Mayor Daniel Lurie

13:50Daniel Lurie:San Francisco is so diverse in its restaurants, isn't it? I mean, it is uniquely so that you can see.

13:56Ruthie:I mean, I'm going to give you a list that you've got to put into your edits or whatnot. I mean, we have some of the best Chinese cuisine going, I think, in the world. this new restaurant called Happy Crane just opened up. I'm taking the list out. I have a list as well.

14:15Daniel Lurie:Tell me.

14:15Ruthie:We got this place, Jewel's Pizza. It's actually, I think, a Tartine alum that just opened this amazing pizza place. We got Kefiko. We got flour and water. All right. This is a good one. You'll like this one. On, I'm Jewish, December 24th, you have to go out to a Chinese restaurant. Typically, I would go to a place, China Live, with the family. I've gone there with my mom and my brother and I went actually just over at New Year's. But we went to a place called Fang. And this woman, Kathy Fang, her dad started House of Nanking, which is a famous place kind of on the edge of Chinatown in North Beach.

14:59Ruthie:And she remembers working at the House of Nanking, I think, when she was seven or eight years old and she just loved it working working like just you know helping out it was a family run and she loved it and kathy told us a story of growing up in and around her father's restaurant and now she's got her own restaurant and her father was there too and it was it was a really

15:23Daniel Lurie:cool family restaurants are great you know and i also think that the atmosphere it's like politics it's it is a people you do it if you love people you know there's just no point even if you're just the chef you know in the kitchen our chefs but the food's got to be good too right of course it does the rigor you have to have it and it becomes that's most important you have to have fruit this food was incredible but the but the place has to be a place where you walk in and go like a city you feel safe yeah like a city you have trust yeah like a city you can have transparency and so i think that i always think it's also very theatrical a restaurant because you know you you You have the dynamic between the people who are eating there, their drama.

16:06Daniel Lurie:You have the drama between the waiter and the people. You have the drama between the chef and the waiter. And, you know, hooray for Alice Walters who said, you know, let's not do this drama behind closed doors. You know, we're going to open up. Is that what you, I love Alice. Alice is inspiration. People always said to Rose and I, how, you know, wow, you had the first, you know, open kitchen where people could see you work. And I said, no, we don't. You know, Alice Walters really was the woman and Wolfgang Puck in California. You know, the two of them really started the idea of having and not every restaurant.

16:40Daniel Lurie:You don't want to go to every restaurant and have an open kitchen. Sometimes it's really nice to just be in a restaurant where you're quiet and it's formal and, you know, it's no noise. But there is a dynamic drama, I think, to having an open kitchen of, again, like the City Hall, you know, come on in.

16:56Ruthie:I mean, a bunch of these restaurants, some have a mix, like Catonia. So Catonia, they have some open, some closed. But you walk into a place like that or you walk into another restaurant, Four Kings. Four Kings. Four Kings. It was ranked, I think, the number two restaurant in the country by the New York Times this past year. Maybe it was new restaurants across the country. Yeah. This place, Frankie Ho, Mike Long, next time you're in town, it's like you're in just some little...

17:36Daniel Lurie:What do you love about it?

17:37Ruthie:You feel like you're at home. You feel like you're in a little neighborhood joint. There's a line that is, you know, there's no reservations. You've got to wait in line. And then they just serve you down home. Chinese, kind of a little LA-influenced Chinese food from their parents and their grandparents. And it's a magical experience. And you can see what's going on in the kitchen.

18:02Daniel Lurie:I've been in restaurants that I've eaten and thought I had a great meal. And then I've been to visit the kitchen and I think, hmm, maybe not. Some should stay closed. But no, that's why I think there is something very reassuring about seeing. It certainly keeps us on our toes, knowing that anybody could come in the kitchen. Also, you can't shout. You can't get that idea that chefs are stressed. They get angry, and they get that way. If you are working in an open kitchen, you have somebody eating near you. There's manners, and there's a way of working, which is very, very nice.

18:45Daniel Lurie:Were your grandparents involved in your early period?

18:49Ruthie:My mom's mom. Her name was Mima, at least to me. She was an incredible influence.

18:55Daniel Lurie:Did you call your grandmother Mima?

18:57Ruthie:Mima, yeah. That's what my children... Call you?

18:59Daniel Lurie:Right. One side of the family, grandchildren, called me Mima. Okay. They called my mother Mima. That's a nice... Yeah, yeah.

19:05Ruthie:She was amazing. she fled Yugoslavia through Italy to upstate New York to Oswego with Eleanor Roosevelt helped a thousand Jews flee and come to come to New York what year would that be you know 43 44 like at a time where America was not having any Jews or immigrants coming in Eleanor Roosevelt really stood up and said, I'm making this happen. And then she made her way down to Maryland, where my mom was born. But she was out here for, I don't know, 30 years.

19:47Daniel Lurie:Did she live near you?

19:48Ruthie:She lived just down on the peninsula, which is about 20 minutes. Was she part of your life? Yes. She's a great woman.

19:56Daniel Lurie:Did she ever cook?

19:57Ruthie:She cooked a lot. Did she? Yes, she did. And maybe that's my mom got it from her. Yeah.

20:04Daniel Lurie:Did she cook food from her youth? Yes, yes.

20:07Ruthie:Oh, my God. It was these meatballs, cevapche cheese, I think is what they were called, cevapche cheese. And like meat, like good, but they were always excellent. And every time I went to her place that we ate that, she actually cooked quite a bit.

20:27Daniel Lurie:Yeah. I would say that quite a lot of the people that I interviewed remember their grandmother's food, sometimes more than their mothers. Yes. Because the grandmother, especially if they came from immigrant communities, bring the food with them. And it's very important to be.

20:41Ruthie:Well, and you go sleep over at her apartment. And I remember she had a comforter that she pulled out of her closet. I slept on her pullout couch. And it was the coziest little thing. And then we'd always have a good meal. I do remember that well.

21:00Daniel Lurie:I think grandmothers do. Well, I think it is just a very different role, and you want to please your grandchild, and you're not in a hurry, and this is a special time. And when you say you left this world of San Francisco and the meals around the table and the conversations and the breakfast, you went to university in?

21:23Ruthie:I went to Duke University in North Carolina.

21:26Daniel Lurie:Was it a culture shock for you?

21:28Ruthie:I mean, it was different, but I had a really good experience there. I spent one summer in Washington, D.C. I interned for Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi. Had a great time.

21:40Daniel Lurie:And then when you left?

21:42Ruthie:I left. I went and worked. So I did a summer interning. Then I worked on Bill Bradley's presidential campaign in Iowa. And I did field organizing. What year was that? It was the 2000. February 2000. But I got there. I graduated. May of 1999 and immediately went to Des Moines, Iowa and was there all summer through the February caucuses, Iowa caucuses.

22:08Daniel Lurie:What did you learn from that? I learned about listening to people.

22:15Ruthie:People want to want to be heard and when you are canvassing and going door-to-door and you're a field organizer, you're not only telling people about your candidate but you're also listening to people about what is going on in their lives and that's the most retail of retail politics is is the Iowa caucuses so then so I well so Iowa and then I moved to New York City I lived there for three and a half four years I remember when you were in New York yeah and worked at the Robin Hood Foundation and that idea of getting uh those who are committed to in that case New York City and improving the lives of everybody around them like that model really resonated for me and I brought I came back home I went to Berkeley for grad school spent two years at the public policy school at UC Berkeley and then with the whole intention of starting Tipping Point which was modeled after Robin Hood and I started that in 2005 with Chris James and Katie Paige and Ronnie Lott and the four of us founded it and I ran it for 15 plus years.

23:23Ruthie:We've raised over 500, now maybe it's closer to 600 million dollars to tackle issues of poverty in the San Francisco Bay Area and got involved in the community that way.

23:33Daniel Lurie:When you were involved with Tipping Point, were you aware and was a concern to you about food poverty? Because there are poverty of education, there's poverty of love, there's poverty of guidance. But we also know that in this country and in the United Kingdom, again, talking about COVID, we found out that the children who didn't have school lunch because they weren't going to school, that was their meal of the day. And we know that in New York, where I grew up, that in the South Bronx and in areas of poverty, there are no food stores. There are no - Food deserts as well. That's what we call them.

24:11Daniel Lurie:Yeah. So what -

24:12Ruthie:We have those issues here in San Francisco. There's no question. We actually had a meeting of all of the food service providers and those that deliver meals to our seniors, a program called Meals on Wheels here in the United States. And they do really good work in San Francisco. We have the food bank. We have a really important satellite organizations that work in culturally competent ways with different communities, making sure they get the food to like right into communities. We we at Tipping Point, we actually during 2008, during the financial crisis, we actually started saying, OK, food is number one.

24:57Ruthie:And what we found food is number one. I mean, it's like housing, food, you know, the most important things. We actually never funded it because what happened in 2008 was we found out that all the private philanthropy, a lot of government, they went actually even filled that void. And so what we found out during that time in 2008 was some of the other softer things like mental health was the first thing to get cut. because people would say, oh, we got to get people food. We got to get people shelter, which is, you know, there's no critique on it. But we at Tipping Point, we're like, okay, where's money not going?

25:39Ruthie:It was always housing, education, employment, and early childhood care. So we focus on really sustainable, durable ways of moving somebody out of poverty. Now, food is essential. We do a lot of funding of food programs here in San Francisco at the government level. And I will tell you something that I'm really proud of our city this past year. When the government shut down in Washington, they stopped funding SNAP, which is our food program here in the United States. It was the first time, I think, since the 1960s that there was no funding going out. We had 112 ,000 San Franciscans that were going to go without food.

26:21Ruthie:we, alongside my colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, which is our city council here, we sprung into action. From the day we said go to the day we got 112 ,000 people, basically, benefits. We sent them cards that would give them access to food or money for food to replace what they were losing from the federal government. We raised$18 million. Nine from city government, nine from philanthropy. That$18 million covered food for the month of November for 112 ,000 San Franciscans. So when people say, well, government can't do this, can't do that. In seven days, we made that happen. And that's because of the people at the board of supervisors.

27:09Ruthie:It was because of some great private philanthropy and it was because our city showed its true values and that is that we look out for our community. We look out for our immigrants. We look out for those that are struggling in a city that we have a lot of work to do in terms of affordability. It is an incredibly expensive city to live in and so I was proud of that moment.

27:34Daniel Lurie:Yeah, you should be. I call you an athlete. and also you have a job which is athletic. You have to train yourself and teach how to eat. Do you think about your efficiency in terms of?

27:46Ruthie:It's funny that you say that. I try to do that intermittent thing. I don't eat until 12 o 'clock.

27:53Daniel Lurie:Okay, let's talk about your day. You wake up this morning. Did you have a breakfast?

27:57Ruthie:I work out, no. Coffee and a Peloton and then I take my son to school every day And then I'm in this office after probably walking the streets, talking to people that are out on the streets, and then had an all-staff meeting. We have an all-staff meeting at 9 a.m. every Tuesday.

28:18Daniel Lurie:How many people come to that?

28:20Ruthie:Well, it's the large agency department head, so about 20 department heads come. We do it once a week. It's something that we put in place when I came into office. I want these department heads around the table, looking each other in the eye, having discussions. at least seeing each other in person once a week because they need to collaborate and communicate and they're doing that well in this meeting helps. So in here, you know, 8.30, 8.45.

28:46Daniel Lurie:So what happens at lunchtime for you? Do you have lunch?

28:49Ruthie:Fernando, who's watching this, helps guide me. We try to be healthy. We try a lot of new spots. So there was a gyro place that we went to. There's a Vietnamese place up in the Tenderloin that I love that I go to. Golden Lotus. Is that Golden Lotus? And I go to Hayes Valley and I go to Suvla. I go to, we got great coffee spots that I go to in Hayes.

29:18Daniel Lurie:And what about the formality of the office? Do you do state dinners or do you do mayoral lunches or do you need to do all that?

29:27Ruthie:No, that's not for me. I mean, I think the most formal thing I do every day is I wear a suit and tie. I think it's important. But I'm out walking the streets. I don't like sitting behind my desk. I like being out walking, talking to people, listening to people.

29:56Daniel Lurie:We've had visits in London. We've had visits now in San Francisco. We've been together in different places. But one of my memories is being with you in Liguria. We were just near Santa Margherita. Theo was there. We swam, we walked, and of course we ate. And when I think of Liguria, we all think of the basil that grows there on the slopes because you have the very hot sun. you have the Mediterranean, you have the heat. And so for your recipe, we thought that you might like to read a recipe from Liguria, from a memory that we spent together for a pasta, which is tagliatelle with lemon, cream, and basil.

30:36Daniel Lurie:So you can just read it straight or you can read it any way you like.

30:40Ruthie:Tagliatelle with lemon, cream, and basil, one and one quarter cups heavy cream, one stick eight tablespoons butter softened this is sounding very healthy already yeah zest and juice of three organic lemons Taya loves lemons so that's good 12 ounces ag tagliatella three tablespoons roughly chopped basil four ounces of parmesan my favorite it it's got to be finely grated and then you have to gently heat the cream and when it's warm ruthie now this is important add butter and lemon juice and zest stir to combine and then remove from the heat i'm really happy that i am telling one of the best chefs in the world this cook the tagliatelle in boiling salted water until al dente drain and stir into the warm cream Seasoning with sea salt and black pepper.

31:41Ruthie:Add half the basil and toss well. And then you serve with the Parmesan and the remainder of the basil sprinkled over. Sounds delicious. Easy.

31:52Daniel Lurie:We'll do that. Next time. Living in Europe, living in France, as I did for six years, what you really see is the emergence and the excitement of cities and with mayors who are really almost a nation state, who are making policies, who are able to facilitate change, who are able to move forward and be a leadership in what the city needs. And that is so exciting.

32:15Ruthie:I think the job of mayor is the best job in politics. I did hear President Obama once say that being mayor is the second hardest job in politics. Next to, I think he was referring to being president of the United States. But I think it's the best job because you get to walk the streets. You actually get to see your policies in action, whether they're working or whether they're not working. You also get a poll every day. You know how people are feeling about you and how they're feeling about the city. And that's why you've got to get out and walk the streets and go to the great restaurants and go to the great art galleries and museums and really kind of soak it in.

33:04Ruthie:And, yeah, we're the ones on the ground. I mean, I talk to mayors across the state and across the country. And, yeah, the action is happening in our cities, and I love it.

33:17Daniel Lurie:Yeah, I think it's been, for me, the last 24 hours has been really inspiring to come to a city that I know about, have so many friends here, have seen the effect you've had on the world, you know, the effect on the city. And I think that leaving here, I'm coming away with something which is, I think, a real test of a city, which is you want to come back really soon. I want to come back. I need you back soon. Yeah, I don't know if you need me. And bring your friends and tell everybody. But we are.

33:49Ruthie:Actually, someone said, Ruthie, you should open a restaurant in San Francisco. Yeah, maybe. Now that I know that we have, we can do that.

33:55Daniel Lurie:Let's go. I will call it Ruthie and Daniel's. How about that? Maybe when I'm out of office, I think that would be a little lower.

34:03Ruthie:Just do Ruthie's. Okay, we'll do that.

34:07Daniel Lurie:If we think of restaurants as places, as we said, of drama, we think of it comparing it to theater, compare it to performance, to family, to a city and a city hall and how we need them. And we started out by saying what they contribute to a city. We also know that food is conversation, food is sustaining hunger, food is a judgment of the way society treats its citizens, and it also is comfort. And so I'd say, Daniel, Mayor Lurie, what would be food you'd go to for comfort?

34:42Ruthie:Burrito. I mean, you didn't even have to. That's where I go. I grew up on them. Gordo's La Taqueria La Vaca Birria is a new favorite of mine but when I the family sorry but we do order out and we order burritos more than anything else and it just it's all right there you take one bite and you get it all and it feels like San Francisco to me, it feels like I know what I'm getting, and it's going to be excellent, and so I'm going burrito. It's my comfort.

35:25Daniel Lurie:I'm leaving tomorrow morning, but the next time I come, can we go and have a burrito?

35:28Ruthie:A hundred percent. I'll take you. It's a date. Let's do it. Ruthie's Table 4 was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton, and Zad Rogers, with Andrew Sang and Bella Cellini. This has been an Atomize production for iHeartMedia.

35:48Daniel Lurie:Ruthie's Table 4 is proud to support Leukemia UK. Their Cartwheel for a Cure campaign raises funds for vital research and more effective and kinder treatments for acute myeloid leukemia. Please donate, and to do so, search Cartwheel for a Cure.

36:13Ruthie:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Thank you.