Judd Apatow

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1:57Comedy and cooking, children and acting, laughing and eating, movies and restaurants. Today we're here in the River Cafe and Judd and I will cover them all. For after all is said and done, life is a cabaret. I agree with that. Eight times. I'm going again. Two more times this weekend. Two. So there'll be, yeah, why not? What's better than that? So I want going to talk to you about cabaret but for the moment you've just come from the pastry kitchen where the recipe you chose pistachio ice cream was being made

2:32i'm bella tubbs i'm the head pastry chef at the river cafe and these are our ice cream machines and they've actually got quite a small drum make like uh roughly two liters of ice cream here is our lovely pistachio base which is essentially plain custard that has had the pistachio paste stirred through it all we do is churn it makes this delightful noise probably i mean for this amount it'll take like four or five minutes like nothing crazy so if you can have a look in the top it you can see it's sort of lightly creasing we know that it's nearly there but um So what I'll do is I'll turn it to churn.

3:14Then this will just go into the freezer until it's frozen fully. In the restaurant, what we do is just before service, we get the ice creams out to temper, like you would do at home, so that you can get a lovely scoop from it. But that only takes like five minutes. But just make sure you're using a cup full of hot water and dipping your scoop in every time so you get a perfect scoop. Thank you very much. Pleasure. Enjoy your podcast. Lovely to meet you too. I hope you have a lovely meal. All right. Very well. What did you think? I'm always impressed by people who know how to cook because as much as I like food, I don't have enough interest in making it.

4:00Yeah. Because I always feel like there's someone who makes it better. Fair enough. So why would I make myself mediocre food? I can go to you and get great food Or I could spend eight hours doing the bad version of what you do well. Would you like to start by reading the recipe for the pistachio ice cream? Okay. This is the pistachio ice cream recipe from the River Cafe. It serves 10 or me alone. One thing I learned during the pandemic is it is possible to eat a pint of ice cream, finish it, and then start another one. I agree. And finish it. Okay. Here's what you need. You need 200 grams of unsalted shelled pistachios, 400 grams of castor sugar, plus an extra 80 grams, 700 milliliters of full fat milk, no oat milk, the real stuff.

4:52Yeah. 300 milliliters double cream and 10 large egg yolks. You know, in every performance of Cabaret, there's a scene where Maude has to crack open an egg, pour it in a cup, and eat it on stage every night. That's acting for you. That is discipline, you know, to be able to do that. It's like that movie with Nick Cage where he, I think it was Vampire's Kiss, and he ate a bug in it, like a cockroach in a scene. That's Maude's equivalent. Yeah, an egg a day is quite a lot. It's very method. Okay, here we go. Roast the pistachios in a dry frying pan over medium heat. Blend roasted pistachios in a food processor with 80 grams of sugar and mix to a fine paste.

5:40Heat the milk and cream to just below boiling. In a bowl, beat together egg yolks and 400 grams of sugar. Add warm milk and cream into the egg and sugar. Return this custard mixture to a thick bottomed pan and cook slowly over heat. This really has to be low heat. Low heat until it reaches 82 degrees. Remove from the heat, stir in the pistachio paste, and then pour through a fine sieve. Yeah, or what do we call it in our country? We call it a strainer. A strainer into a bowl and leave to cool. Cool, then churn in an ice cream machine. You've got to get an ice cream machine. Oh, yeah. Do you have one?

6:19No. You know how dangerous it would be for me to own my own ice cream machine? And then you'd be making pints and pints. So when you are making a movie, okay, you're on the set of 40-Year-Old Virgin, one of my favorites, or Knocked Up, what do you do about food for your crew? On a movie, every day, lunch is basically a buffet. And I have trouble not taking too much from any buffet. Yeah. Like, that's one of my issues is, like, there's, you know, fried chicken there. I'm not going to get, like, one wing. I mean, I'm going to, like, it's hard for me not to take full advantage. So when I make movies, for the most part, I don't, I can't go to where the food is.

7:03Like, there's usually a tent. I have to just have someone tell me what's there and have them bring it back. And because I'll just go to, like, the cheap lemon cake. You know, like I'll have ice cream sundaes. Love it. And then I fall asleep in the afternoon and I can't do my job. Like I get really tired. You say that you like eating because it makes you feel so tough, but you have to go back to work, right? So you are careful. Well, you don't go to the buffet, but then. I mean, I get weak. So usually about like two-thirds through a movie I lose my will, and then by the end I'm just gaining weight and binging.

7:39But for a while I'll try to control myself. Although when we shot The King of Staten Island, we were shooting in Staten Island. We were there for months, and they got good pizza in Staten Island, so it was pretty hard not to slip out for pizza. But if I could lose weight before a shoot starts, then by the end of the shoot, I am overweight, but not insanely overweight. I have to get a lower baseline to start, so I have to pretend I'm like Christian Bale playing a skinny person. I lose weight to begin, and then it falls apart. What are you writing at the moment? I'm trying to write a movie right now to shoot next year, which is a little bit about what's happening in the world of comedy at this moment where everyone doesn't know what they can say.

8:27So I'm trying to write about people not knowing where the line is. Do you know where the line is? Well, for me, the line is never that complicated because I think if your heart's in the right place, people know. and if your point is reasonable and kind, you can get away with all sorts of things. I think people can tell when you're being outrageous with no real point to it. And some people love that, and I think that's fine. I think it's fine for anyone to enjoy anything. It's like music. You might like heavy metal. You might like country music. Everyone picks their flavor. I think it's hard when people feel like they're getting force-fed the flavor they don't want.

9:07and then suddenly you have to say, well, you don't have to listen to that or watch that. But it's definitely a tricky time, so I'm trying to find a way to do it. So this would be a movie about a comedian? Not a comedian, about a writer. And so I just finished a draft of that. Hopefully I'll get to do that next year. One of my favorite movies a long, long time ago was King of Comedy. Yes. Did you like that? Jerry Lewis and Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard. One of my favorite movies. loved it when it came out wasn't a big hit it came out after the attempted assassination of ronald reagan so the whole plot line of kidnapping a celebrity freaked people out a bit and also obsessed fans freak people out at the time but as the decades have passed i think people realize it's one of martin scorsese's best movies i haven't seen it again i have so many times Yeah, I'd like to see it.

10:01In fact, it's one of the movies I watch to pay attention to the cinematography and the shot selection because it's very alive, but it's covered in a way that really works for comedy. So seeing how Scorsese shoots humor is really helpful. So I always watch it. For me, what was interesting about that was the movie was the idea that comedians had to be funny. And, you know, is Steve Martin funny? Is Mel Brooks funny? is I think when I did my talk about Mel Brooks, I said something that people, we always think about the man who makes us laugh. But I also think about the man who talks about Anne Bancroft and what happened when she died.

10:42Is the pressure as someone who writes about funniness or humor to be funny? Do you feel that? Yeah. Do people expect you to be funny? I mean, it is a weird pressure to try to be funny in your work all day. It's kind of an unnatural state. Most people don't try to be funny that often. So imagine sitting in an office and trying to be funny for 10 straight hours. I mean, you're kind of a weird person to just be in that gear all the time and looking for it all the time. So it does get a little exhausting to be in that headspace, looking at life through that lens of what's weird about this, what's funny about this.

11:18The good part about it is that when you're in comedy, when bad things happen, you don't go, oh, no, a bad thing happened. You go, oh, this would be a great story. And so sometimes when things go really bad, like I threw out the first pitch at a Mets baseball game. And I thought, well, if it goes bad, it's a good story. And if it goes good, it's just good. And so there is a way of looking at life. And how did it go, the first pitch? It was in the middle. It wasn't bad enough to be a good story. And it wasn't good enough to not be a triumph. It was just like. That's a big deal. That's a big deal getting to throw that.

11:51I mean, again, for the listeners who may live in some other country, where was it? It was at Citi Field in New York, and it was the Mets versus the Yankees, so it was sold out. There were 52 ,000 people there. Yeah. And it was terrifying. And I always joke that the worst part was when they announced me throwing out the first pitch, I didn't really get more than a very small smattering of applause. And I thought, I think I'm more famous than this. I mean, I'm from New York. Aren't I a beloved son of New York? And I realized, like, no one cares about me. They just wanted the game to start. It was like a local politician was doing it.

12:28Yeah, maybe they don't do it for anyone. Absolutely. Did you grow up in New York? We lived on Long Island. Where? Syosset, Woodbury area of Long Island. A lot of bagels being eaten there. Yeah, I think. It's a big bagel town. At midnight, you'd go to the bagel place while they were cooking them and get them right out of the oven. There's nothing like a bagel. That's also West Coast. Isn't as good, is it? New Yorkers always say it's, some people have said it's the water that makes it good. I hear that. Have you heard that theory that they say the reason you can't have a good bagel outside of New York is the water in New York?

13:00Is that true? You understand how the bread works? I have no idea. Because also I think that maybe, but I've had bagels. It's really hard to insult a country's bagels, I have to say. When someone has a good bagel, you're in trouble. But we know. But they took me once to the East End to, what's that street, do you know? Brick Lane. Brick Lane, was it Brick Lane? Brick Lane Bagels. And they're bagels, and the British are really, really proud of them. So I have got a podcast that I would like to go on and on, so I won't say anything bad. But when you have a New York bagel, it makes all the difference.

13:30Sure. I think that. But I don't know about L.A. bagels. How are they? They're pretty much the same. There's some people who seem to have cracked the code. I don't know if they're bringing some water from New York. Maybe the whole water thing is a myth. Maybe the whole thing is a myth. Right. So you grew up in Long Island eating bagels and smelling bagels. And what was the food like in your house? Not impressive. I can't say my late mother was a master chef. We had a very small rotation of chicken, chicken cutlet, salmon, sometimes like a pot roast. Our vegetable was usually peas and corn. I don't think broccoli got cooked in my house.

14:10I think I refused to eat a salad until mid-20s. Yeah, maybe you didn't know. We didn't grow up on salads. There wasn't a lot of salads, a lot of Chinese food happening. There was going out for it or eating it at home. Going out, a fair amount of McDonald's happening. But then my parents opened a restaurant. Oh, yeah. So just going back one step. Your mother would cook the pot roast or the chicken. Did she work? Well, they owned a restaurant. Oh, when she was doing the restaurant, you would come home and have supper. How many in the family? There was five. Five of us. Three children. Mm-hmm. And at some point, I think my mom made all the cakes for the restaurant.

14:46She started cooking the desserts for it, and I was a dishwasher. What was the restaurant? It was called Raisins. Okay. And it was like, I don't know what you would call it, American Continental. It was like steak, lobster, chicken, Parmesan. It seemed like some Italians, some hamburgers. And they'd bring in a big bag of mussels, give me a brush. I'd have to clean the mussels and pull the hair out of the mussels. Yeah, that's how you have to take all that out. Oh, what a nightmare. No one's paid enough money to rip hairs off a mussel. I have nightmares about someone going, can you do the mussels today?

15:20Oh, no, go check it. We could instead of pistachio ice cream, we could. Well, we don't do mussels, actually. I don't mind. Because I don't like mussels that much. I like clams, but I'm not a big mussel fan. I'm not. I didn't mind peeling the potatoes. They'd give me a 50-pound bag of potatoes. I'm happy to peel them. Okay. Cut them into French fries myself. I got no issue with that. So let's go back to raisins. Your father, he wasn't a chef, so they just did it as a business. As a business. So before that, he was in jazz. He was working in the record business. Well, my grandfather was a jazz producer who produced Charlie Parker and the first Janis Joplin record.

15:52His name was Bobby Shad. What was the first Janis Joplin record? It was called Big Brother and the Holding Company, which was her first album and her first band. That was my generation. Yeah. And I can remember the cover of the Big Brother. Yeah. Hold on. Take a little piece of my heart, right? That's right. That was on that record. And your dad produced that? My grandfather did. I mean, your grandfather. It had that song, Down On Me. It was a song of hers. And so my father worked for him when I was a kid for a while. And they had some friends that owned a tennis equipment store. And then they all went into business with this restaurant.

16:29In your local town. My local town. I remember well. I was getting$4 an hour. I was so excited. How old were you? I started working there at 15. Yeah. And then I became the salad man. Oh, I see. So you were actually right in there. And then my friend Ron Garner started, he was on the grill making the steaks and the burgers. How old was he? He was probably 17. And then at the end of the night, we'd steal a lobster and head home. Wow. But then you'd go to school the next day, I hope. Yes, we went to school. But we loved making money, is the truth. To be 16, 17 and have a little pocket money was fun.

17:05And we put in a lot of hours. It's like we really worked there three to five nights a week. Really? So you could go to school, come home, eat, do your homework, and then go to the restaurant or not do your homework maybe? Sometimes no homework, yeah. And did they do that because it was hard to get staff or was it that they wanted you there or what was the incentive of having your kid? Just kept me out of the house. Yeah, and they were out of the house. Your mom was, what did she do there? Keep me out of trouble. What did she do there? My mom. Yeah, did she cook in the kitchen? No, just at some point she started doing the cakes.

17:40I don't know if anyone wanted her to do the cakes. It's also the key. Was it a good rep? Maybe she was forcing the cakes on everyone. I'm not saying she was good at it. I'm just saying she did it. Well, the question is, did the restaurant carry on? Did it have a good business? It lasted a little while, and then they sold it to someone. Those people couldn't pay the money that they owed, and then they got it back, and then they owned it for a few more years, and then they sold it. But it was a really fun part of our childhood. And rumor has it Billy Joel ate there once. I know you have a lot of celebrities here and all the Dr.

18:11Dre's eating here. But we had one Billy Joel sighting in our whole history of the restaurant. Have you ever seen him? Do you know? I have met Billy Joel a few times. And did you say, did you ever come to my car? I should have said that. You should have asked. I may have asked. You might say that was the best cake I've ever had. That's a big thing on Long Island is Billy Joel. You know, you have that song, Scenes from an Italian restaurant. and so every Italian restaurant claimed it was written about their place. Yeah, I see. But not yours because yours wasn't Italian. It wasn't Italian. Yeah. We thought that our local pizzeria, Cristiano's, was what he was writing about.

18:54Did 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.

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20:49Do you ever sit down for dinner with your parents around the table? Yes, yes. Before the restaurant or during the restaurant? Well, my parents got divorced when I was in middle school. And then I would do a fair amount of cooking for myself. Like I was very excited to learn how to use a wok. Okay. That was a big thing, to cut up steak and broccoli and just pour an enormous amount of Kikuman's soy sauce. And then I thought that was cooking. It was a three-ingredient meal. Yeah. How did you come upon that? I wonder. But I think there was a period when everybody did walks, but for a teenage kid to do that.

21:22We thought that was fun. And also, I remember on my kitchen island at home as a kid, it was a grill on the kitchen island. Oh. So I used to make hamburgers. And I really felt like a chef, just like making my hamburgers every day. And then my comfort food, I would come home. All my friends played sports, and I didn't. So I would come home by myself, and I'd watch talk shows. and I would cook a grilled cheese sandwich. I would get vanilla and chocolate Entenmann's cake and I would eat a bite of grilled cheese, bite of the cake, little milk, cheese, cake, milk. And I would do that for years. You didn't understand the concept of dessert.

22:06I enjoyed the interaction between the grilled cheese and the chocolate cake. And so we did a show called Freaks and Geeks. Yes. And there's a sequence of that. I was going to ask about this. Bill was one of my favorite characters from that show. Yes. So it's true that that is based on your upbringing. That was based on me sitting home watching comedians, cooking myself grilled cheese. And then much later in life, people were like, that's really bad for you to eat. Because there was so much butter involved. So much, or margarine, whatever I was using. In the grilled cheese sandwich or in the cake?

22:37In the grilled cheese. What was your recipe? How did you make a grilled cheese sandwich? It was not fancy. It was Wonder Bread. It was pure Wonder Bread, Fleischmann's margarine, American cheese. American cheese, yeah. But like Kraft American cheese. Yeah, Kraft already sliced that very thin. Even right now, I'm like, is that the best food in the world? Like, I don't know if any food tops it. I'm going to eat at your restaurant today. I don't know. You could try and make your grilled cheese sandwich, but it's challenging finding the Kraft cheese in the Wonder Bread. Does Wonder Bread still exist?

23:06It does still exist. It's amazing that they call it. Do you know what it is? We used to take a package of Wonder Bread, which was sliced white bread, and if you put your weight and squeezed it, it would squeeze into something that was about a foot tall, 12 inches tall, would go into about half an inch because it was all air. It was just air. You could just kind of squeeze it, right? Only my wife pointed out when I met her in my mid to late 20s that everything I ate was unhealthy and disgusting. She also pointed that out. Oh, okay. Like, why are you eating Wonder Bread? You know, there's like good bread out there.

23:42There's good cheese out there. There's good butter out there. But on my first date with Leslie, I made her chicken parmesan and spaghetti with ragu sauce and Wonder Bread with margarine. And? She still married you. Yeah, there you go. The fact that there was a second date is incredible after that meal. She always talks about the madness of that meal. It's funny because I talked to Bob Iger, and he can remember exactly what he cooked. Thank you for the first date with his wife, Willow. I do think about maybe doing a guide to emotional eating. So what do you eat or cook when you're depressed, when you want to seduce somebody, what do you eat or cook when you...

24:26Because eating is not just hunger, it's emotion, isn't it? Yeah. There's a Deepak Chopra book. I think it's called What's Eating You or Why Are You Eating? It's about emotional eating because way too much of my eating is reward eating or sedating myself because I love to be stuffed. I love to be stuffed so all the blood goes to my stomach and I'm half conscious. I enjoy that. What do you do about that just that makes you sort of want to like that? It's like being stoned, but on eight pieces of pizza. What's better than that? But why are you so thin? Well, I'm not that thin. I'm riding 200 right now.

25:09200 is my line. If I go above 200, I know we're in trouble. I should be at like 188. That's pretty good to me. But were you ever overweight? Like really overweight? I think the worst I got, I almost got to 210, the early pandemic era. And then I started walking several hours every day. and then I went vegetarian for a couple of years. Do you think that? It helped a bit because I think I eat bad things with the meat. It's not just the meat. It's what you put on it. Or shame eating, a lot of shame eating. When I was a kid, we used to hide things. So my parents would buy a box of yodels or ding-dongs or something like that.

25:47And as soon as they brought it home, I would hide like half the box around the house. So there was a lot of secretive eating happening. But your mother noticed that. She was busy eating an entire box of Chipwich ice cream sandwiches alone. Interesting, yeah. When you then started, you went out to USC, didn't you? And so what was the food like there? Was that different from what you had? Well, I had no money, so I got a job making burritos in the cafeteria. Of USC. That's how I paid for my beer. Yeah. And when I look back at what I ate, it's amazing I'm alive. Why? Because I think we just went and had Tommy's cheeseburgers at night.