Es Devlin

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1:23Still in my guitar Finkly waves She was great, the little Amy sang. I love to sing.

1:40In June of this year, completely unsure about what to do with Damien Hirst's beautiful studio space next to the River Cafe, which he was giving to us for the memorial for Richard Rogers, my husband. A friend, Jonah Freud, introduced me to S. Devlin by text. A few hours later, I found myself talking to her while she put her child to bed at midnight. S., the designer of the set for Beyoncé's concert, the West End production of The Crucible, the fashion show for Yves Saint Laurent, had recently finished her radical book, An Atlas of S. Stavlin. At the end of the conversation, she said, I'll tell you what, Ruthie, I'm going to Lisbon tomorrow morning.

2:18Why don't I stop over on the way to the airport? Is eight o 'clock okay? of course s i said already exhausted she arrived at eight on the dot we had a look at the space she told me what to do and got straight into a taxi to make the flight this was s spontaneous generous positive creative funny and very smart as i write this s is in the restaurant talking to charles pull and our manager about what makes the river cafe a set a place that is active and calm, dark and light, noisy and quiet at different times of the day. When Ed comes back from all this, we'll talk about food, theater, space, books, family, and cooking.

3:00And most of all, we will talk about friendship and we will talk about love. Thank you, Es. Oh, so beautiful. Don't change a word. So, you know the drills and we asked you to choose from all the recipes of all the books from the last 12 cookbooks. So I'd like to ask you why you chose this recipe for cannellini bean soup. This is from the first book. And of course, my first encounter when the River Cafe first was open, when I was first able to come, which took a while to get my table. And then when the book came out and we were fans. So I wanted to remember that moment. We being you and... Well, back then it was probably me and friends.

3:44It was probably before I met my husband, Jack. But my husband, Jack, is an extraordinary cook. He makes this cannellini bean soup. And he makes it very specifically with a piece of toast in the bottom. And he did teach me how to make it. So I have made it. Okay. But more often, I have eaten it when I didn't make it. Yeah. I ate the love of it rather than making it. Shall I read it? Read the recipe. Cannellini bean soup. Serve six. 250 grams cooked cannellini beans, a handful of fresh sage leaves, 2-3 garlic cloves peeled and chopped, 3 tablespoons of olive oil, a bunch of fresh flat-leaf parsley chopped, extra virgin olive oil.

4:32In a large saucepan, cook the garlic in the olive oil until soft but not brown. Add the parsley, then add beans and stir. Put three quarters of the bean mixture into a food processor, with some reserved cooking liquid. Pulse briefly you do not want to puree. Add more of the cooking liquid if necessary, but the soup should be thick. Return to the saucepan and season. Reheat. If too thick, add more cooking liquid. Serve with generous amount of extra virgin olive oil. And perhaps some toast. And I would, if I were Jack, I would be toasting something in the bottom so you have that gorgeous toast and beans and oil.

5:14Yeah, that's what we love, three ingredients, isn't it? You know, simplicity, which I guess is perhaps the way you work. It is, and also I don't eat meat, and as you mentioned, I use quite a lot of energy. Yeah. So I have to be quite careful to make sure I get a lot of protein without eating meat, and the beans are amazing for that as well. So going back to the beginning, tell me about growing up in the Devlin household. Where were you born? I was born in Kingston Hospital, in Kingston-upon-Thames, not too far from here, proper suburbia. Yeah, close. Proper suburbia in the western suburbs of London.

5:50And then my parents went on a romantic weekend break to Rye in East Sussex. And they bought a house on a whim on a cobbled street called Mermaid Street, which used to descend into the sea. And the house had been lived in by Conrad Akin, the poet, and his daughter, Joan Akin, the author. So in my mind, the house spoke. There was a model city, model town of Rye next to the house. And we used to visit it every weekend because my mother and father were so excited to invite their friends to see the place they loved. So they would take them to the model, which was a Sonnais Lumière, and it told stories.

6:33So each house told a story, including my house. So I was only six years old. So in my head, something made me think that objects could speak. Head stories. Houses could speak the way that I think beans speak and food speaks. So that was me growing up. And my mother was a teacher. What did she do? She taught special needs children, dyslexic children at that time. She had taught lots of things, but she was teaching dyslexic kids. And my dad was a journalist specializing in education. They were both fascinated with education, actually. But my mom prepared all the food. My dad could make scrambled eggs on toast.

7:11That was really it. I'm worried that I might be, like my father was, slightly known for only cooking one thing. Okay. Because I don't cook very much. That's fine. What is your one thing? Well, I do make cheese and tomatoes on toast quite well. If it's good toast. And I sometimes put red pepper. I'm trying to use the vegan cheese. That's all right. Are you vegan or vegetarian? No, I'm vegetarian, but I'm just trying to be as smart as possible with the ingredients. But yeah, my mom was in the kitchen. She was trying to manage everything. There were four kids. Four, and she taught all day and then came home and cooked for you.

7:46Would you sit down, all of you, to dinner every night? Yeah, but it was quite a lot of, you know, back then in the 80s and late 70s, quite a lot of potato waffles out of the freezer, whatever she had time for. Then she got a slow cooker and she realized that before she went to work, She could put all the ingredients, big meaty stews. She would do a white one or a brown one. And she put all the ingredients, the chicken or whatever it was, in there in the morning. She'd go out, do her whole day at teaching, and then we would come home from school. The idea was that the big stew would be there for us to eat.

8:20And that worked? Well, no, because we like the potato waffles. Oh, I see. So we would just go to the freezer and get my poor mum. So she gave up after that a bit. So your father would come back. Would he work in London or where did he work as a journalist? Yeah, we only saw him at the weekend because he would stay up in London. To get to Rye at the time was quite a trek. Yeah, yeah. So he would come back at the weekends. So my mum was really holding the fort and we all did a lot of things. There was music lessons, orchestra. We had a little yellow Citroen Diane that we had to park facing downhill on Mermaid Street.

8:57Otherwise it wouldn't start if it was facing uphill. because then if it didn't start, you could just roll it down. She would put hot water bottles on it in the winter to stop the points freezing. She had a little plastic, like a bonnet that you put on to stop your hair getting wet in the shower. She put one of those over the whole car, a big bonnet to stop it getting wet. But we would go to the beach after school in the summer every day to Canberra Sands or to Winchellsea, and my food memory of that time was sitting, usually crappy weather in the wind and unwrapping foil crusty little pastries and then the sand the grit of the sand would get in them and these she would make these little pastry chicken pies so i remember the chicken and the sand they were kind of tasty with a bit of sand in them so you grew up in this house with four children where are you in the list of i'm number two number two and the mother who worked a father who was absent and you had a meal every night that you would sit around the table and would you all talk about what you've done during the day or would it be just kind of eat and then do the homework what was life like noisy very noisy and kind of my brothers went to boarding school for a while I think it was all too much probably for my mom to manage four kids all at once so they went off for a bit and they would come back in the holidays and it was very very noisy and there were friends over and yeah it was food and noise and talking.

10:22And at lunch, would you take your lunch to school? Did you get lunch there? Do you remember school food? School food, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. School food was horrible. Rice puddings that were all skinny and you had to eat it all. It was a local school called Frida Cardam in Rye, a primary school. And then we moved to Kent to go to a school called Cranbrook School, which was a grammar school. They had a little cafeteria that you would choose your food, but we just did eat the potato waffles. I'm back to the potato waffles. Yeah, I'm afraid so. I'm afraid. It's such a shame. I can't believe I've never seen a potato waffle.

10:56If you were eating. I guess I have to go through the British education home system. Have you had a potato waffle? Yeah. Okay. I mean, in fairness to my mom, the fact that, you know, we were annoying children who liked processed food was not her fault. She's a fantastic cook. She makes great big themed, I mean, she would make ridiculously crazy birthday cakes. Theatrical perhaps? Extraordinarily. I mean, my mum is a great artist, as is my dad. They didn't pursue art as a career, but all of our birthdays were always, it would be a themed mermaid cake with mermaid biscuits. I am pretty terrible because I do, when I eat a meal, and I've been served the most beautiful meals in my life by my husband and others, but I tend to eat the conversation, the food tastes of the thought.

11:42That's fine. That's a story. That's a story of food. And I think food can be a story. And I think, you know, what you eat is so much, obviously, more than what's going in your mouth. And the lighting, I am obsessed with what the light is. I can't, if I walk into a restaurant, the light is wrong. I will probably go up to the person and say, can I just dim this switch here? So what is the lighting that you like in a restaurant? Low. Low. Or outside. And being in the, like just now, we were sitting outside at your beautiful piazza. So either natural light or the light of the fire. Yeah. By the fire.

12:16The food by a fire. Yeah. I'm Charles Pullen, Executive Director of the River Cafe, and we are sitting on table 106 on the terrace outside on a Friday afternoon, and I'm about to talk with Ez Devlin. Very excited, we want to get her take on the feel and the energy and the design of the River Cafe, so rather than one of her sets that we do all over the world. It would be rather interesting just for us to hear what your take is on the space that we use. As people arrive through the front door, their first view as they look left, down the length of the very long dining room, is the big pink wood oven and the fire in there flickering away, which has a wonderful purpose of shrinking the room in a way and making it feel cosy and making it feel much more intimate, despite the fact it is a very long, large dining room.

13:05It's such a sort of hackneyed old reference, the fact that there is so much in common with the theatre and the restaurant world, But it's a truism because there are so many parallels with how you gear up, you rehearse, you audition, but then there's the energy that's just before service, just before the curtain's up, and then you all jump into your roles. And so we've always talked about the staff and the food and all that side of things, but from your point of view it might be interesting to hear how the kind of design of the dining room itself comes into play. I think the comparison between the performative aspects of the delivery of food and the physical aspects of being backstage and front stage are clear.

13:49I don't find them hackneyed. I think they're fascinating. When I was here last time, it was an evening. The weather was a bit like this, maybe not so sunny. But we all gathered in bright clothes in honour of Richard's love of bright colours all around the banks of this piazza. And of course, the river. It's called the River Cafe for a reason. We are adjacent to this great planetary force that runs through our city. So for me, those fundamental forces are the fire in the bright crimson furnace. Yeah. And the river that's here, this green piazza of grass that's outside. The vivid color of the doors everywhere in the toilets.

14:30This beautiful red-orange fluorescent color. Richest color, exactly. Right? So I think all of those energies are felt even when you're inside. We're sitting outside now, but I believe they're felt inside as well. And of course, the color, the idea that when you eat, you're not just eating food, you're eating color. You're eating light, because the way that light reverberates off objects to create color. You're eating what you smell. You're eating the conversation that you might be having with someone. That's what you're eating. You're nourished by so much more than molecules that you need as fuel, right?

15:04of course and that's this place has always celebrated that and of course what's beautiful about it my understanding of the etymology of this restaurant and why it's so dearly loved is because it began as a place of work didn't it began as a canteen to feed those who were working together to make buildings the paper tablecloth here was is absolutely was here so that Richard could get out his pens and scribble on them and design the next whatever it might have And I think that's why it feels so rooted in this spot. It's here for more reasons than one might think even on the surface. Of course, now it's become this incredibly sought-after place to have some of the finest food with the finest produce with some of the most successful and accessible and readable and beautiful cookbooks that have ever been made.

15:53But it started because a team at lunchtime needed to eat in a place where there aren't many restaurants. And it started from, we always talk about, in any kind of work of art, what was the need? Did it need to be made? And this needed to be made, like Ruthie and Richard needed to be together. Like, you know, their need of each other sort of resonated through all their friends and the vast kind of circle of people they've gathered around them, which I really witnessed when I was here on that memorial day.

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17:12If 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. I understand though that you cook for the people that you work with. Is that right? Every day? Yeah. So I don't cook, but I have a cook who makes meals every day.

17:53And we started that probably about seven years ago when we moved to a studio that didn't really have an easy way for people to eat, but also it was part of balancing our carbon footprint. And it seemed much more sensible if I have around eight to ten people in the studio every day. We make them vegetarian food. There's no food waste. There's no packaging. No one's running around getting bits of things in plastic boxes or anything. It was something I could do. You know, we still fly. I can diminish it, but I can't completely get rid of that from my practice at the moment. But what I can do is serve everyone a really nice vegetarian meal.

18:28Do you all eat together? Yeah, we will stop work, go around the table in my house. There's a garden there. We all sit down and we eat. We have a wonderful lady called Chaya who's cooking for us at the moment. We had Antonia until she had to leave. but that's really important for me that we sit we talk to each other we eat great food i think that again how you combine work and food you know there are people who need to go out and go for a walk to stop there people you know the idea of the business lunch where you go to a restaurant and you discuss work which was an anathema to renzo piano richard's partner he thought i remember they were doing the pompadour it was like either you ate or you worked never would you know combine the two you know the idea of enjoying a meal while you talked about work you continue the work of the meal or usually not normally we just talk about stuff we wouldn't talk about it's not worky over lunch and um everyone goes out for a walk after lunch because we're near Dulwich Park oh that's so people go out they wander off they get a coffee they have a little break but normally no the conversation either we're silent sometimes sometimes we just need a break and we all sit there we're happy in each other's company just eating we're very happy to say nothing yeah or we just chit chat about any old thing that's nothing to do with work or we invite people to lunch a lot of the time there are a lot of kids who want to see the studio who who might not otherwise experience what a studio is like so we're busy but we're always stopping for lunch so we say come to lunch so they come they get the vibe everyone's not panicking because they're not meant to be working it's a you know time for a break and you do you're quite solitary i love being on my own.

20:07I love reading. I always draw when I read. I write when I read. I draw. I have to underline. I can't read without a pen in my hand. I love it on my own, but I don't spend very much time on my own because I have two children and I have eight people in my studio minimum. So I'm rarely on my own. So I really cherish it when I am. Because we were talking the other day about artists and alcohol and drinking and going out and being together in the evening because so many artists are alone during the day that then when it's sort of over you want to kind of go out to be out and did you have that period in your life before you had children you were working and then partying yeah I mean I think the time when I moved to London when I was a early teens you know it was magical my boyfriend at the time was a 16 is young I was young well your parents were fine with that not really no yeah I was kind of determined in what I wanted to do and it was music.

21:05My boyfriend at the time was a record producer and a sound engineer, so I was with a lot of musicians and I spent a lot of time in recording studios just observing how music is made, how tracks are recorded, how music is edited. So that was a really formative time to get under the skin of recording and music. And then when I was in Bristol, that was probably my most party time. That was my hallucinogenic moment. Yeah. Tell me about then when you left home. I was about 16 and I fell in love with a man who was 24. I did finish school, but I spent a lot of time in London. Was that a domestic situation?

21:42Did you live in a house and have to cook and shop for yourself? No, but we, do you know, we had hardly ever been to a restaurant. We didn't go to restaurants ever. We didn't have the money for kids in a restaurant. And restaurants in England at the time, it wasn't the same thing as it is now. What year is that, are you talking about? Well, as I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we never went to a restaurant. I can remember going to a restaurant once. Special occasion? I think it was because the car broke down and we went and it had red walls and the Parmesan was off. That's all I remember about a restaurant.

22:11Yeah. So the first time I really remember going to restaurants was when I was 16 and I met my boyfriend and he would take me out in London to restaurants. And we went to Mr. Wing and we ate duck pancakes. It's in Earl's Court. Yeah. And Julie's Restaurant. Julie's in Holland Park. In Holland. Those were the restaurants. And I was like, wow, this is crazy. So you ate in restaurants and maybe cooked for yourself? Then I did do a bit of cooking, and I would have been at university when I got your book. I didn't have any furniture. I had a wooden pallet on the floor, and I put cushions around it, and I would try and make the River Cafe recipes.

22:47That was when I first got the blue book. And then you cooked your way through university? Did you stay there? Yeah, and I did cook then. I would eat veggie burgers in the cafe. Were you vegetarian at that point? I wasn't. No, I just liked the veggie burgers. I wasn't vegetarian then. I would make chicken. I would do Thai dinners and I would get the galangal and lime and coconut milk and make chicken coconut milk soup. I would do that. So when you left Bristol, what did you do? When I left Bristol, I had been writing as you do. I was doing an English literature degree. So I was reading and writing, reading, reading, writing for three years.

23:21But I also wanted to paint. So I painted a lot. I painted my whole house, which was rented. And that kind of painting? No, I was painting murals. You painted murals on the walls, did you? Yeah. Wow. And it was a rented apartment, and it had a shag pile carpet that I ripped off. It was disgusting. It had carpet all over the side of the bath. So I took all the carpets away and painted on the floor great big murals and painted a lot of, I made a lot of things. Did your landlord ever stop by to visit? No, but I got in trouble when I left. I had to put it all back. I had to get a new shag pile carpet and put it all back.

23:53So underneath some person's apartment, you should go back there and lift up the carpet and see if you're discovering a Michelangelo under canvas. There's a mess of devil in writing there. Have a look in number 135, Cotton Brow, 139, I can't remember. So I wanted to make art then, and I went to St. Martin's, and I did the foundation course. So after university you went to it? I did it all back to front. It's not bad to have one education and then have another. I wasn't ready to go to art school, although I'd always made art at school. I wasn't ready to go to art school, not least because if you went to art school, you had to stay living at home.

24:33Yeah. And I wanted to move. I wanted to live in Bristol. So I went to St. Martin's and had the most, you know, rich year of just I was I was a mature student by then. Everyone else was 18. I was 21 and quite old. So I did everything there, you know, really got into photography, printmaking, sculpture, made a lot of books. I sewed a book. I decided a book had to be made completely stitched. And then people kept saying to me, oh, you really should check out this theatre design course. At St. Martin's. There was a specific one called Motley Theatre Design Course, which was run by a 93-year-old lady called Percy Harris, who's a bit of a legend in the world of stage design.

25:13And I said, I don't really care about theatre. It's quite boring. I never sit through, I'm always asleep, or it's a musical, it's kind of embarrassing, I don't want to do theatre. And they said, no, no, just go and check out this course. And I walked in, and it was this red room, smell of pot noodle, definitely saw a mouse. And where was it? It was in the scene dock of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Okay. At the time there was Miss Saigon, so every night you would hear the helicopter coming down. and it was just 10 students pretty much feral slightly smelly they hadn't left that room for a year wow they were just in and they were making they had little model theaters they were listening to opera there was references and you know photographs and paintings stuck all over the wall and i felt i thought this is my tribe i'm happy here and i've never really left that room in a way whatever i'm making it's in a room my room now is kind of like that what is it like it's covered in stuff piles and piles of books tons of little drawings and pictures all over the wall lots of little sculptures quite magical lots of miniatures you have a beautiful voice did you sing do you know i did try and sing occasionally i was so bad funny enough i've i've learned to use my voice a bit now when i make sculptures i speak in them but tell me about tell me more about that what do you mean well there's a work that's on in miami at the moment called forest of us and it starts as a small film with me talking really just noticing the similarity between the shape of human lungs and the shape of trees and just observing that then the film comes apart and you walk into a sculpture that reverberates that observation but when I first made these types of works in 2016 I would never have used my voice like a lot of people if I heard my voice on an answering machine back in the day when we had aunts.

27:08I'd be like, oh God, I don't sound like that. That's weird. I sound, you know, that's terrible. But I got used to it when I used to read my children's stories when I put them to sleep. And I got used to the different quality of sound. If I had one of their heads on my chest, my voice sounded different. And I got used to that. And I kind of became comfortable with my own voice around then. stories and poise and theater and designing this story of your growing up decorating the cakes to going to bristol and cooking thai food and putting murals under carpets it's all about discovery and trying to find the story with with the theme underneath it and then food is the same you have the ingredients you try and think how you can respect the ingredient the simplicity of the ingredient if you're vegetarian if you're vegan if you're trying to do something with or without it always is that kind of restraint which then leads to the richness doesn't it i think so and i think everything that you're just describing there is also about seeking a very basic human need for being participant in ritual yeah and we were talking actually a little earlier about river cafe and ritual and you've got all the ingredients here for ritual you have the river you have the fire, you have that piazza of grass.

28:28And I think more and more, it's what we lack. And it's what we seek. The storytelling voice is another way of calibrating time. It's such a tiny fragment of our existence as a species that we calibrate time with a clock, mechanical, digital, that's so recent. It was always calibration by means of planetary distance. And what is the right time when Richard was doing Lloyd's? They wanted to put a clock on the outside of the building. and we went to Jean Tangley and said, would you possibly design a clock? It was a real whole long story, which is you had to call him at a certain time of day. And somehow I was very involved in this.

29:05And so I made the call and you had to tell him right away what you wanted. And so I said, Mr. Tangley, we would, you know, this is Richard Rogers' wife and we'd like to put a clock on the outside of Lloyd's. And he went, that's fantastic. I love Richard Rogers' work. I love Lloyd's. I love insurance. I love clocks. This is a brilliant idea. And he thought about it. We talked about it And then he said, there's just one thing that if I design a clock for you, that's one condition. And I said, what would that be? And he said, the clock must not tell the correct time. And, you know, and of course Lloyd's went next, you know.