Glenn Lowry

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0:40He's going to read his recipe. Say hello. You're recording from the beginning, are you? His recipe is a ton of a satchini with a satchini. Oh, my goodness. I'm so happy to see you. Happy to see you. Thank you. Of course. Okay, so I'll just read this little thing, and then we can talk.

1:08Today I've come to New York, and I'm in one of my favorite places in the world, the Museum of Modern Art, a place that I have treasured since a young child from upstate New York. Beautiful spaces that are welcoming and exciting are crucial. That is what we do in our own small way at the River Cafe, and what Glenn Lowry has done here in a big way. Over the past 30 years, is that right, 30 years? Almost 28. Okay, I'll say over almost 30 years as director, he's transformed the collection, broadened the collection, and turned the museum into a space where people can not only look at beautiful art, but meet, sit in the garden, and eat delicious food.

1:47Glenn and I like to bring the world of art and food together. At the River Cafe, we're doing projects with Ed Ruscha and Damien Hirst, and one of my favorite drawings is a self-portrait Ellsworth Kelly drew in the River Cafe bathroom, and a message Cy Twombly left me on a menu after a long lunch. If we have brought art to food, Glenn has brought food to art, with a fabulous restaurant, the modern, and small cafes throughout the building. Glenn is a close friend of the River Cafe and a close friend of Richard and mine. Today, we're going to discuss food and art, art and food, our love for both, and our love for each other.

2:29So great to be here, Ruthie. Thank you. I said I was coming to the museum and we'd be doing this interview surrounded by the greatest art in the world, and I'm looking at four black walls, two stories down. We'll have to do something about our recording studio. No, it's great, actually. Do you spend a lot of time down here? Do you record? Episodically. Yeah. You know, we used to do a lot of audio guides in-house, and so we needed a recording studio for that. Now they're produced all over the place, and so it's a little bit different. Do you have a podcast? Does Museum have a podcast? We have a thing called Post, which is online.

3:05It's not really a podcast, but we do a number of conversations is probably a better way of putting it than podcasts. Yeah, nice. I actually did a little audio one for the Guston Show. They came and asked me to talk about, you know, my father was a great friend of Philip Guston. I didn't know that. You didn't know that? From upstate. Oh, yeah. I grew up in Woodstock. And so Philip was in our house all the time. Actually, they liked the food. My mother was cooked, you know, and I think Musa, his wife, was a poet and Philip, a painter. What about artists and food? Oh, I think they go together. I can't tell you the number of artists that I know who are either fanatic about the food they cook or just love to go out and eat.

3:48And Cy Twombly. I mean, you know, lunch with Cy Twombly or dinner with Cy Twombly was always a feast. What was it like? What are your memories? Oh, my memories were being out, you know, above Gaita with Cy in some small hilltop town where Nicola had found a fabulous restaurant and, you know, lunches that would go on for two or two and a half hours. But the food would be absolutely spectacular. Of course, one of the great things about Italy is the tiniest place can produce the most delicious meal. When you see a three-star Michelin in Italy, I always sort of avoid it. You want to go to those small places.

4:21Oh, yes. The magic for me of traveling around Europe in general, but particularly Italy, is the serendipitous encounter with a place that you'd never even heard of that creates a meal that you'll never forget. Okay. So did you ever live in Italy as we're talking about? No, alas. I mean, I spent a lot of time in France. I'm, in fact, French. Ah, Laury. Is that a French? Well, you have to go back to Lievenstein. My father was German. My mother was French. They met during the Second World War. But I regained my French citizenship a year ago. Okay. So you were born in France. Is that why or is it through your mother?

4:57Through my mother. I was born in New York. Because I have a son who was born in Paris. And I remember thinking, great, he's going to have French citizenship. but you have to live in France between the ages of 18 and 22, i.e. go to the army. But I don't know if that's changed. But that's cool that you've got French citizenship. Well, I've always felt French. It's a strange thing that because my mother spoke to me in French from the moment I couldn't speak, and because we spent every summer there, and I have lots of friends. I went to the Université de Grenoble when I was younger. It's in the blood.

5:32Yeah. And I think what's in the blood is a love for food, love for wine, love for all those things that are in the soul of France. Did she cook? My mother is a great cook. She is. Okay, tell me about her cooking. So she was a self-taught cook. She was not somebody who grew up cooking. But when she came to the United States and subsequently married my father and then had children, she had to learn to cook. And she started by just following cookbooks. And in her words, it's not actually that difficult. You just follow the recipe precisely until you— Unless it's River Cafe Cookbook Road. But until you get confident enough to play, right?

6:12Yeah, yeah. And we grew up in a house where food was everything. Let's go to the very beginning. So where were you born? I was born in New York City, but I grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Was your father involved with Williams? No, my parents met because they loved to ski. And so I was born in New York. My sister was born three years after me. And shortly thereafter, they decamped to Williamstown, which is in the Berkshires, northwest corner of Massachusetts, because it was in ski country. So they just moved on a whim. And so that's where I grew up. What was his job? My father was an engineer.

6:46So the weekends were for skiing. And as a child, we grew up skiing every weekend and eventually became a racer. Did you? I didn't know that part of your life. Raced in France for a year. Where? All over. I was on the ski team of the Université de Grenoble, and I was also racing on sort of the lower level of the FIS circuit. So it was all good. Do you still ski? I still ski, but not nearly as much or the way I would like to. I mean, it's pure pleasure, but it's difficult when you live in New York City and you have a day job. We ski as a family. It's always been our thing, our holiday. Where do you ski?

7:25Well, we've gone back over and over again to Courchevel, to the Trois Vallées, you know, because you can go from Courchevel over to Marybill to, you know, Valterrand. And that's a very, very good skier and has children. So it's kind of been our family sailing and skiing, but our part is much more the skiing. And I've skied in Vail and in Aspen and recently in Telluride. And we could go back to food in that case because there's no comparison, dare I say, between the food that you get on the mountains in France. No? That was a real awakening. There's some place they don't let you drink on the slopes, right?

8:04No, it's terrible. I mean, you know, for all of the great restaurants this country has today in the United States, the fact that ski culture here hasn't generated the kind of ambience that you have in Europe. We had for years and years and years an apartment in Megev, so that's where we would ski. And before that in Val d 'Isere, where my parents were younger. And, you know, you'd spend the morning skiing hard, and then you'd find a little place to have lunch. And it would be a spectacularly delicious lunch. Simple, but delicious. And then you go, you know, throughout New Hampshire, for instance, and you go to these ski resorts, and you see these signs that say, fine food served here.

8:44And the only thing that was certain is that the food wasn't fine. It's just a different... It's different. We used to say we used to fit a bit of skiing in between, you know, good food. Richard was absolutely passionate about the food. That's where we went to the course of our, because he just loved the oysters. He skied till he was about 86. A friend of mine who makes wine in Tuscany, Mr. Bonacassi, he's called, he said, is Richard skiing? I said, well, you know, he's finding it a bit difficult now that he's sort of in his early 80s. He said, oh, tell him to continue, because I went through that.

9:18in my early 80s, and then it came right back in my late 80s. Just requires patience. My mother skied until she was 90. And every year from about 84 or 85 until she stopped, she would buy new skis and a new outfit. And you'd say, Mom, but you only take one run a year. Yeah, quite. That's a French woman. It's a great run. It matters to me. So back to the food your mother was cooking. When you were saying about cookbooks, because I learned to cook through Julia Child, which is probably later. But I always say reading Julia Child was like a science cookbook. It gave you exactly the measurements, exactly the size of the bowl, the spoon, the mound.

10:00It was so precise that you couldn't make a mistake. And that gave you the freedom to then experiment on your own. Do you know what your mother used? Julia Child, for sure. She did, she did. Lots of other cookbooks. But I ended up getting one of her copies of Julia Child. She had several that, you know, was tattered. It was actually in pieces. But I think that's what you learn about cooking, that it becomes fun when you have the confidence to in a way go off-piste to start experimenting and inventing as well as following the directions. And also that you can't really make a terrible mistake. I mean it's not people worry that it won't taste exactly the way they want it to.

10:40But every time you do something, you learn a little bit about what you've done that lets you do something else. Did you participate with her in cooking? No, I didn't actually start cooking, strangely, until I met Susan, my wife, and her father was an extremely good cook, as well as her mother, of course. And he became a kind of role model for me because on the weekends he would do the cooking. He liked to cook Chinese food because he had represented Chinatown in Montreal as a federal parliamentarian. And watching him cook and learning from him just stayed with me. And I met him when I was 17. How old?

11:1717? Yeah. Would meals be a very important part of your life? Sitting down to dinner at night, did you all sit, you and your sister and your parents sit down? Absolutely. To a meal cooked by your mother? Absolutely. We lived initially in a very small house. And then eventually my parents moved to a larger house. But the meal was the key point in the day. And my mother— What time would it be? Would she go on French terms and have dinner at 8 or would it be when you came home from school? No, it was earlier. You know, 7-ish. Yeah. I like to eat late now. I don't remember what I liked to do when I was a child.

11:52I just ate when the opportunity was there. But my mother, you know, up until I was in 7th or 8th grade, maybe beyond, would bring me lunch at school because she just didn't think the school would produce a good enough lunch. So as a child, you were both teased because— I was going to say, was that embarrassing? It was horribly embarrassing. But on the other hand, I had a very good lunch. Yeah. She'd actually bring it to you or she'd give it to you to take? Sometimes she gave it to me. Sometimes she would bring it. Because that would be really embarrassing to have your mother come with a plate.

12:23But nice, so nice. You know, my mother is a fantastic mother. She sounds great. And she believes that, you know, if you don't have a good meal, you're not going to have a good day. That's kind of where she started. Do you feel that? Yeah, I do. Yeah, good. I mean, let's put it this way. A bad meal puts you in a bad meal. Yeah. And so you grew up in this house. Did you say your father cooked? No, my father once a year would make potato latkes, which was the one thing he could make. Where did he learn that? I guess from his mother or his grandmother in Germany. Yeah. But the kitchen was a disaster after that.

12:56So my mother was never that keen to have to do it because my father and cleaning up weren't actually synonymous. So his latkes were delicious, but they were a treat to be had once a year. And so you grew up in this household of primarily French food. Almost always. Boeuf bourguignon. My mother would cook a fabulous lamb. You know, every once in a while she would do, you know, a spaghetti of some sort, mostly spaghetti with meatballs. It was not her favorite thing to cook for some reason. And my father loved meat. So we had, you know, probably the worst diet in the world. We had a lot of pork, beef, lamb.

13:31But always cooked, even when it was a very simple dish, my mother had a way of cooking it perfectly. I remember at some point a friend of hers told her about a kind of salmon. It was not quite a smoked salmon. It was a cured salmon. So she started curing salmon. It was spectacularly good. I mean, everything she touched turned out really well. I wonder if she could find the ingredients she wanted in Williamstown. I don't know. You know, there was a store a half hour, 40 minutes away that she would go to. You know, it's gotten better over time. Now when I go there to visit her, you can get pretty much anything you want.

14:10But that certainly wasn't the case growing up. When we did our first book, Random House had a policy that whatever recipe you did had to be available to their cookbook editor who lived in Maine. And that within 50 miles that she could get the ingredient. And now, of course, with the internet, it's all changed anyway. Everybody can get everything. Did you go to France in the summer? I did. Where were your grandparents? So my grandmother lived in Paris, and my cousins, who also lived in Paris, spent the summers in Cannes in the south of France. So we'd go and visit them. And then when I was 11, I was sent off to live in the summer with some friends of my parents in Aix-les-Bains in the Savoy.

14:58And I would go and live with them for a couple of weeks. And then I would go to ski camp for a couple of weeks. And then I would come back and live with them. So I had this kind of idyllic childhood. It's such a regional cooking, isn't it? The food that you would eat in Paris or Normandy would be different from Brittany and from Aix-en-Provence, from the south of France. It's very different. Yes, that's that whole idea of terroir, that everything has some kind of deeply rooted local dimension to it that you can almost smell sometimes, right? It's in the earth and it's in the way things are made.

15:32So you can have a chicken from Bresse in the Savoie and it won't taste the same. Yeah. I just have curiosity as a chef. Did she cook a lot with butter? Oh, yes. I mean, I love butter. Oh, yes. It's very interesting because we have an Italian restaurant where everybody's meant to love olive oil. And we all do. But when you get chefs around the table and we talk about cooking with butter, you know, it's so delicious, isn't it? Cuisine Masso never entered the house, ever. Maybe why my father had a heart attack at 60. Yeah, did he? Survived in many good years after that. But, no, my mother cooked very traditional French food all the way through.

16:09So her bourguignon was a very rich redolent sauce. and in the same way that she'd make a roux with, you know, the best butter she could find. Yeah. Growing up with this food, the French culture, going to Paris, you know, extremely elegant way of eating, going to the Savoie. How did this affect you? I mean, did you have a standard of eating, of going out, going to restaurants? So it's interesting. I wasn't that conscious of it as a child because, in fact, it just seemed normal. But I realized by the time I was 17 or 18 or even 20 that, one, I loved going to restaurants. Two, I loved to eat. That there was a certain kind of pleasure that came with a meal that you couldn't find otherwise.

16:52And a meal that had been thoughtfully put together was even more interesting than something quickly assembled. And when I met Susan and we met when I was 17. Where did you meet? We met in Grenoble. I was there to race and she was there to study. And so somehow we got together. And our favorite restaurant when we lived in Grenoble was a little Vietnamese place called the Po Dala. I still remember it vividly. This is like 50 years ago. But it was exquisite Vietnamese food. And you learn quickly. And I hadn't really had Vietnamese food before. I'd had some Chinese food. You learn very quickly. At least I learned very quickly.

17:30I have eclectic tastes. I love Indian food. I love Vietnamese food. I love new tastes that are unfamiliar. And then you try to understand how did that taste come about? What had to happen to make chicken with lemongrass taste the way it does? And sometimes these things just sit in your mind. Like I can remember that restaurant as if it were literally yesterday. I actually remember most meals I've had. I think people, that's what we enjoy about doing this, is that food triggers. It's like a piece of music, you know. I can hear a song and remember where I was standing when I heard that piece of music.

18:03And I think food, for many of us, maybe not for many, is a trigger for memory, isn't it? Absolutely. because it's olfactory, right? It's got smell to it. It has taste to it. It has texture to it. It has location, right? You know, having the River Cafe, which I have to say, this is not an advertisement, but I'm just going to say it. We're waiting for you. It's my favorite restaurant in London. You should come now, you know. I was supposed to be in London, but I had a back operation that threw my schedule off. Yeah. So I'll be there in the New York. Yeah, it's a great season. And that's maybe now we should read the recipe because I thought it was really interesting that, you know, when you think about all the seasons, of food.

18:40We love when something goes and something, you know, when the fennel goes and then you have peas or you know, the melons go and you can't bear it, but then you have peaches. But for me as a cook, I really look forward to the autumn. I think the autumn is almost a cook's time when you have the dark pumpkins. In England we have grouse, we have partridge, and now at last, the porcini are really good, and we just yesterday got white truffles, which are amazing. My favorite. So it's a very good season right now. So I was really pleased that you chose a recipe, which I love, which is, I think, from the first book, pasta with tomato and a dried porcini mushroom.

19:19So you start with 75 grams of dried porcini mushrooms. I'm already salivating because I love porcini. Four tablespoons of olive oil, three garlic cloves, peeled and sliced, one tablespoon of fresh thyme leaves, two tablespoons of parsley, finely chopped, one dried chili, crumbled, 800-gram tin of peeled plum tomatoes, drained of their juices, 120 milliliters of double cream. Can there ever be too much double cream? I'm just asking. Is that possible? No, I don't think so. So we could add more to it. 120 grams of parmesan, freshly grated, 250 grams of conchili, pasta, Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and extra virgin olive oil.

20:07So you start by soaking the mushrooms in hot water for 20 minutes. Heat the olive oil in a pan and fry the garlic gently with thyme, parsley, and chili. Add the porcini and cook to combine the flavors. Add the tomatoes. Cook together gently until the tomatoes have thickened. Add the cream, season, then remove from the heat and stir in half of the Parmesan. Cook the pasta in boiling salted water, then drain thoroughly. Add to the sauce with the remaining Parmesan. Stir well. Add more Parmesan and extra virgin olive oil and delight in the taste. You make a lot of pasta. I do. I do. So what are you cooking now?

20:54So last night I made a pasta that I sort of ad-libbed on that we like, which is broccoli rabe and spicy sausage. It's a very simple pasta. What pasta did you use with it? I just use linguine. Yeah. Something that just holds the sauce a little bit. And it's just like super simple. Broccoli rabe gives a little bitter taste, but it's super easy. Do you buy the sausage meat out of the sausage or do you cook the sausage and then crumble it? I take the wrapping off the sausage and cook it that way. So it crumbles up. And I always put a little bit of wine in and, you know, some cheese. Yeah. And was that just for the two of you?

21:36Just for the two of us. Do you entertain? We do. Yeah. If I come to dinner at the Lowry House, what would it be like? Nine times out of ten, it's going to be some form of lamb. We have a great producer of lamb where we live in Canada. I mean, just really epically good lamb. And so we'll either grill it, roast it, cube it, and make shish kebabs. But mostly I like to do a spit-turned wood-fired leg. It's pretty hard to beat. And how many people do you invite? There are five of us with my children. Then when we're up in Canada, Susan's brothers and sisters and cousins are there. So we're usually at the get-go between 12 and 15.

22:17Then if we invite some friends over, we get to 15 or 20. so it can be a big dinner. And are you in the kitchen? It's just Susan and me. Do it all yourself. Yeah.

22:29Did you know the River Cafe has a shop? It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks, linen napkins, kitchenware, tote bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at shoptherivercafe.co.uk.

22:59It may look different, but Native culture is very alive. My name is Nicole Garcia, and on Burn Sage Burn Bridges, we aim to explore that culture. It was a huge honor to become a television writer because it does feel oddly like very traditional. It feels like Bob Dylan going electric, that this is something we've been doing for hundreds of years. You carry with you a sense of purpose and confidence. That's Sierra Teller Ornelas, who with Rutherford Falls became the first Native showrunner in television history. On the podcast Burn Sage, Burn Bridges, we explore her story along with other Native stories, such as the creation of the first Native Comic Con or the importance of reservation basketball.

23:40Every day, Native people are striving to keep traditions alive while navigating the modern world, influencing and bringing our culture into the mainstream. Listen to Burn Sage Burn Bridges on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Stephanie Beatriz. And Melissa Fumero. And this is More Better. We are jumping right in and ready to hear from you. Your thoughts, your questions, your feelings about socks with sandals. And we're ready to share some possibly questionable advice and hot takes. God, that sucks so hard though. I'm so sorry. Can you out petty them?

24:17Can you match their pettiness for funsies? Yeah. We had so much fun last season laughing, crying, talking to some new and old friends. Remember when we were in that scene where you guys were just supposed to hug and I was standing? Oh yeah. And I was like, can I also hug them? I'm like, this has no friends. This time around, we are. Say it, Melissa. Should I? Say it. Getting a little more better. Oh, finally. It's all the dressing room talk you've loved in season one. All the things. Because aren't we all trying to get a little more better? Listen to More Better on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.