He's going to read his day. Hello, you're recording from the Naisi, okay, So I'll just read this little thing and then we can't talk. Today. I've come to New York and I'm in one of my favorite places in the world, the Museum of Modern Art, a place that I have treasured since a young child from upstate New York. Beautiful spaces that are welcoming and exciting are crucial. That is what we do in our own small way at the River Cafe. And what Glenn Lowry has done here
in a big way over the past thirty years. Is that right? Thirty years eight? Okay? I say, over almost thirty years as director, he's transformed the collection, broaden the collection, and turn the museum into a space where people cannot only look at beautiful art, but meet sit in the garden and eat delicious food. Glenn and I like to bring the world of art and food together. At the
River Cafe. We're doing projects with Ed Ruschet and Damien Hurst, and one of my favorite drawings is a self portrait. Ellsworth Kelly drew the River Cafe bathroom and a message so I twombly left me on a menu after a long lunch. If we have brought art to food, Glenn has brought food to art with a fabulous restaurant, the modern and small cafes throughout the building. Glenn is a close friend of the River Cafe and a close friend
of Richard and mine. Today we're going to discuss food and art, Art and food, our love for both and our love for each other.
So great to be here.
Thank you. I said I was coming to the museum and we'd be doing this interview surrounded by the greatest start in the world, and I'm looking at four black wolves two stories down.
We'll have to do something about studio.
They can know.
That's great. Actually, do you spend a lot of time down here?
Do you record exodically? We were, you know, we we we used to do a lot of audio guides in house, and so we needed a recording studio for that. Now they're produced all over the place, and so it's a little bit different.
Do you have a podcast as museum have a podcast?
We have a thing called Post which is online. It's not really a podcast, but we do a number of conversations. Is probably a better way of putting it in podcasts.
Yeah, I actually did a little audio one for the Custin Show. They came and asked me to talk about because my father was a great friend of Philip Gustin.
I didn't know that.
You didn't know that. Oh yeah, I grew up in Woodstock and so Philip was in our house all the time. Actually, they liked the food my mother was cooked, you know, And I think music. His wife was a poet and fill up the painter. What about artists and food.
Oh, I think they go together. I can't tell you the number of artists that I know who are either fanatic about the food they cook or just love to go out side Twombly. I mean, yeah, you know, lunch was side Twombly or dinner with side Twombly was always a feast.
And what was it like? What are your memories?
Oh?
My memories were being out you know above Geita with Sigh and some small hilltop town where Nicola had found a fabulous restaurant and you know, lunches that would go on for two or two and a half hours. But the food would be absolutely spectacular. Of course, one of the great things about Italy is the tiniest place can produce the most delicious meal.
When you see a three star Mischlin in Italy. I always sort of avoid it. You want to go to those small Oh yes.
The magic for me of traveling around Europe in general, but particularly Italy is the serendipitous encounter with a place that you'd never even heard of that creates a meal that you'll never forget.
Okay, So did you ever live in Italy as talking about it?
No, Alas, I mean I spent a lot of time in France. You know, I am, in fact French. So now is well you have to go back to Livingstein. And my father was German, my mother was French. They met during the Second World War. But I regained my French citizenship a year ago.
Okay. So you were born in France, so is that why or is it through your mother?
Through my mother? I was born in New York.
Because I have a son who was born in Paris, and I ever think, great, he's going to be you know, can have French citizenship, but you have to live in France between the ages of eighteen and twenty two. I e. Go to the army, right, you know, but I don't know if that's changed. But that's cool that you've got French citizens.
Yeah, Well, I've always felt French.
You know.
It's a strange thing that because my mother spoke to me in French from the moment I could speak, and because we spent every summer there, and I have lots of friends. I went to the Universitated cornob when I was younger. It's in the blood, yeah, but and I think what's in the blood is a lot for food, love, for all those things that were in the soul of France.
Did she cook?
My mother is a great cook. Is a great cook.
She is, okay, tell me about her cooking.
So she was a self taught cook. She was not somebody who grew up cooking. But when she came to the United States and subsequently married my father and then had children, she had to learn to cook. And she started by just following cookbooks. And in her words, it's not actually that difficult. You just follow the recipe precisely until.
You unless it's River Cafe cookbook rug, but.
Until you get confident enough to play right. And she she we grew up in a house where food was everything.
Let's go to the very beginning. So where were you born.
I was born in New York City, but I grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Is your father involved with Williams No.
My parents met because they loved to ski, and so I was born in New York. My sister was born three years after me, and shortly thereafter they decamped to Williamstown, which is in the Berkshire northwest corner of Massachusetts, because it was in ski country, so they just moved on
a whim and so that's where I grew up. What was his job, I follow was an engineer, so the weekends were for skiing, and as a child we grew up skiing every weekend and eventually became a racer and it was part of my life in France for all over I was on the ski team of the university and I was also racing on sort of the lower level of the FIS circuit. So it's all good. I still ski, but not nearly as much or the way
I would like to. I mean, it's pure pleasure, but it's difficult when you live in New York City and you have.
A day job whisky. As a family, it's always been our thing of our holiday. Where do you school holidays? Well, we've gone back over and over again to Courchevell to the to Valet, you know, because you can go from Corshevell over mary Belle to you know, Valtorol and that's a very very good skier and has children. So it's kind of been our family sailing and skiing, but you know,
our part is much more the skiing. And I was I have skied in this in vil and in Aspen and recently in Tellyride, and we could go back to food in that case, because there's no comparison, dare I say between the food that you get on the mountains in France. You know, that was a real awakening. This was someplace they don't let you drink on the slopes, right, No, it's terrible.
I mean, you know, for all of the great restaurants this country has today, and it does state the fact that ski culture here hasn't generated the kind of ambience that you have in Europe. We had for years and years and years an apartment in majev so that's where we would ski, and before that in Valdize when my parents were younger, and you know, you'd spend the morning skiing hard and then you'd find a little place to have lunch and it would be a spectacularly delicious lunch,
simple but delicious. And then you go, you know, throughout New Hampshire, for instance, and you go to these ski resorts and you see these signs that say fine food served here, and the only thing that was certain is that the food wasn't fine. It's just a different it's different.
We used to say, we used to fit a bit of skiing in between, you know, good food.
Richard was absolutely passionate about the food and the because he's loved ski.
Till he was about eighty six. A friend of mine who makes wine in Tuscany, mister Bonnicassi, he's called, He said, is Richard skiing? I said, well, you know, he's finding it a bit difficult now that he's sort of in his early eighties. He said, oh, tell him to continue, because I went through that in my early eighties and then it came right back in my late eighties.
Just requires patience. My mother's skied till she was ninety, and every year from about eighty four or eighty five till she stopped, she would buy new skis in a new outfit and you'd say, Mom, but you only take one run a year. That the great run like it matters to me.
So back to the food your mother was cooking when you were saying about cookbooks, because I learned to cook through Julia Child, which is probably later, but I always say reading Julia Child was it was like a science cookbook.
You know.
It gave you exactly the measurements, exactly the size of the bowl, the spoon, the amount. It was so precise and almost you couldn't make a mistake, and that gave you the freedom to then experiment on your own. Do you know what your mother used Julia Child.
She did lots of other cookbooks, but I mean I ended up getting one of her copies of Julia Child. She had several that you know, it was tattered, actually in pieces. But I think that's what you learn about cooking, that it becomes fun when you have the confidence to an away go off piece to start experimenting and inventing, as well as following the directions. And also that you
can't really make a terrible mistake. Yeah, people worry that it won't taste exactly the way they want it to, but every time you do something, you learn a little bit about what you've done that lets you do something else.
Did you participate with her in cooking.
No, I didn't actually start cooking, strangely, until I met Susan, my wife, and her father was an extremely good cook, as well as her mother, of course, and he became a kind of role model for me because on the weekends he would do the cooking. He liked to cook Chinese food because he had represented Chinatown in Montreal as a Federal parliamentarian, and watching him cook and learning from him just stayed with me. And I met him when I was seventeen seventeen.
Would meals be a very important part of your life sitting down to dinner at night? Did you all sit, you and your sister and your parents sit down meal cooked by your mother?
Absolutely. We lived initially in a very small house and then eventually my parents moved to a larger house. But the meal was the key point in the day. And my mother what time would it be?
Would it be would she'd go on French terms and have dinner at eight or would it be earlier school?
It was earlier, you know, seven ish. I like to eat late. Now. I don't remember what I like to do when I was a child. I just ate when when the opportunity was there. But my mother, you know up until I was in seventh or eighth grade, maybe beyond, which would bring me lunch at school because she just didn't think the school would produce a good enough lunch. So as a child, you were both teased because.
It was that embarrassing.
It was horribly embarrassing. But on the other hand, I had a very good lunch.
Yeah, she'd actually bring it to you, or she'd give it to you to take.
Sometimes she gave it to me. Sometimes she would.
Be really embarrassing to have your mother come with a plate of but nice, so nice.
You know.
My mother was is a fantastic mother.
So she sounds great.
And she believes that, you know, if you don't have a good meal, you're not going to have a good day. That's kind of where she's started that. Yeah, I do. Yeah puts you know, let's put it this way. A bad meal puts you in a bad meal.
Yeah. And so you grew up in this house. Did you say your father cooked.
No, My father once a year would make potato lotkis, which was the one thing he could make.
Where did he learn that?
I guess from his mother or his grandmother in Germany. But the kitchen was a disaster after that, So my mother was never that keen to have to do it because my father and cleaning up weren't actually synonymous. So latkis were delicious, but they were a treat to be had once a year.
And so you grew up in this household of primarily French.
Food, almost always Bogigno. My mother would cook a fabulous lamb, you know. Every once in a while she'd do, you know, a spaghetti of some sort, mostly spaghetti with meat balls. Very it was not her favorite thing to cook for some reason, but and my father loved meat, so we had, you know, probably the worst diet in the world. We had a lot of pork, beef, lamb, but always cooked, you know, even when it was a very simple my
mother had a way of cooking it perfectly. I remember at some point a friend of hers told her about kind of salmon. It was not quite a smoke salmon, it was a cured salmon. So she started curing salmon that was spectacularly good. I mean everything she touched, yeah, turned out really well.
I wonder if she could find the ingredients she wanted in Williamstown.
You know, there was a store half hour forty minutes away that she would go to. And you know, it's gotten better over time, and now when I go there to visit her, you can get pretty much anything you want. But that certainly wasn't the case growing up.
What we did our first book, Random House had a policy that whatever recipe you did had to be available to their cookbook editor who lived in Maine, that within fifty miles that she could get the ingredient. And now, of course with the Internet, it's all changed anyway. Everybody can get everything. Yeah, did you go to France in the summer? Did you go visit Where were your grandparents?
So my grandmother lived in Paris, and my cousins, who also lived in Paris, spent the summers in Cannes, in the south of France, so we'd go and visit them. And then when I was eleven, was sent off to live in the summer with some friends of my parents in ex Leba in the Saboas, and I would go and live with them for a couple of weeks, and then I would go to ski camp for a couple of weeks, and then I would come back and live with them. So I had this kind of idyllic childhood.
It's such a regional cooking, isn't it The food that you would eat in Paris or Normandy, It wo'd be different from Brittany and from excell and France, from the south of France, and it was very different.
Yes, that's that whole idea of teoir, that everything has some kind of deeply rooted local dimension to it that you can almost smell sometimes. Right, it's in the earth and in the way things are made. So you can have a chicken from Bresse in the savoir and it won't taste the same.
Yeah, just to have curiosity as a chef. Did she cook a lot with butter? I mean, I love butter. It's very interesting because we have an Italian restaurant where everybody's meant to love olive oil, and we all do. But when you get chefs around the table and we talk about cooking with butter, you know it's so delicious, isn't it?
Creasy Messo never entered the house ever. Maybe why my father had a heart attack at sixty.
Yeah.
Did he survived in many good years after that. But no, my mother cooked very traditional French food all the way through, so her Bogignon was a very rich red land sauce, and in the same way that she'd make a rule with, you know, the best butter she could find.
Yeah, growing up with this food, the French culture, going to Paris, you know, extremely elegant way of eating, going to the savoir. How did this affect you? I mean, did you have a standard of eating, of going out, going to restaurants.
So it's interesting. I wasn't that conscious of it as a child, because in fact, it just seemed normal. But I realized by the time I was seventeen or eighteen or even twenty, that one I loved going to restaurants. Two I loved to eat. That there was a certain kind of pleasure that came with a meal that you couldn't find otherwise in it. And a meal that had been thoughtfully put together was even more interesting than something quickly assembled. And when I met Susan and we met
when I was seventeen, what did you meet? We met in Grenod. I was there to race and she was there to study, and so somehow we got together. And our favorite restaurant when we lived in Gronold was a little Vietnamese place called the Poda La. I still remember it vividly. This is like fifty years ago, but it was exquisite Vietnamese food, and you learned quickly. And I hadn't really had Vietnamese food before it had some Chinese food. You learned very quickly, at least I learned very I
have eclectic taste. I love Indian food and I love Vietnamese food. I love new tastes that are unfamiliar. And then you try to understand how how did that taste come about? What had to happen to make chicken with lemon grass taste the way it does. And sometimes these things just sit in your mind, like I can remember that restaurant as if it were literally yesterday. I actually remember most meals I've had.
I think people, that's what we enjoy about doing this, is that food triggers. It's like a piece of music.
You know.
I can hear a song and remember where I was standing when I heard that piece of music. And I think food for many of us, maybe not is a trigger for memory, isn't it Absolutely?
Because it's olafactory, right, It's got smell to it, it has taste to it, it has texture to it has location. Yeah, right, you know, having the river cafe, which I have to say this is not an advertisement. I'm just going to say it's my favorite restaurant in London.
It should come now.
You know, I was supposed to be in London, but I had a back operation that threw my schedule off, so I'll be there in the New York.
Oh, it's a great season, and that's maybe now we should be the recipe because I thought it was really interesting that, you know, when you think about all the seasons of food, we love when something goes and something you know, when the fennel goes and then you have peas, or you know, the melons go and you can't bear it, but then you have peaches. But for me as a cook, I really look forward to the autumn. I think the autumn is almost a cook's time when you have the
dark pumpkins. In England we have grouse, we have partridge and now at last the porcini are really good and we just yesterday gout white truffles are amazing. So it's a very good season right now. So AS really pleased that you chose a recipe which I love, which is I think from the first book pasta with tomato and a dried porcini mushroom.
So you start with seventy five grams of dried porcini mushrooms. I'm already salivating because I love porcini, four tablespoons botlive oil, three garlic coves, peeled and sliced, one tablespoon of fresh time leaves, two tablespoons of parsley finely chopped, one dried chili crumbled, eight hundred gram tin of peeled plum, tomatoes drained of their juices. One hundred twenty milli liters of double cream. Can there ever be too much double cream? I'm just asking, Is that possible?
No?
I don't think so.
So we could add more to it.
One hundred and twenty grams of parmesan, freshly grated, two hundred and fifty grams of conchili, pasta sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, and extravergin olive oil. So you start by soaking the mushrooms in hot water for twenty minutes. Heat the olive oil in a pan and fry the garlic gently with thyme, parsley, and chili. Add the porcini and cook to combine the flavors. Add the tomatoes. Cook
together gently until the tomatoes have thickened. Add the cream, season then remove from the heat and stir in half of the parmesan. Cook the pasta and oiling salted water, then drain thoroughly. Add to the sauce with the remaining parmesan, stir well, add more parmeasan and extra virgin olive oil, and delight in the taste.
Do you make a lot of pasta? I do, so what is some of the what are you cooking now? So?
Last night I made a pasta that I sort of add libed on that we like, which is broccoli rob and spicy sausage. Is very simple pasta pasta.
Did you use with it?
I just use linguini, something that just pulls the sauce a little bit, and it's just like super simple. Broccoli rob gives a little bitter taste, but it's super easy.
Do you buy the sausage meat out of the sausage or do you cook the sausage and then crumple it.
I take the wrapping off the sausage and cook it that way so it crumbles up. And I always put a little bit of wine in and you know, some cheese and.
That just for the two of you do you entertain?
We do?
Yeah, what's your If I come to dinner at the Lowery House, what would it be like?
Nine times out of ten it's going to be some form of lamb. We have a great producer of lamb where we live in Canada. I mean just really epically good lamb. And so we'll either grill it roasted cubit and make shish kebabs, but mostly I like to do a spit turned wood fired leg. This pretty hard to beat.
And how many people do you invite?
There are five of us with my children. Then when we're up in Canada, Susan's brothers and sisters and cousins are there, so we're usually at the get go between twelve and fifteen. Then if we invite some friends over pick we get to fifteen or twenty, so it can be.
A be a big Are you in the kitchen well yourself? Yeah? Did you know? The River Cafe has a shop. It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbook, bos Linnen Napkins, kitchen were toad bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Durin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at Shopthrivercafe dot co dot uk. Let's talk about the museum Monarch, because I started out by saying that food and art and art and food, and I have
to say I was saying to Zad before that. I'm often ask in these question as you know, what's your greatest luxury or you know what is your luxury? And I always say, you know, you can keep your cavea, or you can keep your champagne, maybe even a white truffle. But for me, going to a museum when it's closed is the greatest luxury. And I've had that luxury and it really is to see art. But I have to say that two weeks ago I was here and my kids were here, and we all came here and it
was packed. It was full of people. There were babies and children and people lining up, and actually I found it so beautiful, so exhilarating to walk in. I think all these people want to do is come to the Museum Modern Art. They could have gone to Central Park. It was a beautiful day. They could have gone a boat down the river. They could have gone to a
football game. And I've been fine, But they were here, and I love that, you know, I love that so many people were here, and you know, congratulations, because I've been to museums that are packed and you want to run out the door. But it felt really good, and I'm not just flattering you. It really did feel a special to be here.
Well, I love it. I mean, the reason that I enjoy working in the museum is because I love the engagement between art and people. Right. I love to think about art, to talk to artists, to look at art,
to write about art, to just meditate around art. But I also feel that when you work with objects in space with people, they come alive in a different way and there's an incredible thrill and exhilaration really that comes when you see people enjoying an exhibition or an installation, or encountering a work of art they weren't expected to see or not even knowing that it existed. And you'll notice as you move around our museum that we've played
a lot with where we locate benches. Originally, when I started, benches were always put in the middle of a room because you assumed that circulation was the most important thing and you didn't want to interrupt people's ability to move around, and a brilliant art historian that we were working with just before our last expansion said, you know, if you want people to look at art, put the bench in front of the object and they'll actually sit there and
look at what's on the wall, as opposed to sitting on a bench and looking at their cell phone. So we tried. We didn't actually believe her, but we tried a few little experiments. She was completely right. So now when I walk through the museum, what I love is that you'll actually see two or three or four people seated together, strangers looking at a work of art and talking to each other about it. And it's that sense of community that gets created in the space of a
museum that makes it so rewarding to be here. So I'm so glad you enjoyed it, because I get turned on to a museum and see people.
Yeah.
No, it was really exciting to see that. But I also think that Richard did the Pompatouo with Renzo piano.
Brilliant and broke and broke the old mold and created the new mold.
Well, he did that music well. The very early, very first idea of the escalator on the outside was that you could come to a museum and not go look at the art, you know, they could just take a ride up the escalator, have a good time and then maybe one person would say, oh, I'd like to go in, or maybe everybody would want to go in. But there was a restaurant always, you know, George is quite a well known restaurant. Renzo Piano in Chicago has a restaurant
named after him, of course, called Tertzo Piano. So it's a player on the word piano, Piano, the third Floor and Renzo Piano. And here you have the Modern with Danny Meyer. What it was your idea of putting a really important restaurant in a museum.
So it goes back to this very simple equation that looking at art is an incredibly pleasurable exercise and eating at a museum should be equally pleasurable, and that there was no excuse not to have an outstanding restaurant at the museum, even though until we did The Modern, I can't think of another museum that had a really great restaurant and restaurants that were adequate, but not a place that in and of itself was a draw. So working
with Danny and we interviewed dozens of restaurant tours. I mean, actually it was quite a lot of fun because we spent six months trying out restaurants all over town.
And then what year was it?
This goes back to two thousand and three when we started to really put this all together, and then when we met Danny and understood first of all that Danny loves art. He comes from a family of collectors, he grew up around museums, so he's totally comfortable with the culture of museums. He's also an incredibly generous individual, but he also loves hospitality and fine food, and so the
combination was perfect. And we actually set out with Danny to say, can we actually build the best restaurant imaginable for anyone, forget whether or not it's a museum. And to his credit, he has really done a spectacular job. As you know, it has a casual side to it and a more formal side, but the food has always been fabulous. And now we have a young chef, Tom who is just knocking it out of the park.
And what is your involvement?
Our involvement is really quite passive. I mean, obviously, if we see things that are troublesome. We talked to Danny, but it is really a Danni Meyer restaurant. He and his food group Union Square Hospitality Group are responsible for operating it, managing it, and we have been consulted when there have been changes in chefs, which is very nice of Danny. But it's really a Danni Meyer restaurant at MoMA, as are the cafes.
Tell me about the cafes, So the cafes.
Are really designed to be first of all, a completely different kind of price point, so that more affordable, much quicker, faster, less extensively prepared food so you can get in and out relatively quickly, but still a place where you can get a great panini or a great rigatoni al pomodoro that's memorable that you can actually say, well, that was the best panini I've had in a long time. And they've worked very well. I have to say that the
menus are quite on the sixth floor. It's a very small menus or super simple, a few appetizers, fehumanes and a couple of desserts. Cafe two, which is the larger of our cafes, has a much broader menu, and then of course the Barroom and the Modern are full scale operations, but I can honestly say I've never had a bad meal at any of those places. And it's not just because they know who I am. It's because Danny really pays attention to the quality of the food.
Constant question that's interested in the way you describe the restaurants and the cafes and the Edibyshire show is obviously on the moment, which is just fantastic and everything. I would like enough to interview him. Last year in Los Angeles, I had his image of him in his studio in the desert, very contemplative by himself creating his artwork. What do you think it's like for him to come here and see it viewed in these very very busy spaces
and the restaurants and the cafes. Do they like that or do they think it should be more sort of spiritual in the way all contemplative?
No.
I think most artists, and certainly artists of Ed's stature, who enjoyed long and very successful careers. You know, you make art to share it with people, and I think one of the pleasures of working with the curator is you have an interlocutor who can help you see your own art, perhaps in new and different ways, but who can also tell a story with it for a public perhaps that you're unfamiliar with. And I think Ed was a little doe eyed. You know, he's a very love
he's such a such an unassuming man. I mean, it's not that he's without ego, it's that he's just a gentle person who doesn't assert himself in space. And yet of course he's incredibly successful. And I think he was a little doe eyed when people came for the opening and it wasn't one or two people, but it was hundreds and then thousands of people, all of them absolutely goggle eyed at what he had achieved.
And I think he was like, Wow, I can't tell you how people are talking about the chocolate Room.
You know, that's a great cutorial device.
It's sort of just absolutely can bring.
It to chocolate room. What was it like for the museum to have that?
Well, first of all, it was incredibly complicated to experiment with how to do it. The chocolate room is a room. It was a kind of conceptual piece that Ed did, I think first in nineteen seventy two or seventy four, and it consists of hundreds of sheets of paper that have been coated in chocolate. So the room has a certain tonality shades of brown. But more importantly, it has smell, and a deep, rich chocolate e smell that over time tempers a little bit, so it doesn't smell today exactly
the way it did a month ago. But you begin to smell it before you can see it, which is what I like. So you're kind of pulled along by this associative smell of chocolate that doesn't feel like it should be in an exhibition. And then you see this room and you marvel at the fact that actually it's chocolate, but it's not chocolate you can eat. You're never going to take one of those pieces of paper and chew it.
And there was a lot of experimentation of what kind of chocolate would produce the right kind of tint, and how would it sit on the paper, and how did the paper have to be treated so that the chocolate would remain because the chocolate retains a kind of monochromatic flatness to it, but if it started to show pooling of oil and modeling, it would be very different that that kind of flatness would begin to discision.
I thought it was like being in some monks sell Actually it's very strange experience. You have that richness of the chocolate, but also that austerity of the space.
Right, and and those sheets they're pinned right, so the sheets have a three dimensional quality to them. They're not glued to the wall. They flutter a little bit.
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table four, would you please make sure to rate and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, o, wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you.
You talked about your mother and father and your grandmother and Susan food.
What about your children so interesting? My eldest son is a non eater. I mean he eats only because his body needs it. Our daughter is an art historian, a curator. She just opened a beautiful show of an artist, a Columbian artist, Delsi Morello. She loves to cook. She loves to cook, and she learned from her both of her grandmothers, from her mother, from her father. She's a fantastic cook.
And it turns out our youngest son, the one who is now a journalist and working in Jerusalem, also loves to cook, and so Susan is constantly sending them recipes, reminding them what to do.
You have your mother's recipes.
So long ago, my mother made one of the great Kishas in the world. I mean truly a show stoppingly delicious, simple quiche laur and it still makes, you know, a cheesecake that I've never tasted better, but it is as light as a soux fle And she has shared the recipes with us on many occasions as we asked for them. But what I've learned for my mother is, and this happened with the Keish verses, she gave us the recipe and then let's say three months four months later, I said, Mom,
you know, I think I lost her recipe. Can you give it to me again? And she gave it to me, and it was like, but I don't remember you telling me about the tablespoon of flour. And what I learned is that my mother will divulge a recipe, but never one hundred percent of the recipe, so it's just little trick. Like, yes, it's her little trick. Then you got to write each one of them down and merge them together until you get the whole recipe.
One of you should do it because it's a treasure. You know, when you meet people who they say, oh, well, my mother left me you know, a little book of her recipes, and my grandmother left me a book, it means a lot.
Oh yes, and then there you know, I think as children, you grew up with those tastes, right, those tastes means something to you, and then your children memory have those memories of their grandparents because of the taste of eating the cheesecake at your grandmother's that she cooked just for you. Right, those things are special.
So here we are New York, which has incredible amount of restaurants. I'm actually rather ignorant of New York restaurants because either when I come it's a hurry, or I eat with my family or friends in their houses. What do you look for in a restaurant and what restaurants do you particularly enjoy?
So I look for places that are casual. I'm not necessarily that interested in a formal meal, though on occasion that's that's nice. That are casual with outstandingly good food, Places that really care about the quality of the food, how it's prepared, how it's presented, and that make you feel welcome even if you've never been there before, and you know it's a trick, right. You can have a really good meal and you're treated miserably and you probably.
Won't go back again.
You can have a mediocre meal where you've been treated extremely well when you might go back. So when you have a place that treats you really well, that understands what the welcome should feel like, and the food is exceptionally good, then you remember, right, it just gets seered into your mind. You say, well, that's one of my favorite places. Of course I'm going to go there.
And in New York where coming name names yeah becomes are nice.
There's a restaurant that used to be seen down on Chambers Street and then it closed and as a result of the pandemic, but it reconstituted itself as Chambers. It's an outstanding restaurant. The food is just always incredibly well prepared, and it's small and cozy. People treat you really well. It's one of my favorite restaurants in the city.
Glen the question that we ask, and I'm sorry this is coming to an end, and we could do part two. When you come to the River Cafe, you could show us how to cook lamb and if food alleviates hunger, or as you say, if you're an athlete and you're going to ski down a mountain or ride a bicycle up a hell, or if you're going to feed your children or you're in the country, it is a pleasure to share. It's something that is healthy, it's something that makes you work better and think better. But it also
is comfort. And there is a time in all our lives when we need to turn to food for comfort. And I was wondering, that's my last question to you today in New York is if you're going to food for comfort, what would that be.
There's nothing for me like a good slice of pizza. I just take this and I like to make pizzas. There's so much fun to cook and just you know, a simple pizza, a little bit of tomato sauce, you know, maybe some mozzarella, a leaf or two of basil, keep it simple. I could eat that non stop all day long.
Okay, Well, let's have pizza.
Question and wait, do you have a good pizza for you? Well, this is one of the things New York does, so you know, the people in New York get really bulshy about pizza. So Roberta's is, you know, buying large considered yeah in Brooklyn, sort of the gold standard. And I like cooking my own pizzas. Honestly, there's something actually almost alchemical about a pizza, right because of the heat of the oven and the way both heats from below and
the convection above. And once you once you free out how to get the taste you want, then you can replicate it. But if I need to, if I have this urge, this kind of when I have that deep urge for a slice of pizza, honestly, almost any slice will do. Around here. There's a place called Angelo's. It's not anything you wouldn't necessarily travel across the country for, but when you really need a good slice of pizza, it works.
Thank you. And you know, if food is art and art is food, and museums or restaurants and restaurants or museums.
And chefs are artists.
And thank you, thank you.
Thanks So it's great, well and love we have time to go and see the modern before leaving the museum.
Thanks, look at me.
And so we're just doing a podcast play And then I just wanted to say a few.
Words that.
You should if you're working here.
Ruthie's Table for is produced by Atimi Studios.
For iHeartRadio is hosted by Ruthie Rogers. It's produced by William Lensky.
Our executive producers are Zad Rogers and Fay Stewart.
Our production manager is Caitlin Paramore.
Our production coordinator is Bella Selini. Special thanks to everyone at The River Cafe.