J. J.
Martin and I, though years apart, have had parallel lives where women New Yorkers who left there to live abroad for a short time for love and stayed forever for love. Mine was for Richard Rogers. Hers was for Andrea Chicoli and the magic of everything Italian. A friend once told me that living in a foreign city makes you creative,
even if you do nothing all day. But creativity defines J. J. Martin, and she definitely does not do nothing all day, though she claims since moving to Milan, she is surrendered into the beautiful chaos that is Italy and through a rigor and discipline, created a brilliant business La Double Jay, the fashion design and lifestyle brand. We have much in common, strong values in our workspace, respect for the people we deal with every day, and a passion for color. A
passion for beauty. May be a few different things too. JJ is a maximalist, while I'm probably more of a mineralist. She loves vintage clothing. I've never worn anything anyone else is worn. But today we'll share our parallel lives, our love for Italy, our love for food, our love for fashion, beauty. And I am confident that by the end of our time together, we will add our love for a new friendship and a love for each other.
How beautiful. I love that introduction. I'm honored.
It's so nice because we both know of each other through friends, which is always the great connection. I always think life is about connections. Maybe we could start by your reading a recipe that you chose and it comes from I think our River Cafe easy book. But it is a really great that you chose this recipe now because it is very seasonal with a ridicio. It's creamy and warm and what we kind of need right now. So would you like to read the rest of love?
To read? Proshutto and ridicio taliate l three hundred and fifty grams of taliatel, six slices of perscutto one head of ridicio, one garlic clove, peeled and finally chopped, two tea zions of rosemary leaves finely chopped, fifty grams of parmesan rigiano grated, one hundred and ten grams of unsalted butter. So what you do is you cut the perscutto and ridicio into ribbons that are the same with as the telatele. You melt half the butter in a thick bottomed pan.
You add the garlic and rosemary and you cook for a minute. Then add half the chopped redicio and proscutto and you cook it just to wilt. Then you cook the taliately and boiled salted water until al dente. Drain and add the rest of the butter and half the parmesan. Combine with the cooked ridicio, then stir in the remaining ridicuo and procutto, toss thoroughly and serve with parmigiano.
Hmm, thank you. So you've said that cooking in Italy is an art, not a science, and you can pat to get laughed out of town? Will to use a cookbook? Can you talk to me about that?
So I moved to Italy in two thousand and one. I had no friends, no family, no job, no smartphone, no wireless. I was lost and I had no cooking skills. And back at that time, there was really no takeout food whatsoever. If you wanted to get anything taken out, you would get a pizza. Otherwise everyone was either in a restaurant or at their home cooking. And I went into a panic. I went into my overachieving American mode of needing to like conquer this like I did everything
else in my life. So I ordered the Dean and DeLuca Cookbook online, which was sort of my only reference point of like, how you know how to make some Italian food? And I was reading this cookbook like a
novel every night. I was taking notes, and I was practicing recipes from this book, not knowing that it was the least Italian kind of book I could have ever been working from, because each recipe had forty five ingredients and would take two and a half hours, and I didn't It wasn't until I really started watching the Italians and being part of their environment that I realized that,
first of all, no one cooks from a recipe. Everyone has learned from their mother or grandmother, and even if they do kind of have like a you know, a basis of a recipe, the whole idea is to really let your intuition take over and let the magic and real creativity come over. And it was so funny because you know, in these ear it took a long time for me to learn this. I've been in Italy twenty two years now, but I would say like my first ten years I was still in this place of like
really trying to understand food. I did take one cooking class at a Tellian restaurant down on then a video called Tano pasa milolo, and I was at this you know, table with like fourteen housewives, not understanding that this was not a beginner's cooking thing, like the these women knew how to cook and and and so he would always say the beginning of the recipe was like found a krema, find a crema, And I was like, what's a crema? How do you fire it on akrema?
Like I didn't want to do anything.
And he would give us these sheets where the recipe the ingredients were written down and there was no quantity, no method, method, No, there was no well maybe a little bit of method, but very approximate and literally no quantities. So the funny thing about this recipe of reading this pursuit from Ridikio, it is a very Italian recipe except for the fact that you've included quantities.
Yeah yeah, but you know, I think that it's really endearing that you got Dinan DeLuca cookbook because I think that if you don't know how to cook and really want to follow a recipe. Then it gives you the confidence too to go away. It's like fashion, it's like drawing, it's like poetry. You can't write free poetry unless you know the rigor of a Shakespeare's sauna. Then you can depart.
So maybe, unless you have a mother or father maybe who taught you to cook every day in your house, as you say you're Italian friends, following a recipe and then leaving it maybe is okay.
Yeah, I think it gives you the muscles and the training wheels, and just the comfort around being in a kitchen, around preparing ingredients, around seeing how you know, oil at different temperatures changes, you know, even cooking vegetables. I mean, it's the other thing I find really interesting. I was reminded as I was reading your recipe here. Italian recipes are known for their simplicity, but at the same time, there's two things that I've learned that are essential. Number
one is the quality of the ingredients. Because there's so few, you can't masquerade anything. So if you don't have incredible quality, ridicu And by the way, I highly recommend Treviso. It's the best less bitter, but you know, you need to have the best better, the best parmigano, the best rosemary.
Otherwise nothing's happening. And the other thing is technique. So the fact that you are, you know, adding half, you're adding the vegetables at different times, you're cooking them a different it's not as sort of there's a there's an art really to the way they prepare it that is really important.
I totally agree with you about Italian food that I lived in Paris for five years, six years when my husband is doing a project there and then, and I love French food. I love a sauce. I love finding that, you know, a piece of turbot under a bar of black. But then you go to Italy and the first meal I had was a piece of toast bisquetta with a little bit of garlic and then the olive oil. And
that was three ingredients. But had any one of them been any less interesting or of the quality, it wouldn't have worked totally.
And it's so funny you bring up France because one thing that I was so surprised about when I moved to Italy was how proud Italians are of their cuisine. And they're quite close minded to other cuisines, so you never want to travel with an Italian outside of the Italian borders because they're complaining about the food the entire time. And the other thing, which I find so funny is
no matter how good it is, French food sucks. They hate French food and they are and they and one of the reasons why they tell me, because I really got curious about this. They don't like a sauce unless it's on a pasta, and then it can't be too sauce. It has to be the right amount of sauce. Like so most Americans tend to oversauce and overcook their pasta, you know. So these are just all these like small subtleties. But like for example, an Italian would never put a
sauce on a meat. That's a big no no. So it's just funny. Or even a fish. They don't use sauces generally.
When you have misto, you have the sauce of Verde. But they're very they're very specific yea in general. But if you have a great piece of fish, they have SESSI here it is one of the chefs in the River Cafe, and you know, if it's as you said, it's a great piece of grilled sea beast. Why would you do anything more?
Yeah, And that's the I mean, this is what's so amazing about Italy is they distill everything down to raw its purest state, So you know, you just want the crispness of the lemon and the juicy fragrance of the olive oil. I mean, the other thing that I got there was an education in olive oil. Who knew, you know, the guy who I was referring to before about where
I was taking the cooking classes. His restaurant was called Tano Paseloyo and you walked in and he had probably four hundred olive oils lining every wall of the restaurant and he was an expert at pairing. People would go to his restaurant because there would be a different olive oil paired with every plate daily and it was this wonderful symphony that is such a subtletya that you develop.
But once you get rid of I mean, I think it's a really good metaphor for life, Like once you get rid of all the noise, then suddenly your senses are so much more tuned, and then you're really seeing the beauty of something so simple as an oil.
Just to go back from your incredible palette and your interest in food and Italy and ingredients and the way to cook. Growing up. We grew up in Los Angeles, Yes, I grew up in Tell me about early life and the Martin household.
Okay, well I do remember the spaghetti sauce my mom put ketchup in.
Yeah, okay. We had a.
Very food centric household because we were all athletes and there was copious amounts of food being made and consumed. So my mom actually did make a lot of stuff. My dad was a hunter and a fisherman, so our freezers were stocked with dove, quail, dove, dear, yeah, bore. I mean. The thing is he would go out hunting and bring it all back and we would eat this stuff for a long time. It was never really my fake.
Did you ever go hunting with him?
I did? I did, and then I just didn't want to kill animals. Just wasn't my thing, so I would hang out. I have two older brothers. They were really into this. So I went on a lot of camping, fishing, hunting trips as a as a young girl and wasn't into it.
Yeah, and being athletes, do they want protein or carbs or this was.
This was before knowing that like they needed to have the right balance between protein and carbs. They were just starving. I remember so well that, you know, we would all come back from whatever I was in gymnastics, they were in volleyball. We would all come back at like ten pm, and we've already had like four meals by that point.
Because my mom used to pack our dinners. We would have Stouffers frozen food that would be put in a thermos and that we would eat before practice and you know, like at four o'clock or five o'clock, and then we'd have another meal when we came home. We were eating like four times a day.
As a gymnast as well as a.
Gymnast, I was eating just fun of food.
Did you have to keep you away at a certain level or that.
Well, the thing was I was twice as large as every other gymnast because I was so tall, and I mean I was literally eight inches taller than most people, and you know, you're working. I was working out three hours every day, six days a week, and that that's wasn't seasonal, it was all year round. So I did that for about nine years. So it's just an incredible amount of calories that you're burning.
How old were you when you started?
I started the like the hardcore club gymnastics at nine years old, and then I finished when I was eighteen. Yeah, so it was really intense. And I and I, you know, I went to an all girls' high school, also very regress, so I had this upbringing that was very tight. And that's also has been such a wonderful thing that I that I explore in this in this book. The mom I mean Lano about out the loosening, the softening, the relaxing, because I really didn't learn that from a from an
early age. And you know, taking back to food, it was not relaxing while we ate because everyone was scared that it was all going to be gone, so we were all like fighting and grabbing for the food. So it wasn't this like long, luxurious, you know, relaxing moment. It was like, yeah, you was scarfing it down.
Did your father cook?
Was there an My dad barbecued?
Yeah, that's the thing. Men barbecue, and yeah that's how I often.
And my mom would make really nice stuffings for the meats. Like I didn't eat the meat so much I'm not into game, and actually, now it's so funny. I know I chose this don ride kio tellie I've I've since become a vegetarian, so I really don't eat meat or fish. But this recipe was my first and favorite from your cookbook, and it was one that I did so many times and it was so easy, and I was like, this is Italian cooking. That's I wanted to share it.
You can actually have it without the pashuoter. You can make it now. We do it a lot the ridicio, but sometimes we do a sefrito with the ridico, so we put a bit of you know, I can really cook it down and then and then.
You know what I would add maybe if I was doing vegetarian, I would add some toasted pine nuts and maybe just a tiny bit of for modrole, like even another for modrole, just to like it. I mean depends, but I think it's a great rest.
Do you want to say something about do you never made this recipe in the river carefoe?
I have?
I love.
Sounding very English. What I love is that the ridicule is the same shape as the pasta. Yeah, and so you have like this mouthful and you can't quite differentiate which part is which, but it all sort of is the same shape and it's so delicious when it all comes together.
And that is exactly one of the things that I was saying. It's like, you can have all the same ingredients, but it's about how you prep it. It's how you exactly these very simple subtleties that make all the difference.
Yeah, and as long as the ingredients are the freshest and the most beautiful, which we have hit the River Cafe, it just transforms the dish completely, makes it something really special.
Is that the ment. I still can't believe Sassy is a telling me because our.
English is so It was amazing when you left this home of family meals and your mother cooking and your dad barbecuing and hunting and fishing and you know, shooting, not fashion nothing. But then you went to university.
I went to Berkeley.
You went to Berkeley, and that was a big change in terms of food for you did it well.
Unfortunately, I didn't know who Alice Waters was at that time, and I didn't you know, I wasn't you know, probably in the position to go eat there. But the food was quite sophisticated, even just around Berkeley. I remember, you know, I lived in a sorority house, so we actually had these buffets of wonderful food and there was an incredible cook there. I've always been a baker, like that was something that I knew from a young age. My mom was baking a lot. She made a lot of really
great desserts. So the cook at our slaty house would always be making these wonderful homemade American cookies that I now cannot find in Italy if my life depended on.
It, Like what which one?
Just like just any chocolate, chewy, yes, ginger, molasses, oatmeal, raisin, all of those like that, the chewiness and the sort of softness brown sugar is an ingredient that just doesn't seem to exist in Italy the way we use it in American in the UK, and they don't use as much butter. I noticed Italians in general, so I would say the only kind of food group that's missing for me in Italy are the desserts.
Really Yeah, well, Italians I always you know, we always say Italians have their cakes for breakfast in there, ice cream on the streets and then an espress for a dessert. You know, you're so right. And I've been in homes where the food is so good and then they'll bring out one of those kind of custardy pies with the custard and then the food on the top, and you think, what relationship does this have to do with the most amazing pasta sauce. We just they don't. They do not.
Actually, there's there's I have two small complaints with Italian cuisine. Is one is the desserts and one is the bread.
Oh yeah, well you're not even in Tuscany. Wait, you get to Tuscany and there's no.
I mean, it's like a cardboard. It's a piece of cardboard. It's susy.
Jump in tell us.
What's nice though, is it's kind of like a vessel, so it can carry whatever you put on it. So if it has no taste, So when you taste the new oils, yeah put them on that bridge. It's catches, the sort of more salty or colta.
Is wonderful, but it's not bread. There's sometimes when I just miss bread and butter.
Yeah butter.
I love butter. And it's not a cult. We don't have. There's not a culture for that. And there are certain things that I learned. You know, one of the messages of this book that I wrote was surrendering to what is in Italy instead of always looking at what was not there. And at the beginning, I was like, where are the avocados, where's the cilantro, where's my non fat milk?
Yeah, you know, it's trying to find all these things. Where's my butter, where's my good bread?
And what I realized, so much of the exercise of living and embracing Italy is just allowing yourself to melt into the wonder and the magic and the beauty that is there, because once you do that, you will be rocket shipped off the planet into ecstasy. It's amazing.
I should probably say that with most travel you know that living in another country that you do is Mexico, or if you were in China or Japan that you you know, as you say surrender. I think it's really interesting the way I use the word surrender so often, and I really had to learn it, and it's and you use it in a very energetic and positive way rather than giving up. You know, it's not you know, in military terms, you're surrendered by it. You giving them
your flag and we've surrendered. Whereas you're using surrender as embracing, I would say, much more embracing the culture that you're living in. Talk to me more about the book and talk to me what you would try. Because it's so it's so funny, you know.
I when I first started my company, lit Double Ja in twenty fifteen, I was selling my collection of vintage clothing, and I was showing it on all of the creative women in Milan, the women that I you know, as a journalist for fifteen years. They didn't want me writing about those women. They wanted me interviewing George Romani and dul Jingobana and the advertisers. But I had found that there was this like incredible cluster of the most creative, cool,
shockingly adept housemakers in Milan. Like I couldn't believe that they were these women that had these incredible creative careers and that could still turn out dinner beautifully or entertaining flawlessly. Their homes were decorated incredibly, everything, even their pantry clas it's were amazing, and there was so much to learn from them. And I launched the website. I had this whole section on you know how to live like an
Italian and the school of shura. A shura is an Italian or a Milanaise housewife, which these women were not housewives, but they had all the like the tools, and they had all the techniques. And at the time, well, they're well staffed.
That's I was going to wait for that. They're well staffed laws because I think to do that, to work all day and then do all that they know how to. It's a division of power.
But like you know what I've also learned as having a company, so much of that is understanding, like what you can farm out to others, like what should be your own purview and what you can share with others. And the thing is they don't just farm it all out, you know, they know what can be done, and then they they know that they should be tasting the sauce here and making you know, they really know their own
They have the mastery of each of these skills. Anyway, during COVID, a book agent came to me and said, JJ, you know everyone is miserable. They've been inside their homes. I think we need a book on all of this brilliance and exuberance that is Italy and all those images that you've produced over the years. I've done so many photos of tabletops and our homeware and food and the fashion, and I said, you know, it feels like kind of a cliche. I feel like, you know, we've seen a
lot of books like this. I'm happy to give it to you, but if I do that, I also want to tell the real story, which was I was miserable in Italy for my first five years there, and I was fighting against the system. I was irritated at every turn. I was getting pissed off. I was fighting with people at cocktail parties because their movies were dubbed, and I was like against dubbing, I mean the most like absurd,
superficial things. I found myself in bank lines for two hours for no reason, just to like depositive check, I mean, just you know, the inefficiency, et cetera. And it really took me. So, I mean, I could feel my whole body system in resistance and rejection of everything that was around me. And I was rejecting the food. I was rejecting the customs, the traditions, the timetables, the rhythms. Everything was wrong in my mind. And this was just my huberus.
This was my American privilege, coming over and thinking that like, my way was better than like five thousand years of expertise. And so the book is a it's journey of surrender and of letting go of that judgment, that criticism, needing to have things my way, and slipping into what is actually a very feminine energetic of Italy. So that's why it's called Mama Milano because I after later in my life,
I developed a spiritual practice. I started learning, you know, the difference between masculine and feminine energy, the yin and the yang, the divine mother. And I'm like, this is Italy and like America was so quite you know, patriarchal and go and move and and you know, it's it's all about checking off things and and it's very transactional. And I realized Italy is a feeling based culture. It's a relationship based culture. And I had a lot to learn.
So the book is filled with all the lessons that I learned. That of course were how to you know, decorate my table and decorate the house, get myself dressed, but really how to become a better person.
Did you ever think of leaving? Oh yeah, yeah, but you.
Stayed as critical as I am, I'm also as stubborn. So I was like, you know, I had made this decision to move to Italy followed a guy, and I was like, I wasn't going to give up.
You know. The thing but Italy is that with all the we look at Italy and there's a you know, one political party, then there's another, then there's another, then there's a Minister of Finance and then there's another, and then the way they on the transportation in Florence is different from Patava, and it just seems to be that chaotic. But no, but you know what they do it so well. You know, they look at Italy, you know, they produce
beautiful clothes, the beautiful cars. I remember sitting in the cafe in Florence and every young woman would come and dress so beautifully, you know, and I think, how do they are they all kind of making a huge amount of money and are they how do they spend that much money on a dress by Prada or a pair of trousers by a doul Chicabata. And somebody pointed out that they're probably all living at home. Oh and they're
not paying rent. They're so clever you know, we're all knocking ourselves to my kids to pay, you know, to live in a flat with sixteen other people do that, and you know, they can't go to the movies, or you can't go to the fit, or you can't buy whatever you want to buy. And then Italy kind of works in this way and.
That reinforces this very important focus on and importance of the family. And I talk about the mother of the you know, because that's the center of the family, and the table is the center of the family. And I don't have the numbers. This is just is not a scientific.
Steam and no data.
There's no data to support this book. I will just say, of all the Italians I've met versus all of the Americans, the Italians are some of the most well adjusted, easygoing, happy, personally satisfied human beings, Whereas a lot of Americans that I know are really struggling. And I think a lot of it has It's not necessarily about food, but so much of it is like this sense of tolerance that the Italians have. And they are at a slower pace and that's okay, and.
They get it done, and they get it done. I agree. What do you think about because you lived in.
I lived in Florence when I was a baby, and then I also lived in Paris with it. I've spent most of my lifetime living in England. That's why I sound very English. I know what you mean. But the pace is much slower, but everything still gets done and to the highest standard.
Yeah.
And it's funny because that family central unit. I know my father when he was growing up in Rome, when you go to university. If you go to university, you live at home with your family, which is such a foreign concept here in England.
And it's not something uncool, No, it's completely normal. Yeah, it's actually quite strange. If you don't under is going to get ironed by your mom.
I mean, it's like amazing. It's interesting about that again, about women. I always say, if you go to when we go on the wine trips, you know, we can all go to Italy to taste the new oil and the wine, and you go, we go there and we look fine. But then you go into some little cafe or bar at a hilltown in Kianti and all the guys are wearing iron shirts and they're all looking so smart, and you do wonder about the mothers at home who are doing that and the women and I'm sure there's
going to tell me. People are going to say, I'm not iron you sure, I'm just not doing it. You know, I have a book to read or a book to write, or some thing I'm going to travel. And it's you know, it's one of the concerns about as as simple as jarring tomatoes. You know, who's gonna do that? Yeah, maybe
nobody should do it, maybe robots couldn't do it. Instead of this romantization of We're all going to stay home and put jar tomatoes and jars or maybe you know, because everybody else is going to be doing every other thing, that would be something that we want to do, you know, that will be In fact, I was just going to say, I'm actually.
Seeing men get way more involved in things that I like, you know, jarring things. You know, there's and there's a there's a real return also I've seen in the last twenty years. I used to be a journalist covering fashion and design for many publications, and one publication, Wallpaper, was always really interested in like all the artisans. So I
was always interviewing Italian artisans. And what was so cool was that you had these artisans that were like seventy plus, and then there was this whole new generation of like twenty five year olds that realized how cool it was to be a carpenter or to make something, to make something with the hands. But there was kind of like that fifty year gap. So I do think that there's I just Italy has wonderful values, and it takes longer to figure it out. It's more chaotic, it's less organized,
it's less dependable. But once you understand the rhythms, once you start realizing that actually all you need is to make friends, you know, your life just, you know, it just unravels. It was such a gift to me.
We just had JJ Martin here and I'm here with Sean now and I'm talking about shops because you know, she is in retail, she's in design, and she's into spirituality, and so there is a kind of parallel life although she's in Milan and we're in London. Of loving beautiful things, and she's going to open a store in New York that has a room downstairs where you can meditate, where you have a kind of spiritual experience as well as shopping upstairs. I don't know what our spiritual experience would be.
In the River Cafe.
We've got piano.
We have a piano that's spiritual and so especially right now with Christmas, you know, it's so I think if joyousness is spiritual, which it is, I think there's such a joy in our shop. Of the colors, you know, especially the matches and the books and the bags that we've branded ourselves, that we've put our signature on. We thought we'd show you around.
And we've got lots of things going on at the moment, so we've had lots of fun little things.
I know, these Italian.
Right of anxiety piry.
Familiar with them.
This is like legit Italian.
This is this is totally legit Italian.
This is not like so many times my friends bring me to Italian restaurants. They're never legitimate, you know, they don't really do it in the Italian way. But this is this is legit.
You won't find.
Hi. You know.
What I love about your shop is that you have very authentic Italian things, but in the packaging that is like totally not.
One is fine because did she see the hampers?
Did Yeah? She loved them? Yeah? And how many years have you been doing this hampers six maybe six? I remember when you were Satistan and said, why don't we do the alternative to the kind of Fortnam and Mason hamper instead of putting little jars of things that you just kind of give away to make a River Cafe hamper.
That's been a big learning curve for us, isn't it, Because when the brief is that nothing in the hamper gets put in the back of a cupboard. That was at one of our defining things that we had given away to somebody who came to know everything in it has to be You couldn't go round any shop in Britain and put all those things in a box and get that for the you know, the price, which so
it felt like an honest product. But also if I had to feel like something that we would all like to receive and Ruthie would like to receive, so that.
That was our We put books and it was so nice when we can put one of our books in one year we put a book of Richardson. We wanted always to put music in but we've never achieved that playlist, a playlist and the glasses, as you said, and I think the joy of the box itself. People really love the box, so they talk about opening up a brown package and seeing this pink and yellow box and opening that up and finding a beautifully packed Yeah.
And this year we were in Venice and we found this really great linen shop and they've done these snapkins for us this year, which a really nice cocktail naps. And we often go round to shop ourselves and covert things that we want to buy because it's just so would buy. I love the fruit jellies. I think they are bring back a fruit jelly. I say that's quite an old fashioned thing. They're really beautiful. I love the cocktail stirs sensing a trend by anything shout out.
Else? Is that the kids coloring really cool? I like the playing cards. Yeah, and also hello the crackers. Yeah, we have great crackers.
Well that's a bit of fun. Trying to design a cracker where you've got something in it that doesn't get just thrown away. We felt that was the hardest challenge. But this year we've done these really cute badges. They're like a kind of enamel pin. My favorite is a spaghetti bonglai badge.
The River Cafe is excited to announce the return of our Italian Christmas gift box is our alternative to the traditional hamper. They bring you all of our favorites from the River Cafe, kitchen, the vineyards and the designers from all over Italy. They're available to pre order now on shop at the River Cafe dot co dot UK. You worked for Calvin Klein before you went to Italy, and I remember a very good friend of mine worked with Calvin Klein and she was in quite a senior position.
But they had a rule that if anybody sent you flowers, they had to be white. So I mean, talk about control. I mean I kind of respect it because sometimes you go into this array of kind of flowers in every single color. But it's interesting that you went from a company like that that was so controlled to what you know and then your joy of what you've done and you know, and I want to talk more about your life.
I felt so stifled at Calvin Kline. I have to say it was. It was kind of a scary place to be. Even the yellow sticky pads were white, so the I mean, everything was sterilized. That was the moment in my life that I discovered vintage because I didn't have a lot of money, and the Chelsea Flea Market
in Manhattan every weekend had this incredible vintage fair. And that was back in you know, nineteen ninety nine, when prices were still incredible, and so you could just get these incredible you know, coats and gowns and and and so I was really developing that like eccentric, colorful pattern loving thing that was always in me. You know, the Calvin aesthetic was never really my thing.
But they did do beautiful clothes as well, amazing quote yeah in Italy, and underwear and it made in Italy. Yeah. That's the other thing about Italy, the respect I have for the Italian, as you say, either craftsmanship or workmanship. I remember the first time Rose and I went to look at where they made parmesan. We went down this really dirty, dusty road and it was kind of you know everything. You saw these barns in the background. We thought,
where are we going? What are we doing? And then you walked into this kitchen where they were making the parmesan cheese. And they could have been making rockets to go into outer space, or they could have been doing a kind of vaccine to cure a disease. They all had masks, they had white coats, they had their hair tied up, you know, And it's a kind of in built pride which I sew sewing respect. You know.
Did you ever go see any of the reculta being made? And yes, I did, Yes, warm for breakfast.
I know that's another parallel that maybe we don't have because I remember taking that ricotta out of the thing and it was warm, and it was hot, and I thought I might be sick. But let's talk about your eating. So we eat more ricotta for breakfast.
Yeah, when I can.
Okay, So how do you how do you do that?
What?
And what way do you have it? On a bad piece of bread? You take a piece of piece of bread? But okay, so you take a piece of that. We do in the River Cafe, and we love that baked, don't we say? Say what do we do with ricotta?
Absolutely? We also bake it in our wood oven with a little bit of oregono, and so it's all slightly crispy at the edges and then really soft and warm in the middle of frost.
That's another thing. Oregonal for me was a game. There were certain ingredients. Once you come to Italy like olive oil that I was like, whoa, what is that like? It's like a whole new thing. Same with oregano from Sicily or from the south of Italy wherever, especially Pendeluri. I don't know if you've ever met to the island of Pendealeria, but the capers and the oregano from that
part of Italy. I like to buy food when I'm traveling to get the local you know, the frieze from Pulia or the especially the the capers and the oregano, or just sensationally, I buy a lot of it and is dried and then I just fill up my jars. You know, you're not whatever. I'm not going to get cilantro in Italy.
I have not surrendered taking go back to California, but I'm not getting cilantro. Do you feel do you feel as you speak Italian beautifully and you've lived there and you have a company, do you feel linked to the country of your birth in political or social?
Absolutely? I mean I do. I both of my parents are deceased. I have two brothers that live around Los Angeles. But there's something really powerful, you know. My mom's family was from Los Angeles. So her grandfather moved there in the early nineteen hundreds, and so there is this kind of like ancestral thing whenever I go back, and I feel it energetically too. I do, and I think the earth of our birth is so powerful and you've got it, you know. I had to do a lot of clearing there.
I had to do a lot of letting go, a lot of forgiveness. And now I go back to Los Angeles and I just I'm like, there's a reason it's called the City of Angels. I feel it. It's so potent. That being said, I don't really want to live there all the time. I love having the kind of best best of both worlds, and I don't really feel like, I, you know, like either one is really my home. I don't.
I feel like I'm just a home on planet Earth. Yeah. Do you find being a woman in Italy we talk about the role of the woman as a mother, as a connector, as the person who creates the people who can then create. But do you feel as a woman that you're treated differently in business as you might be in the United States. Do you have the respect for your work that you would have.
I think they're surprised every time I show up and like I'm the boss, and I think they're like, you know, they're sort of like, oh wow. But this is the thing about it time. They're very open minded. Yeah, so I think that it's like it doesn't occur to them, it would happen, but when it happens, they're very open. And the thing about an Italian if you can just connect to their heart and get them excited and motivated
about something, they will do anything for you. You know, when I started the website, all those women they were gallery owners, they were furniture designers, architects. You know, they weren't bankers. They were all creative people. There aren't quite a few powerful women.
Are your prime Minister?
Is that the I mean even you know, you see that like the Massoni family with Angela and Resita. There's a lot of female like the Wanda Ferragamo taking over ver Salvatore. You know, Max Maara is led creatively by a woman who's been there for like fifty years. There's a lot of like Donna Tulliversace. There's a lot of Musica Prada.
Yeah they're bossy, yeah, oh wait, they're they're strong articly.
Right.
You know, I'm actually better ambitious and then women a bossy But that's all right. I think we can be there, but we can be bossy too. BOSSI is okay. How many people work for you? Seventy seventy, one of whom is sorry, it was better about this, says, So you told me the story about the kitchen I did.
I did read somewhere that when you were searching for a new kitchen for your house in Milan, you had a friend of yours who suggested that that was a sort of nineties poloform kitchen. Would you mind telling us the story?
There was so I was newly divorced. I had to start home from scratch. And you know, when you move into apartments in Italy, there's generally no lights, no kitchens, no closets. It doesn't matter if you're buying or renting like that, it's just their empty boxes. So you basically have to start from scratch, so it's quite like an expense. I was like, I guess I'm getting any kea kitchen, Like, I guess That's what I'm doing. And I had a friend who he's a wonderful antique dealer, Rymondo Garral Look
him up when you're in Milan. He has just the most fabulous eye. Finds pieces so special and I always kind of refer to him anytime that I'm doing something new, and I just we this is so Italian. Come over, let's have a cup of coffee and talk about my new creative project. This happens all the time. So he came over and he was like, you know what, I think there's a Signora. I'm buying some other stuff from her.
She might have a kitchen. Let me just see. He calls me up and a few days later he's like, yeah, you know, she's got this nineties polyform kitchen. It's Bordeaux red, and but you know it's about what did he say, what's this like twenty centimeter or something like He's like his twenty centimeters too short for your wall. I was like, Raymondo, I can handle like an twenty centimeter hole. I mean, that was so Italian that he had, like it had to go all the way to that. I'm I'll use
it as a broom closet. So the next thing I know, this marble topped polyform kitchen that cost me in order to buy it, ship it and install it. Ship it. It was in Milan, but bring it over cost me less than going to get a new, tricked out Eka kitchen. And it brings me so much satisfaction. This kitchen is so gorgeous and I'd love cooking on it. I mean the only problem is that they don't have gas. It's it's annoying.
Yeah. I have a kitchen story, which is that my husband, Richard Rogers built, was building the Lloyd's building. I've all we moved into our house. We need to have an island unit. You'll have to come and seated and stay inless deal. And it has five five burners, so it's in the living space. It's very very minimalist. And this is before I was cooking in a restaurant. And we've had it for forty years and for the last I'd
say twenty years. You can't light all five burners at the same time, no, so you can light one and then maybe you can light the other. And so every engineer in London would come over and try and fix the gas, and try and do this, and try and do that. And I went into Boffy. You know, Buffy was just really fancy Italian fancy. I went over there and I was joined to the guy and I said, you know, I told I told him. He said, Richard Rogers house, amazing. I'd love to I'll solve this problem
for you. And I would come in and he'd be lying on the floor underneath the island unit, drawing, you know, all the gas and the places and where the where the gas flowed, and how's it going? Is going fine? You know, I'm really doing well. He left, and then
three days later we got a letter from him. He said, dear Ruth Rogers and Richard Rogers, I have spent five days in your kitchen, and what I really think is that it's the most beautiful kitchen I've ever seen, and that you should donate it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and buy a baffy kitchen, which we didn't do. I still have. You know, thirty years later you have to light it ten times. But to
know a kitchen is important. It's important how you work in it, how you live in it, how you and you don't make it work.
It be so funny because I also found that when I was a journalist, I found the cook the process of cooking so helpful because whenever I had a creative block and I couldn't write, I could cook and then I would get back into the flow because so much of creativity is just allowing yourself to get into that frequency. And it was so healthy and satisfying for me. The bigger my company gets and the more responsibility to have and the more travel I have, I find it very
challenging to spend as much time cooking. I usually do it on the weekends. But it's really nice. I'm in a new relationship now and it's so fun to have a boyfriend that cooks for me. I'm like, this is the sex thing that could ever happen.
Yeah, we said that to Michael Kay in the first interview we did, because there's a scene in this movie, The Ipcress File where he seduces a woman by cooking for her, and you get it.
You know it is so because not only is it, I mean it's just it's so nurturing and they're like so self relying in it. It's such a gift. It's really amazing.
And so what do you what would you like to do next? What is your plan? So I have a kind of yeah, where you'd like to be in a year's time, five years time, next month.
Okay, so next year, I'd like to have a store open in New York, and I'd like it to kind of be weird. Like my Ma Lonstra. We have a Divine Mother Goddess cave downstairs. You have to come and visit.
What is it?
Divine Mother Goddess cave way, I say, I'm coming to visit. I'm not committing to anything. I don't know what it.
Is, so it's it's underground. I commissioned this artist from Romania to kind of create this whole descent into the feminine, into the darkness, and so she's got all of these symbols, mystical symbols that she's painted. And then I asked her to paint me five manifestations of the Mother. So you have Collie, you have Kwan Yin, you have Mother Mary, Isis and Green Tara, and they're all mother frequencies from
different wisdom traditions, et cetera. But they're all really talking about the same thing, which is this feminine energetic I really started getting like obsessed with this, you know. It was like Italy was teaching me this. I was learning about it in my spiritual practice, and we use this space downstairs. We hold meditations there, yoga, spiritual channelings, all sorts of different things. So you know, this is on the most traditional road in Milan. You've got a very
untraditional thing happening. So when I go to New York, I'd like to do another thing as well where we Maybe it would be nice also in New York to have some of our homewhere that we create alongside the fashion has been popping up in little cafes here there, and I think like it would be really nice to have a showcase for that. So maybe partnering with someone in New York that would be a great deal. Real goal is ultimately to buy a piece of property in Sicily and open up a retreat center.
Okay, can you do that? Why not?
I think so?
I think you can. I think I can do anything. I think I can. You know, I think you have. Maybe I'd love to see this. Yeah, it sounds to be like you can. You have done so much, and so I think before we we end this really fabulous conversation, I would ask you. We've talked about food as adapting of surrendering. We've talked about food is connecting. We've talked
about food is creating, but it also is comfort. And so my last question to you, JJ is to ask you if you need comfort, and I hope you don't very often, but if you need comfort, and do you want to find it in food, what would be the food you would reach for?
Okay, So I'm just going to be really honest and tell you, for many years, sugar was my comfort food and I was using it and abusing it was such a gift, it was such a friend, and then it was such an enemy. So for many many years my comfort food was those chewy American cookies. So I would even like when I first I was really using it as like you know, as someone would alcohol or drugs. I mean, it was really my drug. And I would in Italy because I couldn't find the desserts, I would
make cookie dough, especially oat milk. How good is oatmeal? Cookie?
Do?
It's the best? So you know, it's a really honest question. I mean, like people do use many people use food as true comfort, and I was using that for a long time. I try not to eat as much sugar like that because it's it's not good for my system. So now just a homemade plate of a spaghetti that I learned, a taliate that I learned in Pantalaria that has capers, alives, tomatoes, super simple, a pasta dish gives me that comfort food.
That the.
I use.
Yeah.
Well also because most of the time I'm trying to go like gluten free, so I'm eating my quenewie and I'm my white brown rice and then but if I really want to, I might bring it on.
Okay, well, let's go have some faster. Thank you so much for coming today. I'll see you in Milan.
Ruthie's Table four is produced by Atami Studios for iHeartRadio. It is hosted by Ruthie Rodgers. 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. This episode had additional contributions by Ceci Jusipetti. Sean special thanks to everyone at the River Cafe
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