How Food Shapes Our Work… Gayle King, Mark Ronson, Graham Norton, Emerald Fennell, and Patrick Radden Keefe.

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Imagine getting into one of the best restaurants in town tonight. You didn't have to plan it. You didn't have to wait for a reservation. You just walked in. After dinner, you make your way into a lively comedy club. The jokes are funny, like genuinely funny. Feels like a pretty great night out. It is. It's a carnival cruise. Time to take another look. Carnival is calling. Ships Registry, the Bahamas and Panama.

0:37Whether in film, music, books, or television, food can be a source of inspiration and integral to the way we work. In this special compilation episode of Ruthie's Table 4, we're talking about the shared ingredients of what we do with Gayle King, Mark Bronson, Graham Morton, Emerald Fennel and Patrick Braden-Keefe I still really love what I get to do still of course you do still I just thought about doing a new restaurant this summer and I thought yeah and everything I heard the restaurant business is very difficult every job is hard and I you know being a restaurant person or being a journalist some jobs are harder than others Ruthie not really well maybe they are yeah I think the way you work the image of a restaurant that old fashioned male image of the angry chef.

1:26And they're screaming. The bully, and they're screaming, and they have to get the food out. I think back in the day, people, like in the newsrooms, you had people throwing typewriters and screaming and hollering. And in kitchens, you had people burning people's hands. On purpose? And they would punish chefs by just getting the thing hot. I have a chef that said she was taking soufflés out of an oven here in London. And I won't say who it was, but the owner went over to her, and he said that if those souffles don't rise, this frying pan will be on your head. He was threatening to hit her over the head with a frying pan and that's against the law.

2:03That's what I think is so great that women today don't take the stuff. They don't take it anymore. Are there more women that you work with now than before? Yep, yep. It's still not equal, but yes, there are definitely more women. And I think women are lasting longer too. You know, it used to be 35, 40, 50, forget it. You know, because men can age. They can get wrinkles. They can get fat tummies. They can go bald. And they're just distinguished. What happens to women, it's like, God, she looks old. And I just think that that's changing. I think that that's changing. Tell me about space because we have to go up to dinner soon.

2:44Tell me about the... It was terrifying. Tell me, tell me. You know, because, Ruthie, I am not a brave person. I'm a very nervous flyer. I don't get on a roller coaster. But there was something, I'd said in January, I'm going to open myself up to new adventures. I was referring to dating. But I said, I'm going to open myself up to new adventures. You found yourself on a frigging rocket. And I thought there's something about stepping out of your comfort zone. And being part of the first all-female crew was attractive to me, I have to say. I just felt that I'm going to lean into it. I'm going to as afraid as I am and I was very afraid I'm going to lean into it I called Tyler Perry he did a zoom prayer I called TD Jakes I talked to my kitchen cabinet which is my favorite daughter Kirby favorite son Will and Oprah of course and if any of the three of them had said I don't think you should do it I wouldn't have done it if any one of them that they all said we think you should do it if you want to do it you should do it and so we go up it's very terrifying Can I ask you what you ate?

3:48I didn't eat anything. I wanted my bladder to be empty. I wanted nothing, just in case. But we went up, and then when we're coming down, we had said to Katy Perry, are you going to sing Roar? Are you going to sing Fireworks? She goes, shut the bleep up. I'm not going to sing a song, and if I was, I'm not going to sing any of my own frigging songs. When we came back down, I could feel myself getting really, really lightheaded, and I thought, oh, my God, please don't let me pass out. please because that's how scared I became I thought I'm about to pass out yeah and the image I didn't want was everybody comes off the capsule and they can you're in a stretcher but as we broke through and we came back down all of a sudden Katie starts singing I see dreams what a wonderful world so we're in the capsule and you just hear that Katy Perry voice in a a cappella singing I see dream that gave us all goosebumps we were all like oh my god it it was just so special so I'm very proud of myself because I'm as I said I'm not brave but that I did it and that we came back I came back in one piece didn't use a diaper and I was fine when did the word rave start rave as opposed to a nightclub what distinguished it was usually it It was in a disused or an illegal venue because it was a place for underground parties to happen.

5:10So the early raves, obviously, all the rave culture came out of England and a little bit before my time, probably the late 80s. And then I was in New York and the early raves, or at least New York trying to copy what was going on in London and Manchester, all happened in the early 90s. But it was fueled by this thing of like kids wanted to go out and dance en masse thousand kids take ecstasy shore and do all this stuff and and in these places and they weren't allowed to so they found you know like disused warehouses and in the middle of a field and all this kind of stuff so as much as I would love to believe that our Friday night was a rave I would say it was a little like we call it low key rave low key rave but it was amazing because it was no no no I want a high key rave no no no no As far as I'm concerned, at my age, that was a high key rave.

6:04And it was so nice to see I was in the middle of playing, like, whatever, Dre and Snoop or something, and I just looked to my right and you were there. That was a high point of my life. It's funny, in what you're saying in the intro, I think about you and being a chef and running the restaurant and me being a DJ. Like, I have a job to do. I am fully concentrated on what I'm doing, but I do have these, like, 20 seconds in between where I can, like, go. and you're looking out at this room with all your friends in it and then a lot of strangers, but it's kind of, I imagine, a little similar. It is.

6:38I think that I go in and with cooking, you really need to see every – I stand at the pass. We have an open kitchen. I can't imagine being underground and not seeing the reactions of people who are eating, for good or for bad. Sometimes you can go to somebody looking, uh-uh, or you can see them sharing or they'll come up and say, how did you make that? There's something that you said before that just stuck out. It's like you can just remember the face of that one person. I don't know if it's like this for you, just the one person who's not enjoying it. You could have 150 people enjoying having the best night ever, but that one person who's just like putting the food in the napkin or in my case just standing there with their arms crossed, not dancing.

7:19And I realized because in the 90s when I came up as a DJ in New York City, we hung out a lot with stand-up comedians. and this was a time when Dave Chappelle and a lot of people were on the way up. And I remember speaking to my stand-up comedian friends and realizing how much we had in common because they two would just have a great night in a club but would only remember just the one person's screw face there. And you'd go to sleep with this person's face imprinted in your brain. I don't know if that's like that for you. No, I feel that. I used to come back and after a night Richard would say, how was it?

7:53And I'd go, I think maybe I'll give up. I just think maybe this job isn't for me. And it just felt, you know, either as you say, there's the person who just kind of shook their head or they sent their food back or whatever. And then you have the other night where you're just flying.

8:17Graham Norton:One of the things that makes the chat show on TV easier is that I'm not interviewing people one-on-one. Yeah, interesting. Because I think then this is everything. You know, it's all you. It's all me. And if one of us just drops the ball, then kind of, ooh. Whereas on the talk show, I've got other people. So, you know, if it is like getting blood out of a stone, I'll just go to the next stone and see what I can get out of them. And that, I think, helps. And also I think the other thing that helps is because they're not just talking to me. You know, I think a lot of those big stars are like, who's this guy?

9:05Graham Norton:Well, they don't. They know exactly who you are. But I think if you're sat next to Dame Helen Mirren, you don't want to be a dick. So you will tell your interesting story, but for her, not for me. But I don't care why they're telling it so long as they're telling it. I have a friend whose mother said that within 30 or 45 seconds of somebody coming into the house, no matter if somebody's to fix a dishwasher, the princess of Greece or a relative who just arrived, they should have a drink in their hand because it means you're stopping whatever you're doing and focusing on them. And I think it's a good, you know, that kind of – and you give people – you have – you give people something, don't you?

9:49We offer them a drink. And I think that's kind of, again, offering something to somebody.

9:54Graham Norton:I just think it, yes, I think it signals. Yeah. It signals to the audience that we think we might be going to have a nice time. Yeah. Did that take an effort on your, did you have to convince anybody to give people something to drink first? No, because we started, I mean, I started doing talk shows back in 1998. And so, you know, people could drink, people didn't. And we were on Channel 4. Can anybody ever smoke? Did people smoke? You were never allowed to smoke. Okay. But we have had people try. What? Tell me the story. Oh, like Mickey Rourke, I remember. Oh, yeah. Like the minute he thought the camera wasn't on him, he'd be like.

10:31Graham Norton:Yeah. I'm like, no, people can see you. Yeah. It was like a child doing that. The teacher can't see me. Yeah. He's been the only one. We've had a couple of sneaky vapes. Yeah. Which I kind of pretend I didn't see. but you know clearly you do see um but uh yeah smoking yeah you were never allowed to do i do love looking at the old do you ever watch on youtube the old clips of dick cavett i love dick cavett he was a great one so dick cavett has these uh shows that they're all out they're all online and you know the guests are wearing you know the women are wearing gloves and hats and they're smoking they've got a cocktail i just love it i went on the jimmy fallon show I heard I was in New York I got there and there was a kind of team around me and then I sat in the green room and the producer came and he sat down with me and we did a kind of mock questions that Jimmy might ask and again I was quite tense then Jimmy came in and then suddenly it was fine because he kind of came in and he gave me this great hug and he went Ruthie I'm so lucky to have you and boy oh boy we can have a great time and then I got out there and I was fine oh good I was so fine It was like the best five minutes I've had.

11:49And I think it was, for me, it was that preparation. That's what I was going to ask you. Can you tell the guests who've prepared or do they not prepare? Or do you prepare? How do you prepare?

11:59Graham Norton:It's really interesting for me to hear that, what you're talking about. Because I forget that being a guest isn't easy. It isn't. Because I'm there every week. Yeah. And so I just, you know, rock up. And so if I know that a guest is nervous or if a guest asks to see me, then I'll go meet them before the show. And, you know, just or if a guest, often if it's a guest that's never been on before, I'll go and see them before the show. But usually I just meet them backstage and on we go. And sometimes I'll be sitting in my chair and I'll look across and there might be a young actor. And you just say, oh, oh, you're terrified.

12:40Graham Norton:and I'm so, I feel terrible. Because, you know, it's like, oh no. Yeah. And you just want to stop the show and go. That's so sweet, Grant. That's so sweet of you. Well, it is. Now it's really nice that you say that. What I try to do is then ask them some things just so that they speak. Yeah, yeah. You know, so, because I think once you speak and the world doesn't end and, oh, actually that's okay. That's okay. I could do that. Yeah. Yeah. Then it's fine. Then we have the guests who, and they are genuine, but they like the show, but they're terrible guests. And you can see them and go, this show is normally better than this.

13:19Graham Norton:And I'm thinking, yeah, because you're on it. Yeah. I think that the other thing that is interesting for me in the house, when I have people over or we're sitting around, I find that the couch, almost architecturally or design-wise, the hardest place to converse because you're kind of side by side and you're looking at each other, but you're not able to have eye contact. But they have eye contact with you. They've eye contact with me and eye contact with the audience. And also, I think really our couch is designed not to be comfortable. Oh, I see. So people have to sit up. They can't just kind of nod off what's going on.

14:02Graham Norton:I think that's the death of performance, is if people are too comfortable. Why Wuthering Heights? Because I love it. I think it just connects with you. It connects with the people who love Wuthering Heights and particularly love Emily Bronte. Yeah. It's difficult. Yeah. It's difficult material in every way. not just the kind of content and not just its sort of refusal to take a moral position and not just the fact that it's troubling but you know just the kind of her writing is very complicated dense and beautiful and poetic it's she really requires active reading you need to be dedicated and persistent and you need to be kind of obsessive and fanatical I think to like her work because, and that's, I think that's why I love it so much is that there have been so many adaptations, I think, of Wuthering Heights and so many of them.

15:07Do you have a favourite? It's so beautiful. I love Andrea Arnold's, I love Andrea Arnold's film. Yeah, I do, yeah. It's so beautiful, it's so powerful and I love the Laurence Olivier version, of course. But they're all really good because they're all different because there's so much to say. I love Balthus's illustration. and I love Kate Bush's songs and I love the kind of like tertiary material around it too because she sort of inspires people to do interesting things because the book's so slippery. I knew I wanted to make it one day if I dared because it is an undertaking. Without giving a spoiler, is there a food scene?

15:49Oh, there are so many food scenes. I'm obsessed with food. Well, you have a movie that has the word salt in it, so there you go. Yes, yes. And eggs. There are eggs in this new film. There are eggs. There's jelly. But also, that's the thing about the Victorian that I'm kind of obsessed with. Because this movie, it's set in the kind of late 18th century. But the food then was like everything. There's a kind of perversion of taking the natural and preserving it. So everything was in aspic. Everything was pickled. Everything looked alive but was dead. Really? So all the food is kind of designed to be, you know, so we've got sort of crayfish fighting.

16:23It's taxidermy. It's flower pressing. it's you know it was about containing the natural it was about being frightened of the the world actually in the natural world and what that meant and so that's such an important part of this movie too it's about what happens when you kind of constrain nature and whether it's like a corset or it's putting a fish in jelly it's the same thing isn't it the same instinct because we don't do that now we don't want our food to look like the thing that we're eating it's sinister did you have cooks who who researched the food and made the food and yes whole teams a whole department and the food was just like there's also a scene where margo sticks her finger in a fish in a jelly inside the fish's mouth and in order to get that shot the consistency of the jelly the clarity of the jelly the type of fish we had fake fish with lipstick we had fish with teeth we had you know the number of different prototypes because you know and but that's the fun of it yeah and like that and everyone's just so thrilled yeah they're not just making like bangers and mash or whatever it normally is you know so we just have oh god it's just it's bliss i was thinking that you and i actually work both in very collaborative ways totally it has to be you need to be um a benign dictator so you can't be so inflexible that it cracks that something breaks you need to be able to bend but always be steady and i think that's the most fun way of doing things and all of the people that i work with are like that you know if somebody comes to you with an idea rather than be like no yeah it's it's a kind of yes and yeah And I think the and could also be, it's a sort of substitute for a but.

18:11Sure, sure. Because when you're in charge, you always want to be like, but, but, but. You're trying to kind of preserve your little precious thing that you sort of thought of, but actually you've got to yes and. Because otherwise it never goes anywhere and it stagnates and it just is a kind of little fossil that you've preserved. It's interesting, the idea of these kind of parallels between writing and cooking. It's funny because I often when I talk with, I mean, this gets a little bit kind of technical and into the craft a bit, but when I talk to writers and journalists about how you assemble a book or an article or how I do, I often use a kind of a culinary metaphor, which is that I never sit down to write with a blank page.

19:02because I go out into the world, I try and stay curious. I always start conversations with strangers. It's a habit of mine, but a good one, I think, because you never know where an interesting story is going to come from. And then I'll slowly start kind of building out the story as I go, and I'm outlining as I go. So as I'm out meeting with people, interviewing them, reading through archives, trying to get hold of documents, I'm always thinking what's the story that I'm telling here what's the beginning the middle and end what are the what are the kind of big moments along the way and I have this outline that slowly populates and the the culinary metaphor is coming but when I sit down to actually write it's usually close to the end and I have this roadmap in front of me where I've actually arranged everything I just haven't written it yet I've just sort of I've plugged in all of these in in raw form all the little bits and everything's roughly where I want it to be.

20:02But I say it's like my mise en place. You know, that when I'm writing, I want the book to come together, the piece to come together for The New Yorker with a kind of velocity. I want the sort of creative act itself to just flow through me as quickly as possible, which means I can't have a situation where I get to a certain section and then suddenly I'm thinking, oh god there's that one great quote and which notebook is it in and i go off and i'm trying to find it everything needs to be sort of to hand so i've had to have done all the prep beforehand in the way that you do here you know where you can just it's all right there and at the moment when you need it it's it's it's it's in your hand and um i really think of it that way in terms of the the kind of the assembly of a book the way uh you would assemble a dish and and what a nightmare it can be if there's some step that you've forgotten in your prep and everything else is there and it completely takes you out of the flow and you have to kind of hit pause on the real fun of the thing which is the alchemy of um you know of producing yeah something beautiful well the rigor of of being prepared you almost can relax while you're yeah making it yeah well and also leave yourself open to anything yeah yeah to what to well to inspiration i mean i don't it's not that I guess it's interesting because there's an aspect of both activities that is mechanical.

21:30But then there's another side of it that's just kind of pure creative inspiration. And in a kind of strange way, I think you need to do the mechanical stuff in order to put yourself into a position where inspiration can... Yeah.

21:56Imagine getting into one of the best restaurants in town tonight. You didn't have to plan it. You didn't have to wait for a reservation. You just walked in. After dinner, you make your way into a lively comedy club. The jokes are funny. Like, genuinely funny. Feels like a pretty great night out. It is. It's a carnival cruise. Time to take another look. Carnival is calling Ships Registry, the Bahamas and Panama Wait, this is a soda? Yeah And it has protein? 10 grams No sugar? Zero And it actually tastes good? It's Sky Pop Sky Pop Protein Soda delivers the refreshing taste you want from a real soda Crisp and delicious with 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and just 45 calories So you're not choosing between great taste and real benefits You're getting both in every sip.

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22:56Graham Norton:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.