Why Restaurants Matter… Jamie Oliver, Piers Morgan, Marina Hyde & Richard Osman, Tracey Emin & Dara Khosrowshahi

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:02Richard Osman:Guaranteed human. Be honest. You don't feel as interesting as you used to. Maybe not as much fun or adventurous. Remember when you actually went out? Did stuff? A Do More subscription brings concerts and comedy, sports and museums back to your life. For seven scrawny bucks a month, you get at least one pair of tickets to something great. Discover new bands, laugh, learn, do more. And right now, Do More makes interesting and adventurous simple and easy. because your first month's free at domorestuff.com slash free. Today, I'm opening a restaurant. Today? Yeah. Literally, last night was my first soft launch.

0:41So can you imagine that Jamie's actually here? Yeah, but that's because you're my Rufy Rogers. I know, but you can't say no. No, of course I can't. You can't say no. It may come as no surprise that I have a special interest in restaurants. The River Cafe is where I work, where I record this podcast, and where I spend so much of my life. In this special compilation episode of Ruthie's Table 4, we're talking about restaurants, how to run them, and why they matter. With stories and memories from Piers Morgan, Jamie Oliver, Marina Hyde, and Richard Osmond, Tracy Emin, and Dara Khosrow Shahi, the CEO of Uber.

1:22Mike Bloomberg said that he would when he did interviews for jobs when people applied for a job at Bloomberg he would take them to a restaurant because he wanted to see how they were with the waiter how they were with their food did they look the waiter in the eye and he also said something that I'm sure you won't agree with is that if someone he was interviewing asked for a glass of wine he wouldn't hire them and yeah and I was somebody sitting next to me who said well actually being British he said well you know Mike if I was sitting interviewing somebody for a job and they didn't order a glass of wine I wouldn't hire them but what do you look for?

2:01Piers Morgan:I'll give you a story. When I was 27 years old I was the show business editor of The Sun Yeah flying all around. Hard job. I was a gossip columnist having the time of my life best gig in the world. Flying around interviewing Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger and all these superstars and then I get an invitation to go and have dinner with Rupert Murdoch at the Stafford Hotel in St James' in the private room. And the editor of The Sun took us there and there were about eight executives. And I was the youngest by far. So I thought I had nothing to lose. Never met Rupert. So I met him, I was very excited.

2:36Piers Morgan:And I noticed that he was drinking a few glasses of wine. But the editor of The Sun was having a three-month wine booze sabbatical. So he wasn't, which became crucial. so we got through the first course second course i was just i was a couple of glasses of wine and started being quite garrulous as i would thinking well i've gotten to lose here at all nothing i'm not going to be doing anything bigger than this and then it got to the end and there was a guy sitting to the right of rupert and then i was next to this guy they got to the end and they went to the editor who wasn't drinking first and they said would you like a liqueur and he wasn't drinking so said no I'm good thank you so everyone took their lead from the editor we better not have one so they all went no no I'm good I know no I never know they're all massive drinkers so they all said no no no and he got to me and I said well what would you recommend and he said the peach brandy is very good so I went really I said I'll have a peach brandy and the guy next to me he said yeah I'll have one of those too and then Rupert said yeah it's my favorite make it three oh so I'm not Well, all I'm saying is within three weeks, I had been made editor of the News of the World, the biggest selling paper in the world at the time.

3:48Piers Morgan:And the other guy had been made editor of the Sun, the biggest selling daily paper in the world. And none of the others who turned down the peach brandy got anything out of that dinner. And so the moral is, if you're ever having dinner with Rupert Murdoch, have the peach brandy. Or be brave. Exactly. Just do what you want to do. I think he looked at him. I personally look back on that and think he looked for someone who would make their own mind up. If you were interviewing somebody for a job, would you want to see how they behaved in a restaurant? I'd want to see how they treat waiters. Yeah.

4:17What would you look for?

4:18Piers Morgan:I think you have here probably the perfect environment to assess people's actual character. And one of my pet loathings in the world is people that are rude to waiters or to cab drivers or chauffeurs or whatever it may be. Particularly when they're rich and privileged and successful. and should have no excuse. And some of the most polite, well-mannered people I've met have nothing. They've been brought up to have manners. My mother, if she ever caught me being rude to a waiter, she would go berserk. I do that if any of my kids ever have even a whiff of entitlement or anything. And they know it, so they don't.

4:59Piers Morgan:And they would never be rude to a waiter. I think it's the ultimate litmus test of character. And I bet you've had some people in here over the years who've just treated your staff badly. I have to say, very few. I mean, I really am so, and maybe because, I don't know, the whole mood here or whatever it is. And also this is the only person I ever banned from the River Cafe, ever, was somebody who I heard. I actually witnessed him being a really horrible to a waiter. And I just said, and he called up, I think Charles, and said, does Ruthie really say I couldn't come back? Or is that what she was into?

5:37And he said, do you know how much I spend here? But there was like a no. And then he said, he called me up really upset. And he said, you know, I was not feeling, you know, whatever. And he said, can I come back like ever? And I said, well, you have to write to her and ask her what she thinks. And you have to apologize. And then we'll give it time. And he said, I said, but you can see, you know, we can talk about it in six months. He went, are you putting me on the naughty step for six months? And I was like, yeah, that's the deal.

6:06Piers Morgan:Did he come back in the end? Oh, good. I'd ban him alive. Why not? It's just too short. Yeah, I use restaurants as a way to soften people up, to establish a rap ball with them. I think that I can be quite good company over a good meal. A bottle of good wine, some good food, a piece of focaccia. I think I can establish a rap ball that maybe we didn't have before. And I looked at all these photographs of people, and there's a lot of affection going on. And then I looked at the one of you and me. And I thought, you know, that says a lot, doesn't it? I just literally have you in my arms. I love that picture.

6:43It's a beautiful book. So here is it at the end. If you look at this one, I think it's here. And there, see? I know, oh, bless. So the two pictures that I thought were so great was one of us in love with each other hugging. And how old were you in that picture, do you want me? I came to work for you at 21. 20. 20. Look at you. Yeah, baby. So how many years ago was that? 30 years ago. So there you go. And then I was looking at the content. Can you believe that? 30 years? Yeah, I can, because we're going to be 40. I know. Amazing. So you only came 10 years, but we're going to talk about that, because it's a long time ago.

7:18So what we did with this book is to say, we've wrapped it into chapters, because with all the people, how do you kind of group it? And so this was the food chapter that we put you in in the end. Thank you. Next to Martha. Next to Martha. And I was looking at this chapter, and I was looking at what we talked about, thinking what we talked about. And I was thinking what we should really do is what I'd like to do is talk about what you're doing now. What is the project you're working on now that's so exciting? Well, today I'm opening a restaurant. Today? Yeah, literally last night was my first soft launch.

7:53So can you imagine that Jamie's actually here? Yeah, but that's because you're my Rufy Rogers. I know, but you can't say no. No, of course I can't. You can't say no. So tell us about the restaurant. Well, as you know, about 20 years ago, I started James Italian and it was supposed to be a really beautiful mid-market offer into fresh pasta and all the things that we love. It was incredibly successful for eight years. It was it was like a dream come true. And then for two years, it fell apart and I lost them all. And it was so I had the best of my life, literally. And and then I had the worst. so in a really nice philosophical positive way I feel like a fully rounded restaurateur now because I've had it and I've lost it but really I also think that in life the concept of second chances and comebacks and the attitude in a world that can be quite tricky and dark at times in the world we live in or personally I think dusting yourself down and going again and I don't you would call it being relentless is important so this is my second chance i think it's relentless and resilience yeah and empathy you know those i think if you can teach somebody i would say yeah resilience is right up yeah but with the resilience you have to have a kind of empathy too totally so that's so it's quite a big deal really go back to that what helped you kind of um well i think like when you've when i lost them all you obviously spend quite a long time doing an autopsy and why, what happened, what went wrong.

9:27And without trying to massage my own self or ego, we got most of it right. We got the important bits right and we got the hard bits right. The culture, the feeling, keeping the staff and taking a pot washer and training them to be senior chefs. But what we got wrong was the business side, really, which is kind of, you know, it was the thing that people always said I was a businessman but I really wasn't so this time around keeping the locations really small making sure I do all the grown-up stuff properly and then yeah I was I did a team a team briefing yesterday like 70 people and I'm they've had all the kind of training and their tasting and the show and the tale and the role play but then I was trying to get into the feeling.

10:18And what was that? And you were there by the way, you were there with me. What do you remember? Which one do you remember? So let's just tell who's ever listening that this is when Rose and I started the River Cafe, the most very very first year we had the idea that we would take ourselves, because it really was just ourselves, and a few, you know, one other person, whoever was here, Ozzy, who was doing the wine, and we would go to the source, we would go to the people who make the olive oil, produce the olive oil, and the wine, and stay with them and eat with them. And that really is a tradition that we've done when we were five people working here right now and we're 130 people well you you were the only people doing that and what's beautiful now is if you look at if you look at the family tree of the river cafe so many of your chefs that have gone off to do amazing things replicate what you did and no one did it before you but i mean the idea of your boss taking you on what looks like a holiday i know it's for like three four days to eat professionally three or four times a day, which is actually, no one feels sorry for you, but it's quite hard work.

11:21But I think it's interesting because you can train somebody, but until they've been there and seen them and been in that area or up a mountain or seen the nonnas making this or seen the charcuterie that came from that village, that's what changes them. And it's that change, I think, that gives you your spark and your mojo. Oh, look. Oh, my God, look at this. Look at that. And I think I ate your ice cream yesterday as well. So you say your parent, you didn't go to, neither of you went to restaurants as kids, which is not surprising because we only went for special occasions. We didn't have them.

11:56But you didn't go at all.

11:57Richard Osman:I remember reading The Tiger Who Came to Tea, the children's book once. And the main thing should be that there's a tiger in your house. But the thing I took away from it was that they went to a restaurant and it had like kind of those, the gingham tablecloths. And I was like, it was unimaginable. I loved it so much. And it's so glamorous because she goes in her nightie and she puts her coat on over her nightie. They have sausages and ice cream, I think. Do you think about what you're going to eat when you wake up in the morning? Yeah. Do you? Immediately, I think about all the different meals.

12:27I love all the different meals. I can't play favorites. And I really think for my children, like, oh, I want to make them a cake. I want to do things like that. I want to do things like that. I want to try and do absolutely everything and do all my work and make a really big supper and make everyone a cake.

12:40Richard Osman:Yeah. Do you think that's a personality trait of yours, Marina? Do you go? Yes, I do think it is. It's weird because it's never come across. But do you go to sleep thinking about what you're going to eat the next day? Unless I'm in a hotel and then I've got a hotel breakfast coming up. And then I can barely sleep because I'm so excited. I think it's the greatest. What's your idea of a hotel breakfast? Well, just help yourself. Oh, the buffet. If I go to a hotel and you go down to breakfast and it's waiter service, I'm like, well, we're moving hotels. because listen I it's I want to be able to see I want to go and see that bouncy that silver thing and things different kinds of eggs and stuff yeah and they go mushrooms make a couple of trips you want you want to yeah I always think it'd be a great restaurant a hotel breakfast restaurant you just come in the clock in the evening yeah I think people would get nuts for it I think yeah would you ever interview somebody over breakfast would you breakfast breakfast meetings or lunch meet do you like food and work business breakfast yes definitively I think that's great we all know where we are and there's something about it because as we know the calories don't count and all that all that kind of stuff and you've got to eat anyway you've got the day ahead of you yeah business lunch no i don't like business do you do business lunch i i love a long lunch but very very rarely but i love to do i go out with all these slightly older guys and they're really good fun and i have like we have a long lunch but then i'm not sort of going to do any more are they that drinking at lunchtime generation i was gonna ask that too that's the one that i really i wish i'd been born in that generation i don't know how they did it the cabinets in the room right they had mad men cocktails when you came back from the business lodge.

14:12You had three martinis and then you went back to the office and had another thing. It's just you're building up resistance. They did pretty good ads, didn't they?

14:18Richard Osman:Yeah, exactly. But I love a business breakfast. You're so right. That's a much, although having said that, I start work really early in the morning. I always start by five. So I don't, and I'm much better. Yeah, something that takes me five minutes at 5 a.m. will take me an hour at 5 p.m. So those are my good hours of working. If ever I get a text at six in the morning, it's only Marina. And you know I've been waiting to send it to you. Take calls at five, because sometimes I wake up at five and nobody talks. I'd love to call you. Oh, ring me. Oh my God, I'm so available. Because what I have to do, I wanted to have a website called areyouawake.com because then you could find out who's actually awake.

14:56Because often in the morning I'll ring somebody and say, I say, I woke up at three and they go, I was awake at three. And you think if we just knew each other, we're awake. It's easy to see you, I'm always awake at three. Yeah, me too, I'm always awake at three.

15:06Richard Osman:Whenever my wife and I are separated, she works away a lot and I work away a lot. And both of us find it harder to sleep when the other isn't there. And so I know sometimes if I could ask, that's the only time I would send a text at three in the morning and just go, are you finding trouble sleeping? And I immediately, yeah. And then, okay, let's have a chat. Because I don't know if when you first, remember when you first met me, I was very, very thin. And I remember coming to stay with you in Italy. And I was crying because there was too much dinner. you know whatever it was i couldn't cope with the amount of food you had a broken leg didn't you yeah i just mashed up leg as well it's like all everything and but for me i used to only eat when i was hungry never never at all any other time unless i was hungry so i could go to the best dinner in the world and i wouldn't eat anything because i wasn't hungry i'd only eat when i was hungry so now things have changed and um and but I've always appreciated good food fine dining and presentation of food that's what I've talked about what do you mean well like I love a beautiful table I like um things to be presented beautifully I like flowers I like I also like simplicity I don't like grandeur and grandiose things but um i think if even if like my mom always even if you haven't got anything you know but you make it you make it look beautiful and you present it well it's going to taste nicer definitely did you grow up so you grew up with that ethos it was that something you discovered later that you it was meal times or presenting food meal times were different in my house because I'm single my mum was single parent and my mum worked as a waitress in the hotel so my mum was never there at mealtimes so it was always it was never we I can remember I can count the times that we sat at a table and ate together you know and at Christmas my mum was always working so our Christmas was a week after Christmas so it for me I suppose I've always been and I think then there was a time in my life when I overcompensated on that you know like I wanted to make Christmas or I wanted to have every Sunday have have a meal or whatever and then went through a stage where every Saturday I went out to lunch to to restaurants because I wanted and I'd invite my friends and I wanted to have this almost like trying to reclaim something yeah exactly ramecate's the right word that and but you actually can't so and now I'm just very um um when you live alone and you eat alone you eat differently from other people maybe doing a show is a bit like doing a dish you know all the ingredients that go into it and the performance when I do a meal or when I cook something or we do something at the river cafe you kind of take a long time to get ready it takes a lot of choosing of time of searching for the right thing and then it's there and then it's the public exposure do you find but then you're talking about memory and emotion as well tell me what you mean so if you cook a really fantastic meal and i'm not saying if when you do i could say if yeah people and people eat it they have this memory of the time the moment the taste buds the the everything the warmth all of that kind of thing so when you do an art exhibition it's different but people will go and they will look at that image for 10 seconds 10 minutes two minutes half now then it's gone they go on to the next one the next one and it's a memory that they have to take with them of how they felt when they saw it so it's the same with you people have will have memory of when they when they laughed what they did if people put their heart and soul into something you can tell you can feel it you know uber at the time was going through its challenges anyway 80 percent of the business was mobility, Uber Eats was kind of an idea that we're developing.

19:31You were developing before COVID. Yeah, it had actually started before I got there. And I was like, look, this is a cool business. Let's keep investing in it. Let's grow it. And then when COVID happened, 80 % of our mobility business disappeared overnight. 80%. 80%, just gone. And we were already losing money. So we went from losing kind of$2 billion a year to losing four to five billion a year. We didn't have that much money in the bank. And so it became kind of a question of survival for us. And lo and behold, the mobility business almost disappeared, but the delivery business really started picking up.

20:14And so - Can I just ask you? Yeah. Where were you? I was in San Francisco. Did you leave your house or did you do everything from home? It was, I worked from home then. Basically everyone. Everyone did. Yeah, everyone stayed at home. It was, you know, conversations were over screens. Yeah, yeah. And you really didn't know what was safe, what was unsafe, where the world was going to go. It was, I got to spend a lot of time with the kids, which was nice. Yeah, yeah. So go back. So then Uber Eats, as you say, became a food. Yeah, I mean, Uber Eats became our lifeline. Yeah. It became a lifeline for our restaurant partners because they were having a ton of trouble, but they got to keep employing their employees as well.

21:00And then also became a lifeline for our drivers because we said, well, you were driving people. Now you can drive food and keep earning as well. So it really was such a blessing for us and a blessing for our ecosystem and our partners as well. And was this global? This was, yeah, it was absolutely global. So Uber Eats was everywhere. Yeah. And now Uber Eats is about half of the business. It's half, is it? We think that there's a scenario where people don't go to restaurants, but now nobody goes to cinemas. They watch their movies at home. And could there be a situation where people say, well, why do we go to a restaurant when the restaurant could come to us?

21:41But then last night I was here. And I was in the kitchen. And I looked around. I just watched people bump into each other. We had Mandy noticed that somebody else on the other side of the room, he'd met at a conference last week and they were all around. And then you had another person who was here celebrating their kid's birthday. And I thought, well, that couldn't happen if you just were at home eating. I don't want to take this away, but we want you to bring people here and take food to people. That's the cool thing about Uber, which is we want people to go out of their house, which is the mainline Uber business, and also people get delivery.

22:21And I do think that the restaurant business is changing. And you know this, Ruthie, which is there's a part of the business that's about the food, but there's a part that's about the hospitality and the environment. You walk into this place, and instantly just the lighting you have, it's so beautiful. Oh, thank you. And the instant you walk into this place, it feels bright. And so I do think that restaurants need to have a clear identity as to, is it the food? Is it the hospitality? Is it something else? What is it that makes them special? And there are restaurants, you know, quick service restaurants where it's mostly about the food and where delivery is the main line.

23:03And so delivery allows someone, you're not restricted by the size of your dining room, you know, and the kitchen becomes a thing and the dining room isn't the thing. and so in that case delivery is great for these players because they get to expand they get to have incredible scope and even even with some of them they have dark kitchens yes which is they take their recipes and and they get to really expand their scopes but then i think for you you have a clear identity which is it the food is special yeah but then there's a hospitality and people getting together and the accidental yeah kind of you know uh interactions that people will have as well, and the environment.

23:42And I do think you need to up that hospitality and really keep that in mind in order for restaurants like yours to thrive. Yeah, we do. And I think that, you know, why do people go to restaurants? You know, as you say, when you're going to have them, why do you go? You go because of the spontaneity. You go because sometimes you can have a conversation that you're describing around a table in a restaurant where you're being taken care of. So you can take care of yourselves and your family.

24:15Ruthie's Table 4 is now a book. Paul McCartney, Michael Caine, Kamala Harris, David Beckham, Tina Fey, Elton John, and many more. It's full of stories, beautifully designed, and a celebration of the way food connects us all. It's available now wherever you buy your books.

24:37Be honest. You don't feel as interesting as you used to. Maybe not as much fun or adventurous. Remember when you actually went out, did stuff? A Do More subscription brings concerts and comedy, sports and museums back to your life. For seven scrawny bucks a month, you get at least one pair of tickets to something great. Discover new bands, laugh, learn, do more. And right now, Do More makes interesting and adventurous simple and easy. Because your first month's free at domorestuff.com slash free. Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, hey, we came to play? Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially?

25:18Step up like a boss and save the day? Or see what life's like under the tree of light? Did you? If you could. Would you? When we come through, it's true magic. Because we came to play. Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.