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meet Sir Johnny I've the person whose designs changed the world. Well, the answer is we met in the White House at a spectacular state dinner when Barack Obama was president and Hope was in the air. We were kind of orphans. Neither my husband Richard nor Johnny's wife Heather could come, and we'd both recently lost our best friends of work partners for him, Steve Jobs and for me Rose Gray. It was the beginning of one of the most important
friendships I have. Johnny's designs for Apple with Steve Jobs transformed the way we live. On my wrist is the Apple Watch, counting my steps, checking my heartbeat on facetap. Last night I read a bedtime story to my granddaughter. Often the last thing I read is a text from Johnny on my iPhone asking how are you Ruthie? How was your day? But today my friend is not five thousand miles away, but here in the river cafe next to me, as close as can be, Ruthie. So how
was making the pizzas? What was that like?
It was warm? The ovens is He's pink and warm and smelt gorgeous. That teledio whnette starts to bubble smells extraordinary. But we used to have a a wood fired oven, an apple very often I would have had the pizza and to see something actually because of the little door you put it in, to see something actually being cooked, not going behind the door, and just then it becomes about time. But when you actually see it, yeah, I think is particularly special.
So would you like to read the recipes? Did not?
Did you going to eat? I'm going to eat it later. So this recipe is for teleggio pizza with herbs or herbs. So we need one batch of tuscan pizza dough, three tablespoons of extra olive oil, four hundred grams of telegio cut into pieces, and then a bunch of time. Now we didn't have time earlier, so we had what we just had was basil gorgeous zucchini flowers. We had merrygolds which if you hold that the orange of the merrygolds, hold it up again. Pink and orange are this beautiful,
very fizzy combination. So I love the merrygolds to look at it, and I haven't eaten them yet. Sea salt and some freshly ground pepper. I put the sea salt on. Preheat your oven to two hundred and thirty degrees. Divide the dough balls into eight balls and roll each one out into twenty five centimeter or two hundred and fifty millimeter discs if you, if you have any precision in you, Ruthie. And it was very very thin.
Yeah, you do very thin. When we were in the south of Italy though, they were very thick. You know. They're thick the further we go, which are also really delicious, you know, but if you're having a if you're having dinner and then you want something, you wouldn't want a big thick that.
I thought, well, I do love the very thin, no it's and then cover each pizza base with a single layer of tillegio, drizzle with olive oil. Finally scatter with seasonal herbs such as thyme, basil, or zucchini flowers. Place the pizza in the oven and cook until the base is crisp at the edges and the cheese has melted. And serve hot.
Pizzas need to be hot. So did you pizza set up? We can order? We can order a pizza. So when you were growing up and you're you were born where Johnny so?
I was born in North London, right where London up, in a place called Chingford, and it's right where London was halted in its growth by the green Belt, which was epping forest. So literally the road ended and the forest began.
So what was the food like in your house? What was a kitchen like? Let's start with a kitchen.
We had a big bread mixer that was made by Brown and was probably the most beautiful thing I think we owned.
Why was that? Was your mother or father a breadmaker? Did they?
Well? They were. I was brought up primarily vegetarian. A lot of bread was made, most of it it wasn't very nice actually, I'll tell you that's something absolutely dreadful. It was made probably weakly, but my parents worked, and so she would make sandwiches for me to take to school on Sunday and then freeze them and then take the sandwich out the night before and it would dethor
in time for the next day. Just just so. The sandwiches were always chilly, but they were always wet because there was something about tomatoes and lettuce defrosting that I think caused havoc in the sandwich departs.
As you were describing a woman who worked, a woman who had to go to work in the morning and see that her children had something to eat at lunchtime, what did she do?
She was a teacher, so she was philosophy. But my grandparents, because both of my parents worked, I was essentially raised by my father's mom and dad, and they were vegetarian and grew or made almost everything that they ate in a tiny garden. There was a greenhouse, and digging up potatoes. My favorite, without a doubt, is you know, harvesting taken the peas, shelling peas. I've shown thousands of peas and probably yielded about ten percent that got to the table.
And tomatoes, but all their garden and chingfri. Yeah, but that's what was odd. It was the difference between something that was ten minutes ago was growing and to watch on the tiny little My grandmother had a little electric oven made by company called Belling. Such a tiny kitchen she had and still some of the most extraordinary dinners and lunches.
I remember what she made with potatoes. Do you remember how she would cook the potatoes.
Yes, so she absolutely so. They would only be scrubbed and quite gently boiled, but with mint she you know it also put well know that I picked after digging up the potatoes, and it was as simple as just potatoes, and then tomatoes if it was good, and I hadn't eaten them, more peas.
And your father what was his what was his career?
Well, he trained as a silversmith and a cabinet maker and then became a teacher and a professor. His specialism
was art and design. And my Christmas present would be he would say, we will go into the workshops during during Christmas, which I'm sure was illegal, and we would go in for one day and he said, you know, we will make together whatever whatever you want with the one condition that you design it, and to me, he didn't actually say designed, what would have been I think I started doing that when I was probably about seven
or eight, so very But what was curious. He didn't say design it, He said think about it and explain it to me, probably with a drawing. And what a wonderful definition of.
Design explaining by a drawing. Also, what you've described is how a vegetable grows about. You know, being in the workshop with your father is about process, isn't it.
I think it's part of the human condition that we assume everything that is made, everything that grows, is inevitable. Now, maybe it's necessary because if we're truly startled and full of the joy and celebration of everything around us, we wouldn't get much done. Perhaps, But I think probably one of the things that defines people that I love is the simple joy and curiosity about this chair, How did it get here? How was it made? The pizza, seeing
this floppy dough change into something rigid and crispy. And I think when you understand process and you celebrated, the glorious thing is that you end up I think, connecting to your environment, to the world in a much deeper way, And I think it also brings a humility you just realize, and I think you become very aware of your small part as part of humanity, you know, part of our species.
So when you left the nurturing and the note of your grandparents being nearby, of your mother making that effort to make bread, your father taking you into the workshop, and then you went to university. When I left that, did you create a kind of home for yourself and you met Heather quite soon or did you were so absorbed in working and designing that food became maybe secondary or something you grabbed. What was the food like for you?
I think food certainly at art school it was functional and sadly rather joyless. And I got married when we were up in Newcastle. We came back and lived in Greenwich for a few.
Years and we've had an apartment.
Yeah, we just had a small apartment. But I used to then. I used to work in Shoreditch for Tangerine.
And Small Design.
It's just a very small design group, but it was near Possibly the best thing about it was it was close to brick Lane and I love Curry. I mean, the culture of brick Layne was so interesting. I mean, many of the restaurants didn't have the licensed to sell alcohol, and so you were typically going by alcohol at the you know, the off license next door and just then go into the restaurant. But I've had some just just extraordinary dinners there.
And when you went to San Francisco, it was for me San Francisco with Alice Walters, and with Judy Rogers and now with Quins with Napa Valley. It's such a food culture. Or was that also? Were you not in a phase where you could actually just go no food.
There was a culture of eating out which I had never never been part of before, and so we would eat out all the time. I mean, Japanice was incredible on.
The farm to the table, a bit like you're grandparents, you know that you take something from farm.
I moved in ninety two, so I've been there for you know, well over thirty years.
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Now I'm joined on the phone now with Mark Newson, a very close friend of Johnny Ive a very close friend of mine, to talk to us about Johnny and working with him. Mark, how did you and Johnny end up working together?
Johnny and I started out being friends. You know, we were both designers, and we didn't work together originally. Johnny was, you know, had just started working at Apple with Steve Job back in I guess early to mid nineties. Johnny effectively invited me to come to Apple to help work on the Apple Watch. And that's a particular project that I think is a really fascinating example in terms of.
How he thinks.
Johnny always loved watches, and he was always fascinated by watches, and he always said he wanted to do a watch. He wanted to do a watch at Apple. But you know, we're talking more than a decade before it was even sort of muted as a possibility, and no one could least of all me. Actually, no one could quite get their head around.
What it was.
He was thinking, you know how, in the context of Apple, would you kind of create a watch? Did the world need a watch? This wasn't long after the iPhone, the iPad had not long been invented, but he had this vision to create a watch, and clearly he managed to convince everyone, the powers that be at Apple, to proceed with this project. You know, clearly it was going to look good, most likely was going to be a success, although I guess that wasn't entirely clear at the time.
You know, the idea of bringing back a product which your parents or grandparents would have been very comfortable with, yet you know children of that generation simply didn't know or didn't own, was stunning. And then all of a sudden, people are wearing watches again. It was like reintroducing this whole new thing, which actually wasn't new, that you wear on your wrist. But now I'm amazed. You see them on people on television, you see them all around the world.
I mean, it's a device like the iPhone or the iPad that cuts through every conceivable geographical, socioeconomic, almost background. So you know, it's an incredibly accessible thing. I guess safe to say, it's the most produced watch in the history of watches. So that was born out of a kind of a desire that Johnny had that no one else could identify or even see. He's sort of cut from a slightly different cloth from the rest of us. I think, Mark, what do.
You think is unique about Johnese's approach to design?
Most designers really wish they could kind of look into a crystal ball and see the future, because you know, what you're doing is creating. You know, ideally you're creating products that people want and maybe even people need, But most importantly, you want to create products that sort of somehow stand the test of time. And in many ways it does require being able to look into the future. But clearly that's a very difficult or most impossible thing
to do, except probably if you're Johnny. Because being able to somehow envisage where we'll be in say, ten years time, and imagine the world around and what it will be like, you know, how it will be different to where we are right now. That's where he's really, really, really clever. And you know, the Apple Watch was a great case in point. There are lots of products that he's been involved in designing that I think really clearly demonstrate that.
One of the things I feel particularly fortunate having such a close relationship with Steve. I got to grow up in Silicon Valley, benefiting from seeing the area through his eyes. Now he grew up in Silicon Valley, he remembers when the valley was Johnny that used to be an orchard of apricotrees, and the way that he understood though the
valley in relationship to San Francisco. So his sense of the importance of San Francisco was quite beautiful, and you then got a sense of, you know, even though it's fifty miles away, you then also have a sense of Okay, Napa Valley where you have extraordinary wine, and the vineyards up in Napa Valley are really really beautiful.
What was Steve jobs your relationship? You know, I can said how we both lost our partner. So Steve was so important in your life. And I know you've spoken about what it was like as a friend, as a colleague working every day with him, but can we also talk about what was his relationship to food? Did you two eat together? Did you share meals? And did he care about food?
We had lunch together nearly every day, so we were Monday to Friday. We would either have lunch in the canteena apple, or we would go out together. And he was sort of vegetarian, maybe pescatarian. I mean he did love sashimi and he had I think, an extraordinary palette. I mean, we would love going for sashimi together. But he I think we could both eat a tomato and just a tomato with great olive oil and be could
never be happier than that. But in his kitchen he had a wood fired other than that you at home that he used primarily for pizzas.
Would you work over lunch or work? Was it seamless you just worked in e and eate and work those No.
It was all one one Monday. I think it was all one thing, isn't it. It's when we talk and we exercise and interrogate and wonder about the world and the people around us, and it's that fluency of just all being one almost one conversation. You know, there's a danger that we will talk about things that are easy to measure, you know, characteristics that are easy to measure with a number, because that's a conversation that's inclusive. You know, we will talk about speed or hie or weight or
and people, particularly with products, will do that. What do you mean, well, I mean, if you're talking about a product own people will be and you have a broad diverse collection of people engineers, marketing people, designers, certain things like well, how much does this way? How fast is this how much is it going to cost? These are attributes. These are characteristics that you can measure with a number. So those are easy conversations, and Steve and I understood that,
and we understood that. The insidious danger is that you, because they're easy conversations, you make the terrible mistake to think they're important. And there are many, many really important things that are ignored because there aren't easy measures.
When we think about food, we think about health, we think about the health that you've given us for measuring on your watch. What were you know from Calies, as I said, to a heartbeat to our is that a measure that you think about when you do?
I think there's something. I've spent a lot of my life working on tools, and I'm very clear in my mind that design that my practice is applied are and so it's really making tools. The thing that I think is so extraordinary about food is that, of course there is a a functional imperative around food in terms of nourishment, but how incredible that it doesn't stop there.
And when you have a problem that you want to solve, or a discussion that you have, would you go to a restaurant to do that at a table?
I have frequently and become private, isn't it? I mean, it's so curious when you're sat at the table. The table is in front of you, but actually it protects your back as well, doesn't it. I mean, you know, remember Child's renamed Macintosh. It does very tall you know, some of the dark Devaux equivalent, but the chairs with the very high back. And I remember art school and I'm actually remember visiting the Glasgow School of Art and so curious how those tall backs created a space and
a volume. But what I love about sitting at a table when you're eating, there's something about I mean, it's very unusual to have a horizontal plane in front of you, but when it has food on, it signals that the world can sort of miss you and you can just be with the you know, the people there are a table with. But it does creates I think a sort of sacred space in a way that's different from a picnic or eating on a park bench. Different in so many ways.
An open kitchen in the River Cafe means we as chefs are able to talk to our guests dining in the restaurant, sharing how we cook their food, where the ingredients come from, as well as hints and advice for cooking the recipes in the books. And now we're bringing that same ethos to our podcast, a Question an Answer episode with me and our two executive chefs, Sean Winnowen and Joseph Travelli. All we need is to hear from
you about what you would like to know. Send a voice note with your question to Questions at Rivercafe dot co dot uk and you might just be our next great guest on Ruthie's Table four. When Steve became ill did the lunch's stall was a very different experience of food for you when seeing somebody through their illness and food.
They certainly didn't stop. I mean there was a point when he was too ill.
It's a connection of food and lunch time and being together that.
Was still really important. Heartbeat. I mean, isn't it funny even if even if you're not going to eat much, it's lunchtime. I mean, I think that speaks so speaks so clearly to just the importance of stopping and pausing and being with someone.
Yeah, You've spent a lot of time in Italy. I've been with you in Italy. We were in Venice together, We've been in a Malfi together. But you also we could talk from them about Ferrari. Ferrari is from a fantastic region of Italy. You were in Mo dinner or in more in Marinello, Marinella, and what was food like there?
I mean, I feel so lucky because I've experienced food to start with in Italy being on vacation, and so you're right, you see, you have a particular attitude and you're in a particular your consciousness is different, isn't it when you're on vacation. And I've been fortunate to be able to also enjoy being in Italy working and being in Marinello and going to the restaurant that Enzo Ferrari went to.
What was that like?
It's fabulous. So John al cam has refurbished and restored.
But I.
Love eating in Italy. I really do you love about it? That it's important, and that it's the food is so good. Particularly, I love simple and it's not fussy. I love when it's not fussy, when it's simple and the basic ingredients are so good. I stayed, actually I stayed once working with John A. Ferrari at a I guess a farm, but it will wear balsamic vinegar, yes it may. And the hotel you could not escape the smell of vinegar. But there were these gorgeous rooms where these great wooden
vats are where the vinegar was resting. But that you could go from that to seeing the farms that you would drive past on the way into the factory.
I would like to ask you about the Royal College of Art, because that is education, it's culture, it's young people, it's communication. You've been the Chancellor of the Royal College and that is a huge honor and also someone that's chosen to really do it in a very serious way. What does that mean to you.
I mean, one of the most remarkable days of my year is as chancellor, watching hundreds and hundreds of students receive their certificate and their degrees, and I'm so struck by you know, when you see just one person and you just think that their journey is only theirs, and that they fell off a bike and they had to struggle to read and they but you're so aware of
how particularly unique everybody's journey is. And then when you see hundreds and hundreds of people in community celebrating an important chapter close, I think that's remarkable.
And so we talked about food as curiosity, exploring different foods, growing food in the soil, picking peas. It's also food is comfort and so what Johnny I've sir Johnny I would be your comfort food?
I would say it would be one of your pizzas, be peas, just peace. But I quite like, if I'm honest, and a chocolate digestive, because I don't have the.
Minimum like the milk ones or the plaines.
I see, I know what you're thinking.
There are two different times.
I know, I quite like the milk on the milk one.
I'll give you any time I'll get you.
Please don't go with the pizza. Okay, thank you, Thank you.
Ruth
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