John Gray and I met last May when You're on Appeal, the global director of Arts for Chanel invited me to be his guest on their Connects podcast. John and I got together and we spoke about family, our cookbooks, ghetto gastro, collaborating with creative partners, food activism, and a lot more. Today, though, the tables are turned and Sean is my guest on Ruthie's Table four. He's just had a lunch at the River Cafe and now with Sean Owen, we're ready to pick up where we left off. So here you are.
When did you get here? Did you just fly in from.
On fresh off the plane dropping the flame? Fresh from New York? Your birth state?
I know it is one hundred miles north. We still claim you, you can claim you. That's a good state. And what are you doing here?
I'm here for freezing the one five four Art Fair and to see you. I don't want to wait till you got to New York. I wanted to come do this.
Yeah, to do it here? Well, why don't we start? As we're talking that food? Your recipe? So we asked you to choose the recipe from one of our twelve cookbooks. And you chose I.
Got the linguini with crab. I don't know how to pronounce it with the Italian pronunciation linguini al grancio. Is that right? You said you like linguini agraaccio. Linguini with crab serves ten Two large male crabs about two to three kilograms, cooked and picked. Three fresh red chilies, finely chopped, Three handfuls flat leaf parsley finely chopped. Make sure that knife is sharp, juice of four lemons, three garlic clothes ground to a paste, five hundred grams of linguini that
evo aka extra version olive oil. Put the white and brown crab meat in a large bowl. Lookas everybody's coming together. White and brown. Add the chili and most of the chopped parsley, the lemon, juice and crust garlic, stirring the olive oil. This sauce should be quite liquid. Cook them linguini and a generous amount of boiling salts of water. Then drain and stir into the crab sauce. Serve with the remaining finely choked parsley.
Okay, so why did you choose this recipe?
Well, crab is a very meaningful ingredient for me, And then when I think about ghetto gastro our signature dish involves crab. It's the triple c's corn bread, crab and caviare and for me, like growing up in communities that are historically underestimated, they tell you things like, oh, the people in your community are crabs in a barrel. They don't want anybody to succeed or thrive. But you know,
crabs don't belong in a barrel. So when you think about different types of environments that humans should exist in, it should not be in environments with scarcity and lack. It should be abundance. You know. I think it's enough on this plane of for us all to thrive and not just have to.
Survive and tell us a corn bread yeah, cornbread.
Yeah. So this dish like it started with the name I want to say, like I feel like in twenty and thirteen, we just I was listening to this group called Triple Seeds, the Carol City Cartel, and I'm like, yeah, we should do a dish name Triple Seeds, And I just started thinking of things that would work with the letter C. So corn bread we use as a base and the dishes had iterations like we've done corn bread with crim fresh and cucumber, but none of these things
were just they didn't work like properly. But then we were like, oh, let's just make it. Let's make it opulent, and then we built the storytelling into it once once we found that. So when you think about corn bread, that's a collaboration between enslaved Africans and indigenous Native Americans, right, because that's an American ingredient corn. Then you think about the crab again with the crabs and a barrel, so
like having that layered storytelling in the dish. And then caviat you know, which often people reference as the pinnacle opulence. Like you think caviar, you think truffles. Right, when you think something that is expensive, like when you're on a date and they're like do you want that supplemental caviar or truffle, you look at across the table like take it easy. But yeah, So it's something that is not
necessarily European. It's really like Middle Eastern, you know, when you think about coming from the castm and see Persia. Russia also connects to that, so and it's black. So you wanted to put the black at the top of the dish, you know, so to think about how these things could stack up to have a narrative.
So tell us about Ghetto Gastro.
Well, Ghetto Gastro. It's a collection of individuals from the Bronx. We use food as a vehicle to tell stories. So it's me, my partner Lester, my other partner, Pierre, and we started just doing a lot of like creating experiences like around the world. Really started doing house parties at
my house now. I remember my first time having caviar was caviar that Lester took from his job at Madison Square Garden that they had like extra because he was the soux chefs at the Delta Suites, so they were all these crazy ingredients like far grive and often they didn't use them all, so he had a lot of caviar. I remember he took some file he made a beautiful
torch show. I used my food stamps and go to Whole Foods to go to the farmers park a gets some produce and we would host these dinner parties for
friends at my tiny West Village apartment. And this is in twenty twelve, and then from there we just started doing projects with different collaborators like brands or art institutions, and they wanted the essence, and it's really about highlighting the reference material where we come from the Bronx, you know, looking at hip hop as an exercise and postmodernism like a symblige, like taking things that people don't imagine go together and creating a new vernaculus.
When you describe yourself, are you a chef? Are you a cook?
I've typically called myself the dishwasher with thin ghetto gas show because my partners are like farm trained, restaurant trained chefs, whereas me, I'm good with the menu in my hand. I handle the business in the creative direction. I would like to think my palette is incredible just because I've tasted so many things and I have a deep love and knowledge and respect for the people that use their hands.
I don't have the skill to make it all work on the plate, but the concepts are there, so it's a great collaboration.
Do you talk a lot about collective and I was wondering if you could tell us what collective is. What is the meaning of a collective?
I think convening and being a part of a collective in community is essential to me because I never really took the time to become really good at anything but assembling people. So I kind of need other people to help make things that I want to exist in the world. So it's kind of been a means of survival for me, like a necessity like and it started I think early when I was really young and most of my friends
were a lot older than me. So when they drew they drew way better, and I was like, I'll never get this good. But I have a lot of ideas. So can I use them as a vessel to help create the ideas that are in my brain and look the way I want them to look because my hand wasn't able to create what I was thinking?
And is it for profit? Is it it's a business?
Absolutely?
And then what about your work in the Bronx.
The community efforts that we do. I feel like, in my opinion, growing up how we grew up and where we grew up and still having family members and relatives and dear friends that might be living below the poverty line or not have certain access. It's not like we just escape the reality, you know. So it's unfortunate, but it's also I do love the grounds and effect that I still live in the community that I grew up in,
you know. So you're dealing with issues of broken homes, incarceration, all of these things that come with generations of systemic oppression. But for us, we focus on food. Food is our tool, right, So we work with organizations I like to say, we try to empower and provide resources to people that are actually doing the work. Like we have a platform and we talk about it, but we work with the Southretta family their own Lamorada, which is a hawking restaurant in
the South Bronx, but they're undocumented. When the pandemic hit, they just started using the food that they had in their pantry and cooking for families and just not charging them.
So we saw that work happen and we're like, oh, we need to support this, and then we partnered with Rethink Foods, got some money from some brands, use some of our own dollars, and just like started feeding people and also people that were forgotten about, like people that were formerly incarcerated elders that couldn't like walk down from Nisha to go get to the soup kitchen, like, so delivering it to their door at the height of the
Pandemics and they also have a community garden. So we've been doing a lot of work with them in The Bronx and then some our organization, some stuff with Lauren Halseley South Central la some organizations we work with in New Orleans, and we try to spread it out.
South Bunks is one of the poorest series in the United States.
Yeah, I don't know if it's still accurate, but it definitely had the poorest congressional district in the country, which always shocked me because we.
Think that's amazing that in New York. You think poverty would be in Appalachia in the South.
Or Mississippi or something. My ignorance, I was like, all right, that has to be somewhere different. But now it's like in New York City, what do they say, eighty blocks from Tiffany's Like there was a movie that came out about how different things are eighty blocks from you know, Fifth Avenue or whatever.
Access to food is very evident in poorer areas of the United States. We're in any country that I remember reading about the South Bronx, but you know, if you look at the kind of access we have to food, in other areas that the access of fresh vegetables in the South Bronx was limited.
It's so ironic. This is very true the Bronx in general, not just the South Park, but when you talk about food insecurity or when you talk about poverty, the Bronx is highlighted. And the thing that's so ironic about the Bronx is that the largest food distribution center in the world of its kinds in the South Bronx. So much of the food that's in the Bronx leaves, but it
not just leaves, right. The people in these communities are dealing with the effects of the diesel fuel emissions, right, So when you look at asthma rates in these neighborhood when you look at obesity or different like hypertension, high blood pressure, all the results that come from lack of a healthy diet, the lack of access and how inconvenient it is to find a spot to get fresh food, like Hunts point with the food distribution centers actually one
of the most food and secure spots probably in the city because it's so industrial and it's like broken up. But I also think there's a lack of We also have to talk about desire right, And I think culturally so many of our foods, Like when people think about Black American food, they think about often what they call soul food, and I think all food is soulful. But when we look at the diets that our ancestors had, they were like more and more balanced. I think for us,
it's also about creating desires. And I think you create the desire through the storytelling and also making it compelling and culturally relevant. For like vegetables to taste delicious in a certain way.
We worked Sean and I for a couple of these. We went to Edible school Yard. Do you remember that experience of trying to teach children about vegetables, about food through having gardens in the school that could be on the roof, it could be in the car park, but to grow, which she calls the edible school yard.
Do you remember in Shepherd's Bush where I live, I cook with school there. I like to bring the kids to the River Cafe, so it's always a Monday in July. Usually the culmination of the working with them is that they cook a meal for their parents, the teachers at the local community and everyone layser table and they serve
everyone and cook. But I show them around the first of all, I like hook them in by showing them the toilets at the River Cafe because I don't know if you went, but they're very bright and.
They're like, wow, look at these toilets. You know.
I'm like, they were all like oh, and I'm like, guess who instagram the picture of themselves?
They love it.
And then we show them around and there's kids from diverse area. It's interesting to see the difference of what they know. Often some of the North African kids know a lot about hubs and broad beans and things that other kids are just like eating fish fingers every night. They ever even see the broad bean. It's nice to see that played out with the young ones.
I think edible schoolyard is important because when you're able to connect where the food comes from and you have an emotional connection, like if you plant it the seed tended to a garden that carrot, just like when you walk into a restaurant where the hospitality is great, everything's going to taste better. So it's like, how do we make it so that knowledge doesn't get left behind in the school where it could also come into the homes
and be reinforced. And some of the reasons why it's a lack of access and food in America, it's because the government subsidizes cash crops, right, so farmers are less inclined to grow fresh vegetables because of shelf life, and more inclined to grow corn soy. We eat a lot of these monsanto crops. It ends up destroying the nitrogen the soil because people aren't rotating regularly, so the agriculture isn't regenerative. And also it drops the cost up of
fresh vegetables. So and when you're looking at calorie to calorie and when people are making economic decisions, it's often not going to be the freshest best option for your health.
But it is also to do with all of what society values, you know, how we feed our children in school, how we seek people in hospitals. Really what we value as a society in terms of feeding and educating people. That's a basic we got to put a profit. It's a human right to eat well and to feed up people.
I agree.
I agree.
The River Cafe is excited to announce the return of our Italian Christmas gift boxes, our alternative to the traditional Hamper. They bring you all of our favorite ingredients and food and home wors from the River Cafe kitchen, the vineyards and the designers from all over Italy. They're available to pre order now on shop the River Cafe dot co dot uk. So you grew up in the South Bronx.
I grew up between East Harlem, the South Bronx and the North Bronx. I spent the majority of my time in the North Bronx.
And North Bronx is on the way to Connecticut, right, it's.
On the way to Connecticut Westchester upstate. It's like right on the border of Westchester County.
Yeah, and tell me about growing up. What was your home like?
So my childhood was interesting because my mother single parent. We lived on the floor in co Op City, which is a Mitchell Lama kind of rent control, lower middle class like housing. They created opportunities for people to get homes and like have fixed rent and be in a beautiful community. My grandmother lived on the same floor as me, so it was like a real in My my grandmother and my aunt my other car. So it was like a firm matriarchal situation. It was that was the only
male in my family. It was my great grandfather who had three daughters, my grandmother being one of them. All of those daughters except my aunt Sheila, she didn't have children. They both had two daughters, and then my mother had me. So it was like all of these women and then me. So even at a young age, I felt like I had to take care of things, like I had a burden that I just self imposed. Nobody like put pressure
on me. Everybody was doing fine, but I felt like I needed to take care of these women that took care of me. And they're all educator. So I grew up like with knowledge being important. I always struggled with my behavior though allegedly.
Did you feel that you had to take care of them food wise as well? Did your mom cook?
My grandmother's not going to listen to this. My grandmother wasn't the best cook, which is probably why my mother went hard to become a great cook. And my mother's also just a different type of person where it's like she gets interested in something and she studies. So my mother has two culinary degrees, one from the Natural Gramet School of Cooking in New York, and she went to
a special pastry school in Chicago. Whereas me, when I'm interested in something, I started business and learned about it just from doing the things. But I was able to benefit from my mother taking these courses and learning how to do the thing, and so yeah, she's a really good cook. But my mother often worked during the day at a hair salon. She used to wash Lenny Kravitz and Michael Jackson's hair at this I want to say it was John ash Atkinson is a hair salon. She
worked on the Fifth Avenue. That job exposed to a different type of eating, so she was going to like the French bakery for lunch, or like the Italian spot or the Indian curry spot. So naturally I kind of inherited that curiosity about food. So she often didn't have time to cook because she after work, she would go work on her college degree, and then at night it was just us. She picked me up from my grandmother's a babysitter or whatever, and then we'd go out for dinner.
That was like our bonding time. And at this moment, I was living in the East Harlem, like one hundred Street between First and Second and Metro in the projects called Metro North. So we go to the upper east side off then, and I remember this restaurant called First Walk. It was a Cantonese restaurant, and we would then just sit there eat, and I remember it was this older woman, an older Jewish lady. She was a regular too, so we would we would eat there and see each other
whole time. And I asked her. I was a social kid. I asked her about you know what she ordered. She's like, oh, yeah, I always get the lemon chicken. And in that night, I ordered the lemon chicken. And I was like, this is not good. And I told her what she should order and why she should order that, and I want to say it was probably the orange chicken or the sessame chicken. And I was like, it has a sweetness,
it comes with the broccoli, fried garlic. And this is how I was thinking about ingredients and the assemblage of things coming together to make a dish. And I remember she tasted it the next time we were there, and she was like, you know what I ordered, what you said I should order. You're such a remarkable boy. And I remember the confidence I felt, because you know, your parents and your family members tell you you're excellent, You're great.
You could be anything you want. But getting that external validation gave me such a boosting confidence, and I think subconsciously I just associated food with that feeling for the rest of my life. It took me as an ad to like search, spind the block and come back around to knowing that food is where I find joy and the communion with people and all of the things that
food brings. The window in the culture. Even growing up in the hood in the Bronx, you go to the Chinese spot and you understand, like, oh, people eat with things other than folks and knives. There are chop six let's learn more about this. And I'm just a super curious person and I love history and people's stories and you know.
So interesting. I think also it's the sort of thing that even the young guys who work with the there's people of all ages here. And I always say to the chefs, there's no shame in wanting to have a night off work, because you've always feel like if you're a chef, you have to work really long hours. There's no shame in going out and saying I want to
read about food. If I want to go and cook and cook with friends or go out as any as groups, and they don't eat in places I imagine that Ruthie frequents, but they're together and talking, and you know, more than ever you see people trying to put their phones away, so they actually communicate over a meal of whatever it is, and they have a constant dialogue about food. It's really important.
We were really bad people to go out for dinner with, though, because if I go out with my partner, I try not to talk too much about the food because it's probably boring for a not and I'm just like trying to keep that to myself, so I'm not like this is like too much soul or that this isn't placed how I want it. And every day is that conversation with yourself about what you're eating and where you're eating, isn't it.
You gotta just pick better friends that want to talk about her food. Like my friend Dream is sitting here now and she has a concept called I don't know if she trademarked this for food Tap, So it's like it's like knowing people that you'll kind of submit to with their restaurant recommendation. Right. So she's probably the boss of most of her people in terms of picking the spot where we're eating. I'm probably gonna pick what we're ordering,
she says. I'm her food tap, where she'll trust me to make the right judgment on a restaurant or some place to go. And then I have one person, my friend Giorgio from Italy, who I don't want to use my brain. If I'm in Italy with him, I'm like, yo, Georgia, whatever you take us, I know it's good. Do the thing I don't. I don't want to to think about it. So it's like being able to bond and like I've
built community. Food is usually the connective tissue, Like if we love food, we're going to like have deeper conversation, We're gonna break bed, we're going to do things and vibe. And I think also people that care about what they put into their body and like the ritual of that and how important that is really have a different value for life. Like now, people that just have a bunch of money and want to go to all the fancy spots and it's just like another thing to do just
to check off Michelin start restaurants. But people that like it could just be getting a bagel or a cinnamon roll from a bakery or like knowing to write bodega in New York to get the chop cheese from. But like people that consider that part of their day, I think are like really great people to be around.
Favor feeling the restaurants and people like or where they'd like to go or what they choose to eat in a restaurant. I think it tells you a lot about a person. And that's why sometimes when you do have to recommend someplace that you would like, you really are thinking, well, that is telling a story about me. This is true.
We might have to get some like restaurant therapists. That might be a whole nother lane of practice.
What do you think about, say, if you eat out and you're with friends and you're trying to break down what that is and what's good about it? Is it the combination of the food that's on the plate, or is it a combination of the people or the room or the lighting or where you are in the world. You know, because often I think amazing meals are more than just food, aren't they. They're about an atmosphere where
people feel like they're welcome. They're sitting on a comfortable chair or but trying to create that setting is also part of what makes that experience so good, isn't it.
I think the hospitality starts before you walk on the door, like from how do you book the restaurant? Like what's the story of how you got there? Were you not able to get a booking? And you just walked up and they took care of you. I have some crazy stories that are just we never thought we were going to be able to get a table. And I don't know if it made the food taste better, but it does elevate the experience. So I think all of those things come into place. Flavor is of the utmost importance
as well, and different people have different priorities. Like Ruthie say, you can tell a lot because some people are strictly ambianced and they'd be like, oh, the food is greater than the place. And then you go and you're like, I don't know about the food. It's a lot of pretty people in the room, but I don't know if the food is really hidden.
But then you can have really good food and have an arrogant waiter. You know, that makes you feel small, insignificant. I always say to the person who answers the phone, to take the booking. This is your first introduction to the person who's going to come here. How you answer the phone, how welcoming you sound, how you feel it's the most important job, is that receptionist answering your phone
to take a booking? You know, I think it tells you a lot until from that moment when they book the table too, not when they've left the table, not when they've paid the bill, not when they've kind of walked down and say goodbye. It's one they're in their car and the door is closed, then they're not yours anymore. But up until that moment, they're kind of yours.
I think the first impression is essential, like you said, like that first barrier, like when you cross the threshold into the realm, it should always be warm, welcoming and consider it.
So tell me about what you're doing now, because you're working also with Nike, you're working with big companies. How do you marry that with also the work that you're doing in the South Bronx.
So when I think about working with these brands, I think of it as not just working with the brands for money, but also meeting people where they are. And we call it put in the medicine in the kool aid, right. So if I want to talk to teenagers that are in high school that are doing certain things, they might not want a verbose explanation of what food does this are or why these things impact them or why it's
a certain type of food available in their neighborhood. But when we do a sneaker release with Jordan, that brings them into our world to where they might be more keen to listen or participate in some of the matters that affect them in different ways. So a lot of it is like, yeah, we're going to do the work
and collaborate because it's cool, it's fun. But it's also when people associate you with these things that they feel like are part of their lives and what they care about in a passive way, they might really be able to join your community and connect with you deeper. So we just try to think about, like like when we mentioned earlier, thinking about what do we want to exist and how do we create the things that we want and layer it with meaning where it's not shallow and
it's not just about materialism and consumerism. It's like, how do we create a new formula for how business should be done. Because just like ghetto gas show doesn't exist, the River Cafe didn't exists before you dreamt it up. Once you dream it up now with a model, and you could keep refining it. But it also inspires and it becomes a platform for other things to happen. And I think that's how you scale chain that spark thought, create community, and then it's step by step.
Do you think the cultural identity of food? Identifying a culture food is that important? Do you think we've passed that now?
You know? I think it's always important to site sources and pay homage to where thinks come from, especially if they're coming from places or voices that have been silenced for a very long time. But I think it's also important to collaborate and create. I think some of the most beautiful things are mixes and collisions of culture. And when I think about hip hop, Dream loves this because
she knows I love talking about hip hop. It's a collision of breakbeats, jazz samples, different drums, Puerto Rican, Black, Jewish people, white people creating thing. I think it's a beautiful thing that has impacted and changed the world that we live in.
What about your book A Black Power Kitchen, It's about that.
For us, when we think about black power, you know, we think about how long black people have been creating value in the world but have been left out of the part where they capture their value that they create. So for us, being unapologetically black, boisterous, loud about it, we try to base it in academic thought, which is why I keep people like dream around me to keep
me honest. It's just important. And I think it's also like ghetto gash or it could be a polarizing idea, right people see a word like black black power, and they could be offended or afraid of it. But for us, it's really about leaning into the beautiful things from our ancestors. So when I think about like black power, that's a phrase coined by Kwame Torre aka Stokely Carmichael, who was a revolutionary Yeah from the Bronx, though.
From the Bronx, and he married Mariam mckiva Okay, probably in the sixties. I guess she was from maybe Johannesburg. She was South African and she had this beautiful, beautiful voice, and she could do this thing called the click. We all knew her music and then there was Stokely Carmichael, who was this great political force of the Black movement of the sixties, and then suddenly he married her. Stokely Carmichael was so handsome, and then they married Maria McKay.
But it was like, wow, it's the bronx, the bronx tackle and you know, it gives a little extra charm, a little extra riz. Food is a tool for liberation, you know, when you think about how lack of access to food could often be a tool for oppression, saw a tool for liberation, like to tell stories of the ancestors of potential futures of love and convening and communion. I think the dinner table is the first social network.
You know, so people break bread, share ideas. It might be a little bit of trolling and arguing, but a lot of it went down at the table so well.
Before we say goodbye and we are so happy to have your hair, and we'll have to do this again, and this is our second time together. We often say that food is you know, food is staving off hunger. It's for sharing, it's for cultural heritage, as you were explaining it, it's for alleviating, for gaining access to choice. It's also comfort, and so I suppose my last question to you is to ask you if you needed comfort, is there a food that you would go for? Or
would it be that crab caviat and coin bread? It could be anything.
Every day is a different it's a different thing. But answer right now, man. That one nut, I'm a retta tart. Were very confident with the pistachio. So I took some my pistachio ice cream and put a bit of it in my express so like I wake up from from the flight, but that, wow, that was extremely confident.
Well, thank you, Thank you, Sean. It was good.
You really appreciate it.
Thank you. It's lovely to see you. Thank you.
It's always a pleasure.
Ruthie's Table Flour is produced by Atami Studios for iHeartRadio. It's hosted by Ruthie Rodgers. It's produced by William Lensky. Our executive producers are Zad Rodgers and Faith Stewart. Our production manager is Caitlin Paramoun. This episode has additional contributions by Sean Winer. Special thanks to everyone at the River Cafe.
Come Up Up,