Nick Allott

24:57and the third was a very, very beautiful girl who went to America and became a big star called Fanola Hughes. And they were the only three who rigorously worked out, they were the only three who did not miss a performance. It's a real, real responsibility. But going back to Joe Allen's and afterwards, and of course Jeremy then went on and, you know, as we all started to do a bit better. So you would go there every time. Literally every night. What would be your day? I would, well, until I really settled into London, because in the provinces you tend to do everything and you're responsible for everything.

25:33I would never do less than a 12 or 14 hour day in the provinces. So I started to do this in London until people said, look, this is crazy. You need to actually start coming in a bit later. So I had a nice little flat in Kensington and I'd walk in and my day would be talking to the theatre staff, getting to know, you know, looking at the theatre bookings. This was the early days of theatre bookings where everything was manual. You know, we didn't take credit cards. We didn't do phone bookings. It was all checks or cash. And, you know, you talk to the box office queues for these big hits. You know, snake around the block for hours people would queue.

26:11It was an extraordinary time. And we were learning on our feet then. And then, of course, there was a lot of corruption in ticket selling because ticket touts would buy tickets and resell them at huge prices and double sell. So you'd have the very difficult task every night of actually facing up to people and going, look, I'm terribly sorry, but your tickets are either forgeries or they've been double booked. You know, and this is for a show that they may have waited a year to see. But, I mean, that time was incredible because, you know, I was a boy from the provinces nearly in the army. and every single person I'd ever wanted to meet in my life was coming through Cats, whether it be the entire whole family.

26:47I mean, I watched Charles and Diana dancing around my office just after they were married, you know, and watching her drop into this perfect split. He said, you know, how do these dancers do that? She said, let me show you, darling. Literally dropped into a perfect split. But the thing about the restaurants and the theatre, the food theatre, is that they're both, I think, extremely collaborative jobs. so if you don't chop the parcel you can't make the sauce and if you don't probably paint the set you can't put on the play if you don't remember your lines your fellow actors have a problem do you think there is a collaborative similarity?

27:23No I think there's a very, very, it's absolutely right theatre is an enormously collaborative venture and the great thing is you go and see a big musical let's say the Theatre Alderay Lane when we did Miss Saigon there were 200 people involved in getting that show on whether it be the lady selling the ice creams, the backstage usher, the person pulling the ropes, the actors, the lighting technicians, the sound technicians, and then going all the way back to the creators of the show, whether it be the authors. And in musicals it's even more so because you have an added layer of responsibility. You have orchestrators, you have members of the band, you have choreographers, you have assistant choreographers, you have armies of people who look after it, all of whom are working to that specific moment, which is curtain up at 7.30.

28:08Yeah, curtain up at 7.30. We have a curtain up at 7.30. Exactly the same thing. And if the floor isn't, you know, hoovered and, as I said, the chef's aprons are clean. And do you get into a huddle beforehand? Yeah, we get into the huddle and we go through. And then the same, and then nobody eats before. No. You just don't really want to eat if you're about to cook, you have a drink. But then did you do work in restaurants? Would it always be kind of at the end of the meal you'd just go and relax? Or would you meet with Cameron or your other colleagues? and do... It was very, yeah, you were always, you were sort of always on the job, as you know.

28:41I mean, theatre is full of gossip and exchanging information and stuff. And, you know, in the days before social media, happy days before social media, that's how you got your information. And you walk into someone like Joe Allen's and there'd be, you know, Wayne Sleep on a table over there and there'd be Trevor Nunn with the Royal Shakespeare Company and there'd be someone from the National Theatre. And there would be, as always, Princess Margaret in the corner. and so you'd move from the table hopping that went on it was sort of became became rather a joke and Jeremy had that wonderful pianist who'd sit there and and you know you would suddenly notice seamlessly as you walked in you walked in down those steps into that famous cellar and he'd see you coming and very suddenly you realize he's playing something from Cats or Les Mis or one of those tunes that that you did so yes I mean restaurants um were always the good button what What about in other cities when you were on Broadway?

29:32Would you go to Sardis? I grew up thinking that the theatre district was Sardis, wasn't it? Theatre district was, and that's where you traditionally had your first night parties. So our first show that I opened over there was Cats, and we had a massive first night party in, I can't even remember the hotel, but I always remember they had police horses in the foyer of the theatre, and they had trucks outside with ice full of champagne, and everyone who came out, it was the most extraordinary thing. We then did Oliver on a slightly smaller scale and went to Sardi's and had a traditional Broadway opening at Sardi's.

30:07And I took the director across the room to meet our producer, a wonderful man called James Needlando, recently died. And I said, come on, we should go and chat to Jimmy, our producer. And as we got there, an aide of Jimmy's came over, leaned over and said, the New York Times is out. It's a lot of shit. Yeah. That's like... Everyone got up and left. apart from the Brits. We were all sitting there going, what? What just happened? What just happened? And indeed, the New York Times was out, and it was a terrible review. I was just about to say, you must have known it was going to be a hit. Well, the audiences were hysterical.

30:44But at that time, the New York Times had that power. And they could close the show. Close the show, and they did. We battled on, we spent money on television, and four weeks later, we were gone. Somebody else told me that story about if you were at a party, the after party of a play waiting for the review, that everybody would just go. It was just, you'd just leave. It was very, very structured. It was so grim, yeah. Yeah, because the papers would hit the streets about half past 11 midnight. You might, might, might get a tip off if the critic was friends with the publicist. So occasionally, you know, they'd whisper in Cameron's ear, Les Mis is going to be okay.

31:20Yeah. Nowadays, you don't have that kind of romantic. The first night is more about social media and TV and stuff, and the critics have all been in the week before. They don't come on the first night anymore. And I think, to be honest, that's a reflection of the fact their role is not as important as it once was. You know, I fear for theatre criticism just like I fear for food criticism. You see the great restaurant critics are sort of slipping away. Well, I'm talking about a restaurant critic. Talking about a restaurant critic. Talk about the restaurant critic. When we had the dinner at the River Cafe to celebrate Adrian Gill, to launch the bursary, tell us about it.

32:00It was the Sunday Times Prize for an aspiring food writer. And they could write about food or a restaurant they'd had. And it was for someone who'd never been published before. In my opening little speech, I read the review that he wrote about the River Cafe, which was pretty damn mean. very complimentary for us but then he focused on the nemesis do you remember the dessert and how difficult it was to make it was so Adrian and we just you know we loved Mr. Ben when he came into the restaurant with Nicola it was just he was one of a kind and he was your closest friend he was I think genuinely was my closest male friend we had a we had a pretty difficult beginning because I met him at a very very smart party and the girl I was with at the time, who remains a very dear friend, had misread the invitation and I turned up in full Venetian puff trousers, puff sleeves, great commedia delati mask.

33:00And it wasn't a costume party? It was for Viennese, not Venetian. Oh, Venetian. So everyone else was in tails and military uniform. And I was on the same table as Adrian. And I hadn't met him before. I knew who he was. He was going through that rather affected stage of wearing a monocle. And he looked at me and said, one of us has got a strange idea of geography, dear, and I don't think it's me. Anyway, I rang him the next day and said, you're a bastard for making me feel so uncomfortable. He said, let me take you out to lunch. And we did, and we became very, very good friends. And I loved going out to eat with him.

33:33What was it like going out with a food critic? Quite daunting in the case of age. Well, first of all, there was that thing, of course, he could never go as A.A. Gill. The bookings were always in the name of Mr. Oxford or Mr. Cambridge. Oh, really? Yeah. so you'd arrive and you say table for Mr Cambridge and you see the colored rain from the maitre d's cheeks um we'd sit down and look he knew enormous he was as you know a very good cook himself I mean I used to read his his cookery column in Tatler and it was hysterical he'd go for ham and pea soup get some ham get some peas cook it you know it's that sort of thing but he was a very good he was a very good cook and he had enormous respect for restaurants as restaurateurs and for particularly for front of house staff he was very he admired waiters a lot but they had to know their stuff and why it was daunting was he would challenge you just to see how much you knew if you were being charged a lot of money so he'd go so tell me about the venison and they'd go well it's from a deer sir okay yes yes i knew that um what part of the deer And he'd go, the waiter would either go, well, you know, it's a haunch or blank, whatever it is.

34:43Or they'd go, I'll just go and find out. Then come back and say, OK, so tell me, where's the deer from? And they'd go, well, highlands, new forest. And he was testing them. I mean. Well, he's really testing. Yeah, he was testing. He's testing the restaurant because that's the job of the. Exactly. That's one of the things we do at the River Cafe. The idea is that everyone participates in the prepping of the food. And so if you are serving, not everything, but if you're serving a salsa verde, you know because you chopped the parsley and you washed the capers and you cleaned the anchovies. There's a kind of involvement and then the importance of knowing how something is cooked.

35:22So he tested the restaurant. He tested them and then, as you know, he could be absolutely excoriating if he didn't like the food. And I've met a number of restauranteurs since who knew I knew him and said, did you know your friend bankrupted me? because I think he was one of the very, very few critics who could still have that power. He was rather like the New York Times. It's fair, I think. Yeah, I think so. If you're going to be paying a lot of money, then your standards should be exacting. But when he loved you, as he loved you, and he loved Jeremy, and he loved Andre at Reva, he had his favourites, the places he would always go back to.

36:00Would he tell you what to order? He would try and make sure we all had something different. He'd go, oh, that's a bit boring if we do that. And then if we did, he'd then eat off each of our plates. And what was interesting, he was... He didn't take notes. No, he didn't. He'd never take notes because, as you knew, he was chronically dyslexic and he couldn't spell anything anyway. He would always, at the end of the evening, ask for a copy of the menu to take away. Right. And that was his aid memoir. But we went to incredible places. I mean, you know, at the time of the great gastronomic explosion, we went to Heston Blumenthal's for the first time together and he and Heston became very good friends.

36:36and we went to Favigan in Sweden and we went to El Bulli. I say, travel. Oh, we did, and Noma pop-ups and things. I mean, it was a real, it was exciting going to the theatre internationally. Sorry, into restaurants. There we are, about the theatre and restaurants. There you go, same thing. Would he come with you to the theatre? Oh, yeah, he was my regular first night date. And in fact, more often than not, he would either bring Flora, his wonderful daughter, and I'd bring one of my sons. And they two would sit together and Adrian and I would sit together. No, he was acting. He was asked, in fact, I don't know if anyone knows this, he was asked to be the Sunday Times theatre critic.

37:11And he said, no, I can't possibly, because I've got far too many good friends in the theatre and I wouldn't have any if... Because I did read a couple of his theatre reviews. They were zingers. No, I miss him every day. He was literally someone I spoke to every day. Every day. And what was extraordinary about him, and you probably know this again, is it was only after he died that I realised how many people he spoke to. And where did he get the time to do that? He never, ever hung up on me. Let's just say I've had a lot of drama in my life over the years in terms of losing close friends and losing members of my family and various problems and things like that.

37:52And I find it very difficult to cry. But the only thing that I cry like a drain is music. Music is my kind of go-to emotional release. It's a wonderfully cathartic thing. and it can be a beautiful piece of classical music or it can be a great bit of rock and roll. I mean, I told Bono, who's a regular client of yours, I know, that for one reason or another, I don't know why, when my first son Tom was born 35 years ago, I came back at 4 o 'clock in the morning from the hospital, dizzy and confused, and I poured myself a large glass of scotch and danced to his song Bad. So after that, that became a tradition.

38:30I've got four sons, and I danced to bad for every one of them.

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39:14Ten athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an iFit contract for$250 ,000. This is when mindset comes in. Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. This is Trainer Games. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th. When do you go to Glastonbury, do you eat? Yeah, but you don't eat well. It's very hard to eat well. I mean, interestingly, there's a lovely local restaurant close to us because I live in the West Country most of the time, in Bruton called At the Chapel.

39:59And Bruton's become a sort of new culinary centre of the West with OSIP and Aspenworth. But At the Chapel was the first. And they had, it's just changed hands, and they have a pop-up restaurant in Glastonbury now. And they came close to getting the At the Chapel experience, but when you're catering for many hundreds of people. So, no, it's not really about the food. What about cooking at home? Cooking at home I love doing. Yeah, because you described to me about cooking for your family and cooking a lot of Asian food. Well, yes, I love, I mean, both are very, very important partners in my life.

40:32None of them could cook, so I sort of cooked to survive, and I taught myself. And then, rather wonderfully, all four of my children have loved cooking. And, in fact, my eldest son, Tom, has just opened his first restaurant. Where? Yeah, it's called Outcrop Social. Okay. It's a pop-up restaurant in 180th Strand. Oh, is it? and it's Thai food, and they're giving him three months to see if he goes. And I can say totally objectively, he's had the most incredible reviews, and it's delicious. So let's go. What's it called then? Outcrop Social. Outcrop Social. Let's go there. Outcrop Social. Yeah. I love what he does.

41:09Well, I'll take you there in September. Let's do that. And so what do you cook at home? So at home, well, if we're there and it's Sunday, and it's a great sort of traditional Sunday lunch, then we all do our bits. And we all love quite spicy food. I love cooking Asian food. I love cooking Indian food in particular. I love grinding spices and preparing things like that. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of process. It is a lot of work, but that's why it's good to have all your family around you. So you can say to someone, look, you do this. Back to the collaboration. Yeah, exactly. And do you go out to restaurants now?

41:41I don't go out nearly as much. I tend to go out probably more down in the West Country. Yeah. And also because as I've sort of moved away from actively being involved in the West End on a daily basis, I'm not there as much in the evening. I still go and see the theatre quite a lot, so I'll go out to places. Do you still go after? Yes. Do you? Yeah. I can't bring myself to really have big nursery tea, as we call it, at five or six. But, you know, again, I've got the go-to places like, you know, the Ivy Club and things like that will stay open and, again, are very convivial. But I've worked for many, many years with Cameron McIntosh, who is an absolute foodie and a brilliant cook as well.

42:22And he was someone else who really inspired me to cook because we'd all shut the office down in the early days. You know, cats can run itself and their mates can run itself. And we'd go off to his place in Scotland where you have the most incredible produce of seafood and things. And we'd all be given a job. And as far as he was concerned, it wasn't cooking unless there were at least 20 people around their lunch table. So people would come out of the hills. So that was fun. I learned a lot at his knee, as it were. So we'd always go together. But, I mean, no, I mean, the days of the high, high, high-end dining with Adrian and it being fun, I think, are probably behind.

42:56Yeah. And working in restaurants, will you meet people for meetings? Yeah, the business lunch is sort of a kind of thing of the past. Yeah. I mean, in the early days, you know, I'd go off and meet our advertising agents and it would be, you know, and he'd sit down and he'd go, is this a two-bottle lunch or a one-bottle lunch? And now it's, I'll have a glass lunch, which is a shame in a way, but probably we get more done. I honestly think it was more fun in the 80s and 90s for us than it is now because it's much more pressured. The challenges are much more. The margins are much lower. The good thing is the way we look after people has changed a lot and you have to do that now, as you should.

43:39And as we know, the actor strikes on at the moment about getting proper recognition and that's going right through society. So the way we behave has changed. But in terms of that feeling of real excitement, of, you know, I can't tell you what it was like opening Les Mises on Broadway or Phantom on Broadway and, you know, Saigon, which was a massively controversial production because of the casting. So I have a letter from you. I don't remember where the correspondence, but it says, I'll read it. I'm going to read you a letter that you wrote me. Ah, darling, I had an emotional evening last night at the first night of Carousel.

44:17Adrian was one of my few friends who really enjoyed musicals, and even though we used to warble, if I loved you from it, he never actually had seen the show. They announced a revival just as he got sick, and I made him promise to stay well enough to come to the first night with me. Of course that didn't happen, so I kept an empty seat next to me. I miss him badly and will definitely know when I'm next seeing you. Much love, Nick. So I was wondering, because I thought, you do have one of the most beautiful speaking voices that I know and I was wondering if you might sing If I Loved You and here's the lyrics I'll have a go shall we have a go?

44:56and I'll sing it with you a little bit you know I grew up on musicals so I lived in upstate New York we'd go in the car and we'd drive down the throughway to New York and we would see the big ships and we'd see the SS France and we'd see the United States Then we would go and have lunch, and then we would go to a musical. We'd go to My Fair Lady, West Side Story. This is, I guess, I was sort of 12, and so it was late, early 60s. Yeah, early 60s. And then we would go to Sam Goody, a record store. Do you know Sam Goody? Yes, yes, yes. And we would buy the record, and then we would drive up back to the country, and we'd play the record over and over and over again.

45:40So I know the words to basically every musical of that era, and so I know this song, If I Loved You. So shall we try? It is one of my favorites. I know the first two lines to more songs. First two lines. But then I go, I'm up, so I'm going to cheat and read the lips. Yeah, absolutely. If I loved you, time and again, I would try to say,

46:15Oh, Ruthie. Oh, I'm gone. Wow. Thank you. To Adrian. Oh, to Adrian Gill. God love you, my friend. To musicals, to theater, to carousel, to you, and to love. So the singing gives you, singing can give you comfort, and food can give you comfort. So my very, very last question of talking and listening and singing is to ask you if you have a food that you need not to eat when you're hungry, but to eat when you need comfort, what would that be, Nick Allitt? If I tell you, you'll be so appalled. No, I won't. It was the most delicious thing I've ever done. I'm feeling really down or depressed or hungry or worn out.

46:57And it was actually a concocted recipe by a friend of mine who wrote it in a play. and I read it. I thought, I can't believe he's actually done this but I'm going to try and put it together and it is basically toast with peanut butter, very crispy bacon and cheese melted on top. I'm not disgusted. I'm interested. It was... I think food because the food that comforts has a story. Yeah. Well, the next time you have one, call me. Okay? Will do. When we go to my son's restaurant, we'll sneak home after. Oh, yeah, and have a peanut butter sandwich. Thank you very much. Oh, what a joy. day. Thank you, Ruthie.

47:33Thank you so much. Thank you.

47:39The River Cafe Lookbook is now available in bookshops and online. It has over 100 recipes beautifully illustrated, with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book has 50 delicious and easy-to-prepare recipes, including a host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks. The River Cafe Lookbook, recipes for cooks of all ages.

48:08Ruthie's Table 4 is a production of iHeartRadio and Atomai Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ten athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an iFit contract for$250 ,000. This is when mindset comes in. Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. This is Trainer Game. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th. Shh, you won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs.

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