Scott Rothkopf

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1:48The connections between Scott Rothkoff, director of New York's Whitney Museum, and I run very deep. When Rose and I wrote the first River Cafe cookbook in 1994, Scott's husband, Jonathan Burnham, helped us with our introduction. And when the Jasper Johns retrospective opened at the Whitney, Scott, who curated the show, took us and our young children through, slowly describing the paintings he loved most and why. Museums and restaurants are about connecting art and people. They welcome audiences, Scott's chosen word, into a space and create something beautiful to see. Or we cook something delicious for them to eat.

2:31When I spoke to you yesterday, I said, what's new? And you said, Ruthie, what's new? Is that I had a visit from Barack and Michelle Obama to see the show that is on right now, which is called Edges of Ailey. Tell me about it. Yeah, it is really one of the most exciting things that's ever happened at the Whitney. The show is just this extraordinary look into the life and work of the American choreographer, Alvin Ailey, who famously said that he wanted to chronicle in his art, which was dance, the black experience. And he does that, but for me, that's the American experience. There's everything in this work.

3:11You know, he grew up in Rogers, Texas in the South. It was a sharecropping family, very poor. He lived in LA. He danced on Broadway. He danced in movies. He choreographed the opening night of Studio 54. You have the church. You have Soul Train. You have Gospel. You have Duke Ellington. You have the State Department, which funded his journeys around the world as, you know, one of the great choreographers of America. beginning in the 1960s. He danced at the Lyndon Johnson White House. And Ailey has never been subject of a big show like this. And he is, to my mind, not, you know, the greatest black choreographer or even the greatest choreographer.

3:50He's one of the greatest creative geniuses of the 20th century in any medium, period. And that's what this show is about. So when the Obamas came calling on the second or third day that the show was open to say, could we come for our anniversary? I thought, sure, that we can make happen. So they got a private visit too, Ruthie. They got the luxury. For an hour and 15 minutes they stayed. And it was so moving. To see that show through their eyes was really something I'll never forget. Well, lucky them as well. Lucky to have you and lucky to have you take them there. So you've come for Frieze? I've come for Frieze.

4:23Tell me. And also I came for a birthday party of one of Jonathan's old friends. Was that called a destination party, right? It was. Tell us about the destination. Because I know the destination. We were at Castle Howard, which is a very glamorous place to celebrate a 70th birthday of a mother and a 30th birthday of her daughter, which ensures that you have a lot of good-looking young people as you get older. And I, being 48, was really upset that I was seated at the old people's table. Oh, you were. I thought, you know, I could pass. And, you know, like this bridge generation person. How lucky would they be to have me?

4:52Yeah, so that was a good, you know, having an English husband means that there are certain things that bring me to London other than just art fairs and museum openings. Why don't we read the recipe? Well, this is very exciting for me because I don't think I've actually read a recipe since I met my husband. He does all the cooking and I do all the eating, but this is something I really enjoy. I love artichokes, so I'm delighted to read about spaghetti with artichoke pesto for six. If we were making it at my home, we'd probably make it for eight, even if we were only having six coming, because Jonathan has always panicked, there won't be enough.

5:23That's a nice quality. So it's always too much, exactly. Six small globe artichokes boiled, 100 grams of pine nuts, one garlic clove, 250 ml of milk, two tablespoons of parsley leaves, 150 grams of grated pecorino, 150 milliliters of olive oil, 400 grams of spaghetti. Blend the artichokes, pine nuts, and garlic to a rough pulp. Add the milk, parsley, and pecorino, and pulse again. Add the olive oil to the mixture to form a cream. Season and put it into a small pan. Cook the spaghetti until al dente. Drain and return the pasta to the pan with one ladle full of hot water. Toss, add the pesto, and toss again.

6:15The sauce should be wet and creamy. If necessary, add more water. served with freshly grated pecorino or parmesan. Oh, great. Well, do you want to get them? We're going to bring some over because they're cooking it there in the restaurant, even though you're having lunch. We'll have a taste. Well, I didn't have breakfast in anticipation of my lunch, so there you go. It's good to have spaghetti before lunch. So let's talk about growing up in Dallas first. Let's start at the beginning and the beginning. Tell me about the food as a child in your home. Sure. Well, I was born in Arizona. I was born on an Air Force base called Luke Air Force Base that was outside of Phoenix.

6:48And my dad was in the service, then this was in the 70s. And we moved to Dallas when I was just almost a year old. So I really did grow up in Dallas and really was a kind of child of the 1980s in Dallas. Brothers and sisters? No, I have a stepsister who entered my life when I was 12, let's say. So you were an only child with your parents. I was. Your mom worked? My mom worked. My dad was a doctor. My mom worked at what was then a new Saks Fifth Avenue store selling handbags to, you know, These people in Dallas in the 80s who wanted very glamorous-looking bags covered with rhinestones and things.

7:21And she was a good cook. And when I was really little in our household, we kept kosher, actually. So that was interesting. And it was not that strict when we went out. We kind of cheated. But at home, it was— So there was no pork? No pork, no shellfish, no milk and meat, which actually meant I was introduced to all sorts of funny products like Cool Whip, which was a kind of fake whipped cream. because you couldn't have whipped cream on your dessert after a meal that had meat in it, things like that. And she was a good cook, my mom. And her grandfather had been a baker and her grandmother the cook at a restaurant in a hotel in the Catskill Mountains that they owned.

7:58Which one? Do you know? Well, it was called the Liberty Hotel. Yeah, it no longer exists, that hotel. It was Grossinger? Not Grossinger. It was very close to Grossinger's. It was the sort of less known cousin of Grossinger's, yes. Because that's where I grew up. Yeah, I know. 10 years right in that area. Well, the hotel was actually called the Dixie Lake Hotel. The town was Liberty, New York. That was the nearest one to it. So she grew up in this world of hospitality. It was a kosher hotel. And she learned certain things from her mother and her grandparents. So we did have a lot of home cooking.

8:30I remember especially the Jewish holidays like Passover and Rosh Hashanah, everyone coming together around big meals. Did your mother have a recipe book of her grandparents' recipes? You know, she joked that her grandmother and her mother used to always sabotage all the recipes that they would give to her, which apparently is not uncommon. They would accidentally leave out something so that she was sort of foiled and ever being as good a cook as they were. But, you know, it was a time in Dallas where there was probably like the kind of inkling of a dawning food conscience. So we're talking about what years?

9:02In the 80s, let's say. We didn't go to farmer's markets. Nobody had ingredients like that. But I remember, you know, you could buy basil at the supermarket that wasn't flaked and dried. Or, you know, my mother had this cookbook that reached us from New York City. It was called the Silver Palate Cookbook. And it was about, it was from this store on the Upper West Side that sold prepared foods, basically, in New York. And my mother must have thought that this was incredibly kind of chic and worldly. And this was sort of before anybody had heard of Ina Garten, let's say, and the kind of things that she has you cook.

9:35And she would make recipes from that cookbook. And I remember looking at it thinking, this just must be the most glamorous place in the world. I always had an obsession with New York. So it wasn't all old-fashioned kosher cooking. So she would work during the day and shop and then come home. Would you sit down to dinner every night as a family? We always, pretty much always sat down to dinner. You know, my parents divorced when I was 9 or 10, and they had joint custody. So I would go back and forth. And it kind of meant that whatever night they had me, they were home. They didn't make other plans because that was maybe only half the time.

10:08And we would eat, my mom, my stepfather and I, and she would often, you know, grill like a simple chicken breast. I can remember like marinated in Italian dressing, which also probably seemed like an interesting food concept at the time. And my stepmother also cooked, but my father had a recipe that he thought that he was famous for, famous perhaps only to those who knew him well, called hamburger lemon surprise. Which part was the surprise? I don't know. Probably the amount of lemons or the black peppercorns that as a child I used to have to avoid burning my mouth. And that's the only thing I can make without a recipe.

10:44You can make it now. Yeah, you can make it too, Ruthie, I bet. I don't think you'd want to, but you can make it. Would you ever put it with pasta, do you think? You could. You could put it with pasta. You could put it with anything. You could feed it to your dog. Oh, no, no. Do you think your father was expressing some form of love for you in a way? There might have been a bit of that. I went to Dallas. I was in Dallas. Richard and I, he was working with Ray Nasher, a great collector. Of course. And we insisted on staying downtown, but this was in the 70s, maybe late 70s. But we had some good food, and I was wondering if you, did you go out to meals with your parents?

11:23We did. Was restaurant life? You know, we went to Italian or Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood. Special occasion. Yeah, well, there were special occasions there. You know, there were, and you might know more about this than I did, but at that time in Dallas there was this kind of beginning of a kind of southwestern cuisine, and there was a chef called Fearing at the mansion on Turtle Creek, which is expensive. Yeah, the mansion is expensive, yeah. But that had a really well-known chef, and they were bringing together ideas from some Mexican cuisine and some barbecue and, you know, So grilling and blackening things and kind of thinking about the Southwest and some of the more local cooking traditions in a sort of elevated manner.

12:01So that was a thing. And then there were a couple of like really old-fashioned kind of restaurants. I'm sure that don't exist in hotels like the Adolphus and you would go. That's where we stayed. There you go. That's the hotel we stayed. I had thought of that in sort of 40 years. They had a restaurant there. It was called the Pyramid Room, and you could have a sorbet intermezzo that they would bring out on a frozen swan that I think had a flashlight inside. So it was like this glowing ice swan, and you could have a chocolate souffle there, which is the only time in my life that I ever had a souffle until probably I went to France many years later.

12:33So there were these occasions that you did go out infrequently for these super, what seemed like very grand dining experiences. So going back to the art history, you grew up always with art and with the visual. I grew up just always loving art. It was the thing that excited me and interested me the most of anything in the world. I had friends in Dallas in the 80s who liked football or American football, I mean, playing sports. I never had any interest. My father remembers me picking flowers by the side of the field at my first soccer game. And I think he realized I was not going to be one for team sports at that point.

13:10but my mother was interested in art and she painted a little herself and she really encouraged me and I developed an absolute fascination with Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect and he had designed the theater in Dallas where I took little acting classes and did plays as a kid and maybe when I was about nine or ten right around the time my parents were getting divorced actually I sort of wanted to go see some of these buildings and my mother I think realized that this was something that she could encourage in me. And we would plan these trips and we went to see Falling Water outside of Pittsburgh and we went to Taliesin and we went to Chicago and we went to all these different places.

13:48And it was this kind of wonderful time in the life of a mother and a son. How old were you? Well, I was probably at that point about 11 to 12, 13. What do you think was it that drew you to Frank Lloyd Wright? There was something, you know, I used to study the floor plans and I could memorize all the buildings. I was absolutely obsessed And I would ask for volumes of the catalog raisonne for my birthday. They were very expensive and they were printed in Japan, I think. We'd go to the Rizzoli store. And I had a collection of Frank would write books. And there was something about the kind of complexity of the space.

14:19And I would get lost in these floor plans and try to understand how the rooms fit together. And also the story of him was kind of grand. And he went around with a cape and a beret and, you know, thwacked his cane and made pronouncements. Then at some point, an interest in contemporary art sort of supplanted the architecture fixation. But when my grandparents were very, I was very close to my grandmother, especially my father's. Oh, your father's mother. My father's mother was just about my favorite person in the whole world. Why is that? Even thinking about her now, I get a little choked up. I miss her.

14:51She always had her face made up and went to the beauty parlor. And, you know, she wore some jewelry. and her husband was an accountant who'd been born literally in a tenement on Ludlow Street and went to City College for free, which was a great opportunity that people had in those years during the Depression. But she really believed in supporting my interest in art. And she and my grandfather, I would go once a year to stay with them in August for like a week on Delta Airlines as an unaccompanied minor, you know, whatever age I was. Yeah, a badge. and I would get there and I can still picture that drive from LaGuardia Airport out to Hicksville, which is, of course, not a very attractive drive.

15:34But in my mind, that was like, people have, what's your favorite journey? You know, like they're going to the Alps, you know, to go skiing. My favorite journey was from LaGuardia to Hicksville, you know. To your grandmother. Yeah, with them in the car. I remember being picked up in the anticipation of what that week would be. And they took me to the Whitney Museum many times as a child when it was on Madison Avenue to look at Calder's Circus. Will you describe what Calder's Circus was? Yeah, Calder's Circus is one of the real treasures of the Whitney's collection made by Alexander Calder. He made sort of for fun, but it became a great artwork, all these different circus figures that he could, you know, pull a lever on a kangaroo, and, you know, it would walk and move its feet.

16:15And it's actually on view right now in the Whitney Museum in downtown Manhattan, and I take my son there. And he's totally into it, the lion, all the different characters. I'm just reminded it's very touching to me. Things do come full circle.

16:34The River Cafe Cafe, our all-day space and just steps away from the restaurant, is now open. In the morning, an Italian breakfast with Cornetti, Ciambela, and Crostata from our pastry kitchen. In the afternoon, ice cream coupes and River Cafe classic desserts. We have sharing plates, salumi misti, mozzarella, bruschetta, red and yellow peppers, vitello tonado, and more. Come in the evening for cocktails with our resident pianist in the bar. No need to book. See you here.

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18:38You went to college and you went to Harvard. Or was that either an awakening because of the restaurants that were available in Cambridge? Or did you not really? I mean, I ate a lot of bad dorm food. And I didn't cook. And I didn't have a kitchen then because I lived in a dorm. But it was obviously a more international context. Now, Dallas has many immigrants from all around the world, too. But we didn't grow up going to those kind of restaurants. I remember the first time I ate Ethiopian food and the kind of tang of that bread. or the first time I had Vietnamese pho. Would that have been in Cambridge?

19:12In Cambridge, exactly. And the kind of thing that people associate with graduate student life in cosmopolitan areas, my taste definitely started awakening to a broader range. Like in Dallas, the only Asian food I would have had would have been a certain kind of Chinese food. And I say certain kind meaning American kind. But as I got to college, I had Japanese food and all these things. And a lot of it was cheap. and we would go out with our friends, sometimes venture into Boston. After Harvard, you moved to New York. I moved to New York for a year. In an apartment? In a little apartment in Chelsea, about three blocks from where I'm living now.

19:48Oh, okay. Which is just, talk about coming full circle. It was a studio apartment. I did not have a bed. I had a sofa bed from Ikea that I rarely opened because that was going to require too much effort. I slept sideways on this Ikea sofa bed. I don't know that you would call it a kitchen. It was not even a galley kitchen because it wasn't even enclosed. It was kind of part of this room, essentially. The only enclosed part of which was the bathroom. But either they probably call it bed sit, right? I don't know what it's called. It had a stove and it had a fridge and it had an oven, none of which were probably ever used.

20:19I think if you'd opened my fridge then you might have found some tonic and some cocktail olives and some leftovers or something growing on them. So social life was centered around going to all the restaurants. Yeah, we had these teeny tiny apartments and nobody really entertained at home. and I remember going, I mean, speaking of like being in London, to around the corner from me was the art dealer Gavin Brown, who now is part of Barbara Gladstone, had this really cool gallery and he had this really cool bar. He had a bar. Called Passerby, yeah. In the gallery? In the front of the gallery, this social space.

20:53So this would have been in my first year in New York, so let's say it's 1999 or something. And I would go to this bar and I was very aware that everyone in the room was really cool and really interesting. And I knew who they were. I knew who, you know, Elizabeth Payton. Oh, my God, Elizabeth Payton's at the bar. And I remember there was this kind of shorter woman with big curly hair who it turned out was Amanda Sharp, the founder of Freeze, speaking of the Freeze Art Fair. So I kind of thought, you know, I'm just not ready for New York. I've got to go back to school. And I picked up and I went back to Cambridge for graduate school, also studying art history.

21:28and then at some point I was offered a job of moving to New York to become a senior editor. And I thought I better get to New York in my late 20s and I was going to meet artists of my generation and I was going to write about them and I was going to go to their studios and I was going to drink with them and maybe I'd make out with them and we'd go to bars and we just, this was the minute, the last minute where I was going to end up at Harvard in the faculty club with a pipe, which could have happened because I loved the academy. me. And so I picked up and I moved to New York and started this job in the art world, which I never left.

22:02And you were ready for New York at that point. That was 20 years. Yeah. Then I was ready. Then you were ready. I had a business card. I knew more. It's very self-aware to say, I'm not ready for New York. Yeah. I was ready to not be that student or that Texas kid anymore. And it was an incredible journey about 04, 05, 06, the aughts as we call them, meeting so many people. So your aspiration, you did hang out with young artists. You did go to their studios. Absolutely. And did you eat? And some of the friendships. Did you take them out? You know, the eating, again, it was funny. I ate as a guest, as a journalist, as an editor.

22:40We went to the places where the business was of looking at art, of selling art. And often our hosts were museums or galleries that celebrated their artists. And we went to around the world where art fairs were, and I developed a sort of taste for foods in a very select set of cities that were the stops on the art world caravan. I've always been interested in reading much earlier about de Kooning and Pollock and the artists that were in New York. and the, what was it called, Max's Kansas City, where they would, and the solitary life that they had, painting all day in a studio and then going out at night to drink and to party and to, because it is solitary.

23:27And I think Gavin's bar, that one passerby I mentioned, was a bit of a Max's of its moment. And, you know, it was interesting. As a young critic, editor, person, whatever I was, we, my friends and I, were interested in the places that had a kind of patina of the art world's history. And it's amazing to me now to think that quite a few of them that we went to still exist 20 years later. Like Indochine. Like Indochine, like the Odeon. I mean, these were places where we had seen pictures of, you know, the Leo Castelli gallery in the bathroom at Odeon with Andy Warhol. And, you know, we could imagine what it was like when people went out there.