter society here. It's much more difficult to leverage money out of food. You know, the margins are quite tight. but at the same time I would say the qualities are very high yeah, really high I've eaten so well here you know, really from the lunch we had I can name all the meals we've had you know, and I've only been here a short time you've had a pig lunch and you've had a rotabayo what about the fish we had the first day you know, getting off the plane and having that fish and then sitting in your bar that night and the pig yes, the pig but the breakfast and the tortillas and what David and Evelyn and Celeste are doing here.

10:17I mean, the kitchen here is amazing. Anecdotally, it's often said that we're buying more cookbooks but doing less cooking. Clearly, the idea that people still cook is pretty fundamental part of the whole food ecology. I mean, do you have the feeling that people are still cooking? I think they are. I think, you know, young people who can't, I mean, you know, maybe afford to go out or they have children at home and don't go out. I think that cookbooks are kind of aspirational. You know, Nora Ephron wrote a very famous essay for Gourmet saying, I get Gourmet magazine every month and I look at it from cover to cover and I've never made a recipe, you know.

11:02And I think there is that thing of looking at a cookbook and thinking, I will make this, I will do it, I'll be a better person if I do or whatever. And then you put it away and you go back to making what you do but i do think people like to read i think the internet has changed a lot of people look at recipes online which is great you know or on youtube which is great you know i think that anything that makes people want to cook do people cook for you do your friends cook for you yes but there's certainly a sort of london dinner party cooking but i suppose i'm talking about you know every day yeah for your kids yeah and i think it's hard I mean, it is really hard because now we're all working.

11:43The idea of one of the women who stayed home and shopped and prepared and cooked and food was on the table when you came home, it has changed. It's just a lot of pressure because very often those women are going to do the night shift at Amazon or they'd rather do homework with their kids than cook a meal for them. I'd like to take the value judgment out of it. I would like people to think, instead of ordering on Deliveroo, I can put a bag of pasta in the boiling water and serve it with broccoli and you're done. But I think the reality is it's hard. It's hard to do everything. As things become more and more expensive, even to buy, then the reliability of processed food that you can buy becomes simpler.

12:30But again, slightly anecdotal, but I heard a mother talking on BBC Radio 4 saying that she tried and she felt morally under stress to cook every night for her children and sit down. She said, but I can cook reasonably well and I can do it. But so many of my friends don't know how to cook. and also that it's a risk because if you can buy things and you don't cook your supper well for your kids you might have blown your budget and secondly they might not want to eat it whereas if you give them a hamburger or something that's guaranteed and your friend Jamie Oliver so those of you that know this chef Jamie Oliver who has had a really big influence in England came from your kitchen.

13:27He was one of your kids. Yeah, he was. He is still. And he's been an incredibly good advocate for sort of normal food. I think Blair appointed him as a sort of ambassador for school food. So he tried to improve school food. but how do you see the larger food culture? Well, your first point about people not cooking at home and not knowing how to cook, I go back to Blair and would say education, education, education because I think how do you judge a culture? How do you judge a society? I could take Paris where if you walk, I have a photograph of a Col Maternel, which is a state school for young children and they put their menus on the outside of the school.

14:20And you see, you know, they start with celeriac remoulade and then they have a soup and then they have a fish or a meat. Then they have a cheese course for four-year-olds and then they had a dessert. And I have this photograph and I thought, that tells you something. I think that tells you something about a culture that prioritizes feeding little children well, you know, for free. This is not a private school. And I think that the way a society feeds their children, the way they feed sick children, I could go on and on. I don't want to get too political, but I really do think that the way, and I can see it here.

14:58You can see in the market. You can see the way somebody offered me. One thing I thought I would do is buy a piece of cheese today because I hadn't been able to do that. And she wouldn't take, you know, she gave it to me. And that culture of sharing and seeing food. It's not always true. sometimes they take money well they didn't take it for me for the food they didn't take it but they were just it was just i don't know it's a way somebody cuts a piece of bread i think it really goes deep into a culture how we can fix it i think is not sure but i i do think if we invest in people then it japan now i mean japan had a had an anxiety because they shifted diet a bit they're eating more western foods and they panicked about child obesity and they were getting a large percentage of child obesity so they introduced regulations into the school all school food now has to be produced on the school it all has to be fresh food it has to be cooked in them and they've got child obesity down to four percent or something so just it's as simple as that surely.

16:03Yeah. Isn't it about... Well, in our schools, they have candy machines, don't they? They're machines that sell sweets, you know. So it's a complex issue. I think cooking is joyous, you know. I think that it is fun. It brings people together. I think that there are so many ways to do it. And I think that, you know, there are ways to communicate that and to give that to people, you know, definitely. And, you know, as you say... So you need a food culture. Yeah. And presumably, at a certain point, these things have to be stimulated or promoted or encouraged by simple regulations or not. I mean, we saw something in England, which I was quite surprised at, the last government, conservative government, put a tax on sugar in drinks.

16:49It's happened in Mexico, a huge, huge difference. You must have noticed that they taxed Coca-Cola because people were buying huge bottles, and that has really helped. Yeah, I agree.

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18:59Your whole food thing began in the office. it was the canteen of Richard Rogers architects why did you do that tell us how it started with Rose Gray and how did the whole thing oh sure because it's a long story but Richard and I were living in Paris where he was designing a building and we we came back to London having lived in Paris for five years and he really it was Richard really thought that he didn't want to move into a building in the city or a building in an office. He wanted to create a community. And I think living in Paris made us very aware of being outsiders and sticking together quite closely with people we worked with, with our family.

19:47And so when we came back, he really looked for a place where there could be a community. And we found these warehouses on the Thames, which are quite in the western part of London, Hammersmith, and they were originally Duckham's oil, you know, and so it was noisy, it was dirty, it was quite industrial. And he and his partners bought the site and tore down one of the warehouses so you could see the river. They took a large part of the space, but there was somebody who framed paintings, there was graphic designers, there was another architect. the idea was how to create a community and the most important thing for Richard being Italian having lived in France loving food mother was a great cook was gathering together over food you know where how could you do that and so there was a very small space and we talked about it I'd worked in publishing and I worked in the office doing books and I was trained as a graphic designer and so the idea was we would interview various restaurants or small cafes that would want to come into this very small space and I can actually remember the night that we were skiing and I turned to Richard and said the only thing worse than not having a place to eat would be to have a mediocre one and these are mediocre I think I'll do it I honestly said I think I'll do it and so from that idea we went back to London and Rose Gray a magnificent woman who was a friend a great friend of Zad's family as well um had come back from New York she'd worked with Keith McNally on setting up Nels and she was back in London she was cooking and I said let's go you know can we meet for a coffee neither of us really knew very much about doing a restaurant but the reason you wanted to do it was because you wanted this to be a sort of social center of the yeah A place where people could come and have lunch.

21:43We weren't even allowed to open. We wanted to open to the public. We wanted to be the best Italian restaurant in London. The idea that we wanted to start a canteen for the office wasn't really our idea. But we had the restriction of not being allowed to open to the public and we could only be open for lunch. And why Italian? That's a good question, yeah. Richard, Richard's family were in Florence. His connection, his mother was Italian from Trieste. We spent a lot of time in Italy. and Rose had actually lived in Lucca for two years with her children. I had the sense that you were also, it wasn't just Italian food, it was the idea that you were also interested in where the food came from and you did all your trips, research trips about where the recipes came from.

22:29We really wanted to cook the kind of Italian food that we had eaten in Italy and if you went to restaurants, Italian restaurants in London were mostly run and started by managers or waiters. And they brought the kind of food that they thought people would want to eat in London. Quite heavy, you know, parmigiani, which was delicious, spaghetti with meatballs, cheap chianti. And we wanted to bring the kind of food that we had cooked and eaten in Italy. Bread soups, pasta sauces that were simple. That all seems fairly obvious now. But 35 years ago, that must have been... It was very challenging. We used to go to Italy and bring back Parmesan cheese.

23:12We used to go and bring back a prosciutto. I remember carrying a prosciutto. And famously, Rose once brought back a huge pumpkin. And she gave the pumpkin a seat in business class, and she sat in the economy. But it changed. It did change. And have you seen that change over these years? Yeah, radically. I think that, as I sometimes say, when cheap flights started happening, that you could fly to Florence or fly to Naples for 15 pounds. More and more people went there, went to Italy, and thought, wow, I can eat this in Italy. I'd like to eat it in England. In the beginning, we'd serve a pop of pomodoro, which was made of bread and tomatoes and basil.

23:54And people would say, well, at the time, why should I pay five pounds for this? People became much more involved, I think, in the kind of food you could eat. And what other changes have you seen over this period? Well, it's been 37 years, so there has been, I think, people eating out more. I think that people who go to restaurants do want to know about sourcing. And then I think for us, a big radical step was when we became involved with the people who produced our wine. And so we were very Tuscan-based in the beginning, but then when we went to Piemonte to meet the wine producers, or Sicily to meet the wine producers, or Puglia, It took us into the world of people who were creating something and then also people who were then starting to really think about bringing food from Italy to England.

24:48We brought back seeds. We brought back the seeds for Cavalloneiro. I have to give Rose a credit for that and found a farmer near Southampton who grew it for us. We were able to have Cavalloneiro in 1989 when nobody even could get it at all. We could make ribolita. You can't make Rivolita really without Cavallonero. And then became very involved in olive oil as well because the people who make the wine also make the olive oil. So we bottled our own olive oil. We'd go and do that. I used your cookbooks for 30 years or whatever. And I think the cookbooks were also a way of explaining the idea of River Cafe.

25:33I mean, do you have that feeling that they were sort of fundamental to the idea of the River Cafe, not just as a place, but as another way of looking at food? Yeah. When we were asked to write our first cookbook, the River Cafe cookbook, and we said, we're not cookbook writers, we're chefs. So, no. And then we started thinking, well, how can we, in a way, it almost became a handbook for the people who work. so they'd come up, a chef would be working and say, how do I make rotolo or how do I make a tomato sauce? And we'd have to explain. And then we thought, well, if we write them down. And I think it's a long story again, but the cookbooks, the first cookbook that we did, we wrote the recipe down.

26:17We took a photograph of the food right away, no styling. We just took, and it's like, if you follow these directions, you will be able to make something that we make. You know, it's simple, it's easy. it's accessible. This is the way we cook in the River Cafe. This is the way you can cook at home. It was kind of bringing restaurant food to the domestic kitchen.

26:42The River Cafe Winter Set Lunch is now running from Monday to Thursday. Reserve a booking on www.rivercafe.co.uk or give us a call.

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27:41Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200 ,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa. Visit washablesofas.com today and save. That's 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. I wonder if we should open it up to some questions to give you the opportunity. Thank you so much for being here.

28:22And question from me, I know that you have a very particular culture at the River Cafe, the way that you train the staff to care about the food, the trips that you do to Italy to source, even hiring people that have trained at Ballymalo in Ireland. Could you talk a little bit more about how you instill that into like every single day? Yeah. Well, the Italy trips are really, you know, something that Rose and I did when we were just starting out. And we thought, you know, I really like, like David and Evelyn do, to have a personal relationship. So we started out with the people that we bought our wine from.

29:00And then we realized that for a lot of the young people working in the River Cafe, cooking, making the thinnest ravioli you can see your hand through, or doing a slow-cooked field sauce, or making a polenta cake, they were cooking great food. But a lot of them, I think life is about exposure. And I just say the way my children have been exposed, or my friends' children. And so they hadn't been exposed to actually Italian life or Italy. And so we started taking chefs and managers and waiters. And they became really important. We still do it. Now we take, because we're bigger, we take about 15, 16 people to Tuscany.

29:43We do it around the olive oil. And we take them to see how olive oil is made. The pressing, the olives. And then the producers give us. it's quite hard work. You get up in the morning, I know, and then you go to a winery, you taste the wine, you see the olive oil, then you have lunch, always in the house of the producer. Again, it's a home-cooked Italian meal, Tuscan meal, and then you do it again and you go to it. So it's, but they come back so excited and so knowledgeable so that when they pour that bit of olive oil over somebody's bruschetta, they really respect it and they understand it. And so that's the Italy trip.

30:22Then I suppose we have, we change the menu every meal. So the chef comes in and writes a menu, depending, like you do at home. What do we have in the fridge? What have we ordered? What's left over? How do I feel? What would I like to eat if I was eating in the River Cafe tonight? So I think that gives a lot of interest. And also, the chefs come in and they don't know what they're going to cook. So that gives a kind of interest. And then I suppose we have, again, the open kitchen. we work in a kitchen where it's so open that nobody can shout you know which is you know you have a kind of order which is I once said to a friend of mine as a director look at the kitchen isn't it like a play and he said no actually Ruthie it's like a ballet because everybody's moving the whole time you know and you go over to the grill and say is it ready yet or you go you know to the post and say are you done can I put the lamb on now you know so I think making and they feel part of the room Yeah, and a team.