Welcome to River Cafe Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adam I Studios.
Okay, let's get the show on the road, shall we. It's now twenty to six and people are coming in soon, so the two of you better get going. What are you going to make We are making Kelly. Kelly happy with that chef.
I'm more than happy with that, yah, David.
Okay, David, it's going to okay.
Over the last year, forty six guests of Sat at the River Cafe Table four, not at the same time, Michael Caine, Jake Jillanol, Nancy Pelosi, Pete Davidson, Paul McCartney, and many many more, but only one. David Beckham walked past the bright pink wood oven and headed straight into the kitchen.
Give it a really good shake, Yeah, take it, shake it. I gotta go, and a.
Bit of parsley.
Oh yeah, what do you like cook at home?
David?
To be honest, my kids are upsets.
We have Italian food.
They get me to make like a ragged yeah, because the kids love.
I can tell when you're shaking the pane that you work just in office.
I want a job.
I would love a job. I need a job up there, you.
Need a job.
We need.
Most episodes of River Cafe Table four began not with a job offer, but with reading a recipe, and with more than twelve River Cafe books, there were plenty to choose from. Jeff Goblum's recipe was one of my favorites.
So I've got this book in front of me and I've turned to I've dog hereed the slow cook funnel. Well, there's not much to read. It's like a high coup. I see ready, here's my You don't like it, you can say, take take two. Waited, I haven't taken one yet.
Just a second.
Okay, here's there's take one. You don't how many takes Stanley Kubrick would do sometimes for a movie. No tell me famously eighty seven.
Okay, come on, read the recipe.
You are a good interviewer. I like when the interviewer claps your hands and says, come.
On, get that all right, come on there.
Okay, here it goes, slow cooked fennel serves six, six fennel bulbs, five tablespoons olive oil.
The River Cafe have a dessert which is my favorite, and it's called panacotta with grapper.
This voice, of course is Michael Kayane's.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you the recipe in case you want to make it for yourself. Okay, pour nine hundred milligrams of cream into a pan, add the vanilla pods and the lemon ride, bring to the boil, simmer, and reduce by a third pass through a sip. Then scrape the seeds from inside the vanilla pods back into the cream and discard the alta pods. Remove the jelatine from the middle.
Oh no, now you just played me, Michael Caine. How am I supposed to this is?
Like?
How the hell am I supposed to do this?
This is?
But you got tomato sauce.
Maybe I should do an intro to Okay, I'll do this. Then I'm Jake Jillenhall, and there is truly nothing like Ruthie slow cooked tomato sauce.
Hello, this is Wes Anderson. I'm going to read you the recipe for the River Cafe roast pigeon stuffed with cotaquino. You'll need six breast pigeons. That's six pigeons from the breast. I guess these are French pigeons. Now, preheat the oven to two hundred and thirty degrees celsius to make the stuffing soft. From the onion and celery in the two tablespoons of olive oil for ten minutes. Remove the skin from the cotaquino and crumble the meat with your hands.
Add the cotaquino and sage to the onion and celery and fry together for a few minutes. Then pour off the fat from the pan and add two hundred and fifty mili liters red wine and boil to reduce by at least half, season with black pepper, and allow to cool. Before stuffing into the six birds, heat the two hundred and fifty milli liters of olive oil in a roasting tin over a medium high heat. Then brown each bird all over season with sea salt and black pepper, and
roast for twenty minutes. Pour any excess oil out of the tin. Then add the remaining red wine over a high heat. Reduce us we got half the wine still to go? I think yes, over a high heat, reduce the liquid by half, so cook it until half it goes away.
I think old.
The people who cook know this.
I don't.
I don't know that, then seasoned with sea salt and black pepper, and then this is your sauce, poured over the pigeons to serve.
Thank you.
The food we smell and taste as a child seems imprinted on our memories. And almost every guest took me back to their early years. We heard about family recipes, noisy school canteens, first restaurant meals, and childhood kitchens. Here's Victoria Beckham to start us off.
Ruthie, here's a story my mother. You know what to uses her oven for.
Let me guess by her stockings.
No, she used it as a filing cabinet. Oh, I'm a filing cabinet.
Yeah.
If he didn't go in the microwave, Missus Adams wasn't interested in it. But this was the eighties when I was growing up. But it's all about microwaveable food, all being super super quick. So you know, as I I began my life in the Spice girls, we were eating out a lot, going to lovely restaurants, and that was something really quite new.
A middle class family in Mexico growing up in the sixties and the seventies.
Alfonso Couran told me about growing up in Mexico City.
There was still a mentality of making things last. I remember the refrigerator in the kitchen was probably a refrigerator of the fifties, you know, the rattle a lot. By the way, my first memory was a very old woman called Benita, and Benita was the cook because she knew how to cook.
She was great.
But also my grandmother would come with her big book of recipes that it was one of those ancient books you know. Well, it was not a book, it was a notebook. It was all written, handwritten, probably from her family, her mom or whatever. It was a very old kind of note book and she would go through the pages and find like the recipe that was going to be for that day. So that means that those recipes will come from from way before.
It's interesting because yesterday I did a conversation with someone Rushti, and so there's someone who grew up in Bombay with a book like that in his kitchen.
Middle class kitchen's kitchens which employ cooks, there's always a copy book. It's called hanging on a hook, and in that book are the recipes of the family. And I've always thought if somebody could just go and gather the recipes in those copy books. That would be the greatest Indian cookbook of all.
Do you remember your grandmother was your mother's mother a cook?
Yeah, my mother's mother was not a cook. My mother's mother sort of shouted.
At cooks, ah, okay, yeah in that way. I do you think she knew what she wanted?
Well?
Yeah, she was a grubby old lady. I don't know. I wouldn't have liked to be cooking at.
Her kitchen really, And what about your mother and her?
But my mother was very a gentle person, you know. And I also had an Ayah, a nanny from South India, came from Mangalore, which has its own very distinctive cooking. Her kind of pickles and chutney's got into Midnight's Children because I grew up on those. There was a particular green chutney which is famously in the book. It was just a lot of green things chopped up with a lot of chilies. It was very particular South Indian recipe that arrived in our house through her go and South
Indian Aya Mary mayonnaises. She was called lived to one hundred and two. She spoke seven languages and was illiterate. There's a line somewhere in Midnight's Children where where the character the narrator talks about stirring feelings into food. And I always believe that that if you're in a good mood, the food tastes one way, and if you're in a bad mood, the food tastes another way. You know, that sense of emotion, your own emotion getting into the cooking.
You know, it's something I always thought.
Did your mother put an emotion into her cooking?
Yeah? I mean she actually she wasn't like a great chef, but she enjoyed it. Yeah, she enjoyed it. So the food was enjoyable.
But cooking for a family is not only enjoyable, it can also stir up complex emotions. Here's Nigella Larson talking about her mother.
She married very young, she was nineteen nineteen and had to have her child at twenties.
You know, my older brother.
She felt things very deeply, but didn't always express it, so would erupt quite a bit. And you know, she was fantastically impatient. And one of the jobs we had to do, my sister Thomasina, we used to have to make mayonnaise together and one of us would whisk, and one would pour the oil. And whoever was whisking, you know, you weren't whisking fast enough, and whoever was poor and you weren't to sing slowly, you weren't. And the tension,
you know. So it's so difficult because I remember what I learned, and I remember being in the kitchen with fondness and gratitude, and yet it would be so unfaithful to the truth if I didn't say it was also a source of great tension. I mean, it was frightening, but I think that. But I think I did learn a lot. And she was a very spontaneous cook.
But imagine being nineteen and or twenty and having to embrace motherhood and domestic life and cook. Do you think she liked cooking? Did she like he?
Didn't I associate my mother with food, And yet she had a very troubled relationship and had eating disorders, which I didn't really think. I didn't really take on board until I was in my teens, I think, and I don't know when it started. And it was difficult because it it was really a repudiation of something that gave her pleasure. And the heartbreaking thing is, you know, She died when she was forty eight, and she hit pretty quickly because she got diagnosed, well, she didn't get diagnosed.
I was told by the doctor three weeks before she died. I didn't tell until two weeks because I was waiting a bit just to get it for you know, more tests and things. And she said it was the first time being terminally ill was the first time she could eat without anxiety or guilt. I mean, that's that's and I think that so on the one hand, you know, I've learnt everything about what cooking is from her, not everything I've learned from you. I've learned from anadel Conte.
I've learned from Claudia Rodin. But I also learned what path I didn't want to go down, and it wasn't That was your father.
Do you ever cook?
No?
He didn't.
Occasionally later on he would make his own breakfast breakfast, which I think is quite an old fashional male thing to do that somehow they don't feel, you know, cooking eggs is too much of a dent to their dignity.
My dad came here in nineteen forty eight on a ten pound ticket from Cyprus, and then my mom's a gypsy, so it's really quite exotic.
Actually, this is the artist Tracy Emmon.
Up until we were about six, we would go to Turkey regularly once a year, and we spent when we were really tiny, we spent two periods of six months there. Once when I was about three or four, and then another time when I was six, we spent six months there, and all that time it would have been Mediterranean food and Mediterranean cooking. And we used to drive to Turkey, and this is really cool. We used to have in
the back of the our car. We had a Zodiac with these little tiny wooden chairs, you know, with the wrap seats, and my dad just with a brand new Zodiac, and my dad just stuck a hole through the roof through the you know the bits, and then got bongee elastic things around the chairs and then just sat us in the back of the car bouncing up. And we were twins bouncing up and down on these chairs with
those little knotty dogs. And we'd drive to Turkey and we'd stop on the way all the time, and my dad would get the calor gas stove out and fry eggs and cook and everything, and we'd go go to fields and take watermelons and things. So it was really exciting and like adventurous these drives and romanticizing about it now because it is romantic and it was different and it was different from everybody else's upbringing that I knew.
And so we went from that to this light to squatting in a cottage and my mom working in a hotel as a waitress and a chamber mate, and so it was like from high to low really fast, a reversal of fortune when you were having to cook for yourselves.
Did you eat? What did you do?
There was so my mom was out a lot most of the time working lady, and weekends as well, she'd be out to free in the morning. So we were on our own and often my mom would leave us sandwiches and whatever. But my big thing was just like orange, just orange squash and just tons of orange squash, and sitting up at night crocher and in bed. We and also for example, like Christmas, like you said about this, a lot of this podcast is about people sitting around
the table and remembering it. Oh, there was no sitting around the table for me. It was sitting and watching the telly with a tray with egg and chips, you know, when my mom come home and Christmas was not Christmas. We didn't have Christmas because my mom was always working. Our Christmas was like a week after and kind of cobbled together, but it was never going to feel the same as the real Christmas. And I remember we had Salvation Army one year, you know, coming around with food
and presents because we didn't have anything. My mom, if she didn't work, we had nothing. And that is a very different upbringing to a lot of people.
I know.
The singer Rag and Boneman shared a fantastic story of childhood ingenuity.
Yeah, there's the truth to the story. In the summer, the kids from our street we used to sometimes get together and so we had a house full of instruments. We had guitars that were hanging on the walls and sometimes there are old crappy ones that no one played anymore,
or old keyboard that doesn't really work. We would get those instruments and put them out on the front lawn, open the windows and play like whatever music it was through the stereo as loud as possible, and act like we were playing it and put a basket there in front of us to ask for money. So we could go and buy ice cream from the ice cream Vand did it we it did. I mean people came out and gave us money. I think we made enough to get some ice cream.
That's the version of I grew up, you know, selling lemonade when I was a kid. You know, we take lemonade and then put a table on the front lawn and at five cents please. Yeah, we were like buskingto like guns and roses for aff for hersh The scent of food was almost more important than the taste of food.
I remember so clearly. I didn't go to Garner until I was fourteen, and my first memory was stepping off the plane and two things hit me. The first was the heat, and the second thing was the smell. And the smell has never left me, and I still every time I go to Ghana instantly hit with this intoxicating smell. And I've tried to work out what it is. I think it's a combination of just heat and sea air because it's very the capital is on the coast and
it's a quite rough Atlantic coast. There's a lot of sea breeze and mist and salt in the air. And then one of my favorite Ganeian dishes, which because the BA flight from Ghana lands basically at dusk, and at dusk is when food vendors in the city start selling this afterwork snack which they fry outside. It's called kellolee and it's ripe plantain diced that seasoned with ginger, black pepper, tiny bit of nutmeg, chili and salt, and then it's deep fried, absolutely delicious. I made some last I.
Actually, you season it first, and then you do you season it and then you take.
You eat it hot.
Yeah, you eat it hot.
And it's street food.
It's street food, and that makes the entire city have a fragrance of kind of slightly sweet spicy nut maggy air and I honestly think it's it's a little hint on the air and a cross.
Glenn Close spent part of her childhood in Africa and can still remember the plaintive cries of the family chicken.
We had a rooster called Pretzel and he would crow during the night, and my brother cut a oil drum in half and cleaned it out, and at night, Pretzel would be put under the oil drum, but you still could hear it.
Worm.
Finally, finally, everybody thought it was time for pretzel to be butchered, and he was, and he was put in the freezer. And then I happened to be there when they brought pretzel out and said let's let's roast pretzel.
He was inedible.
You could even get a knife into where my mother was pretzels revenge.
Do you remember going to the markets in Tehran?
Not markets? Oh well, actually no I did. They're called bazaars.
Christian Amanpour grew up in Tehran.
I mean, if anybody's been to the Great Bazaar in Istanbul, imagine that in all the other Middle Eastern countries. And we used to go. I do remember. My mother would do the shopping. Obviously, I would just be amazed by the color and the vibrancy, and that I want this and I want that, even if I didn't know what it was. I'm afraid that the men at that time were very cheeky and quite intrusive. So I used to go, not knowing any better, in my shorts or my short
skirt or whatever and get my bum pinched. That was quite derry ger in those days. My mom told me from now on I had to bring a flip flop you know, sandal hold it behind my bum and if anybody he dead, you know, bang them. It really worked.
I can't remember when I discovered pasta, but I can remember when I discovered pasta and risotto.
Norman Foster one of my oldest friends.
I was a student and i'd cycled and ended up in Milan, and I associated rice with rice pudding, which was sweet and sickly and really for me, not very nice. And I discovered rice and pasta and it was just a great discovery. That was a very very long time ago.
How old were you then, ah.
I must have been in my teens.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon were also intrepid teenagers. Here's Paul recalling their first trip abroad.
John and I hitch hiked to Paris. He got given a fabulous birthday present by his rich relatives in Scotland, and one of them gave him one hundred pounds for his birthday. You know, I mean, I still think that's a reasonable gift.
It's very reasonable.
No one hundred quid I have it anyway. So we hitchied to Paris and then we used the money to get food and stuff, and we thought, oh, we've got to have a wine experience. We're in France, you know. So we went into a cafe corner cafe and we sort of sidled up to the bar and said, do van ordinaire ceavow play? And she gave us two glasses of red wine and we took a sip and thought, oh, that is terrible. It's like vinegar. God, I don't know what the fuss is about all these people going on
about wine. They're crazy, We're saying.
So.
We never liked wine till we got down to London. And the first time I ever remember really liking wine, it was with George Martin. My girlfriend at the time was Jane Asher, and Jane and I went out with George and his wife Judy, and we went to a little restaurant in Charlotte Street called Latroale.
I probably know that, I remember that.
Yeah, I was treating so the way to the wine waiter, Somelia came up to me and said, would you like a wine?
Sir?
He leaned in all very intimate, and I sort of equally whispering. I said, I'd like you to recommend to me. I don't know much about wine. Said, oh, yes, sir, thank you very much, leave it to me. And then he brought back a bottle of Louis Latour's Caught on Graci nineteen fifty nine, and I took a taste of it. Oh it was like velvet, was it? And I thought, now I get it, And I see why people go crazy about one.
I think, in a way, we all love food because Richard was a great eater.
My husband, Richard was also a great lover of restaurants. As our son Rue remembers.
I do really think that being a great eater is a really fundamental skill. It can be very frustrating great because everything is being analyzed all the time, but it is a very beautiful thing because you're constantly searching for that new taste and that new experience and anything else
is not exciting for that. I mean, I remember the Michelin Guide with yellow post it notes and written notes, and I mean like obsession, and then like going into bookstores and saying, we found this restaurant, but we haven't been do you recommend it? Like the amount of diligence we did just to have lunch because Dad wanted a great meal and you wanted to make that possible. But
you you know, and we did it. So I think a lot of thats of you know, curiosity and food cooking and food quality comes to Dad's real keenness and passion for eating.
Actually, it's interested to say that, because I do remember that we used to. He had this theory. I don't know where it came from that if you wanted to find a good restaurant, you always asked it a bookstore. That there was a people who loved books would probably know where to eat. The River Cafe is thirty five years old, and the subject of restaurants is close to my heart. Planning menus, juggling staff, road is, sourcing ingredients, most of all, cooking a restaurant is all consuming. On
River Cafe Table four, we shared our restaurant memories. Let's start with comedian Pete Davidson. There is quite a lot of drama going on in a restaurant, do you think absolutely.
I mean, when I worked at a restaurant, it was for like three or four years, but the bus boys hated the waiters, and the waiters hated the bus boys, and I mean like afterwards hated the chefs. Yeah, they but after work everything was fine. Everybody was like cool, but during work it was like, we're gonna be in each other's faces all day.
Yeah, you know.
But my favorite thing was always sneaking off in the back and eating whatever somebody didn't need.
Oh really, off somebody's plate.
Yeah I didn't. I didn't give other people like you're gross, and I'd be like, it's chicken palm.
So tell me about the restaurant you've worked in called Nucci's.
South since that island. It's right under the bridge. My dad's good friend runs it. It's it's like pretty well known on the island and well respected, and they serve classic Italian food, and you know, they have a playlist of sixty songs on a loop and it's all Frank Sinatra.
Yeah all day?
Can you sing that some more?
I burned it out of my brain. I used to be able to tell what time it was in the restaurant by what song was playing.
What songs would they say playlist?
I mean.
Just like fly Me to the Moon, Yeah, fly Me to the Moon, just like every yeah, And I would hear that every six hours, So like if I fly Me to the Moon came back, I would know we were halfway through with the day.
Stanley Tucci and Darren Walker, CEO of the Ford Foundation, look back at long shifts in restaurant kitchens or waiting on tables, and many guests stories of eating out, whether in Michelin start restaurants, backstreet bars, or beach checks. Here's David Beckham talking about a Paris restaurant we both love.
One of my favorite restaurants in the world is Lammy Louis.
Yeah, w I agree.
You know all the ways addressed in those white jackets, and whether you're wearing a bomber jacket or whether the most elegant lady walks in and the Chanel coat. They take your coat off, they fold it up and they throw it above the head on the car. It's like a train carriage. And my record for eating escargo is I've eaten thirty two escargoes at one dinner.
To the listener, Can I tell you those are big? I've had that many.
Times big and they come on trays of six or nine I think, and they come and I was in there for about four hours with Victoria once and we had the most amazing wine and everything about that restaurant and the palm free.
The little potatoes.
The bread, and everything about. It's just unbelievable.
When you go to a restaurant, what do you look for it? Do you look for the food, the atmosphere, the people, the energy.
I look for the vibe Darren Walker and the vibe to meet lutes. What does it smell like? What does the menu look like? What is the decor? I mean for me, I really like energy. Some people, for example, say, oh, this restaurant's too loud.
I don't know.
I like a loud restaurant. If I want an intimate dinner, yes, I'll choose something that is quiet with very little background noise. But if I want to have a great evening, I'll book a table at Balthasar Or.
It's loud, it's boisterous. It feels like New York on steroids. That's why I live in New York to drink New York from the fire hose.
Jude Law filmed The Talented Mister Ripley in Italy. What was it like being in Positana? Did you stay there when you were doing Ripley?
Was that was that?
We want that so long? And my memory of Ripley is more on the island of Iskia.
Oh, I've never been there, Yeah, just off Naples and next to Caprian Prody that and we found this extraordinary restaurant right on the sea and it was almost as if they could sort of fish out of.
The back window and cook what they caught.
You know.
We just sort of as a crew took that over and it became the sort of heart of the film really where everyone would congregate there after a day shooting and eat wonderful fresh fish food.
Something that's really nice and Ghana now is it's all about chefs making food in their homes, especially during this COVID times for just like for just two or three.
People, the architect David Aja, and.
That's been kind of amazing to experience. You just get like half a dozen people invited and it's in the garden because the weather is so great. It's socially distanced in the garden.
You know.
As a chef called Selassian, she has a kind of pop up Comandoonia. She's doing incredible things with Gannian food. So she's been a kind of whenever she does a real run to go eat. So this idea of like eating in a place where you know where somebody really you know, I think the best way to describe, is that where the food is hard, you know, it's not just product, not just stuff like exactly what you do. You sort of taught the world that Ruthie and I
think it's it's going around. I see versions of you in the younger generations all around as they try to really connect with food in a much more powerful way.
I think that is, you know, what does it mean to go to a restaurant? What does it mean to go with your friends? And something we've all missed enormously, certainly when people have come back to the River Cafe having been away for so long, it's quite emotion being in a room with people.
Do that.
Is there a certain restaurant you'd like or don't like it that you feel comfortable in.
Yeah, I'm very specific about the kinds of places that I like and don't like.
Yeah, let's go for the positive. What do you like in a restaurant?
I like it to have a certain kind of authenticity, to feel like it's not trying to bamboozle me with effects, but it's confident in itself and it's trying to reflect a little bit of what its culture is.
And what about designing, Because you're in art you've designed, Yeah, public buildings, restaurants, have you designed.
That you I haven't designed a restaurant yet, but I'm right now designing the restaurant for Princeton Art Museum. That's that's probably the closest I'm getting to my first ever a restaurant. Actually, ironically, do you.
Know what it will be like?
The restaurant in the museum.
Yeah, it's trying to really the things I said have a certain kind of quality that has a certain sort of openness. It kind of has its own terrace, so it's open onto a really beautiful terrast that overlooks the grounds. Trying to make it feel not in any way that it's exclusive, but it has a kind of egalitarian quality. But it's really good quality. There's a kind of quality in the kind of pieces that are around you, the things that you touch, the things that you kind of
got next to. But it also kind of honors the idea of food that it has a certain ritual quality to it as well. I think that that's really lovely. You know a restaurant that it feels like a ritual.
You come usually on a Wednesday or Thursday. You always sit on table for and you always sit at the same seat, and I was just wondering how you feel about restaurants and food.
Well, I love restaurants. I've owned a couple, Michael Kaine Again, I don't use restaurants for occasions, restaurants for a part of my life.
Tell us about Jason's.
Jason's was almost like a club. I should go there every Friday and you look around the room and Alfred Hitchcock was always sitting there. Kerry Grant was over there, you know, and it was one of those incredible places. You know, the stars everywhere, just all the movie stars I've been seeing in movies all my life.
The restaurant I know best is, of course, the River Cafe. And in the next episode, I'll be talking to executive chefs Sean Renoan and Joseph Travelli. We'll also hear more food memories and stories from my guests at Table four as we talk about the joy, the comfort, and the politics of food. To play us out, here's Rag and Bone mass. You make me have me when skies are great?
You love knowd how much I love you?
Please don't my son shine?
No?
You want to come on.
Tour to visit the online shop of the River Cafe. Go to shop the Rivercafe dot co dot UK.
River Cafe Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.