Welcome to River Cafe Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adam II Studios.
Over the last year, I've been lucky enough to sit down with forty six guests at River Cafe Table four. We've talked about food and family, taste and memory. We've read recipes and swaps stories of dining out around the world, from the grandest Michelin start restaurants to canteens, bars and market cafes. The restaurant I know best is, of course, the River Cafe, and so to begin this episode, I'm stepping behind the pass to talk to executive chefs Sean
Winowen and Joseph Travelli, friends and colleagues. We've been cooking together for over twenty years. This is just about how immediate your performance is judged in a restaurant.
Chef's a judge as soon as they walk into the kitchen. Judge a chef by the chef's trousers they wear even or if they come in a jacket that's not clean or tied neatly, And how you present yourself before you've even picked up your knife, which people are judging you by your knife quietly even though I don't believe in the what your knife says about you, per se. But a lot of chefs will just have a little look at someone's knife before they've even chopped anything.
When a new chef comes. When you've interviewed someone, and you know, I always used to say, what books do you read? Michelle Rue used to say, make me an omelet, But what do you look for in terms of somebody coming for a job here?
If we interview people together, that we try and put them off because some people come with they have maybe a law degree or they've done a degree in dark medicine y we have, and we're like, okay, so you know, you have to stand up for a living. You know, you have to work nights, you have to work weekends. It's shift work. If you love cooking, you can always
cook at home. And then if you're really, really, really really really set on it, then you know, because some people think, my god, you could earn a fortune being a lawyer. I look for people that I think will fit into the team because if someone wants to learn, we can teach anyone to cook.
We also talked about Rose Gray. We founded the River Cafe together in nineteen eighty seven. She was my closest friend and a brilliant cook.
I remember meeting Rose on my first day and she said something I always quote still said, I'll teach you to slice a piece of preciuto the perfect thickness. I'll teach you to cook pilotti beans perfectly. I'll teach you the art are simple cooking. And I remember thinking that sounds easy, but actually that is the essence of the
River Cafe, isn't it. Simplicity and the understanding of simplicity, which, as I've worked with Ruthie over the years, I've never understood it more than watching you and how you take one thing more away.
I remember one time we'd had a huge lunch in Tuscany, and then we drove to Piermonte and we went out to dinner and there was I remember there was again a grand dinner and I sat next to it, and I remember when the fifth course came out, I just started to cry. I literally started, I can't take this anymore. That's too much, and she was just, you know, there she was, come on, Rogers, Rogerina, she used to call me.
Next.
She was very much her own person, I think in terms of what she chose to do and fiercely loyal and fiercely proud.
I was.
You know, we used to get into a taxi in Paddington in the early early days and she just said to the driver River Cafe, and I say, I hope this guy knows where the River Cafe those days going to be rude, and she was.
Really, she's such a character.
I met Rose Gray in New York Tracy in the eighties, and I remember going to Nell's Campbell, who's friend of mine, Australian knock at her nightclub, and about three in the morning, she said, Darling Litsky Row, are you hungry? And you think three in the morning, but yes, of course I am nell Lytsky. This is wonderful. Lady's gonna make us something to eat. And Rose was so quiet, and she started bringing out these little samples of things that were so divine.
I'm like, wow, Rose, amazing.
And we just all sat and talked and you know, were saying those things like you should have your own restaurant here, You're brilliant.
That's how it all started. She was with Nell and it Nell's in New York, and then when Rose decided to come back, that's when we started the River Cafe. I called her up and said, I think there's this little site in the middle of nowhere. She would go have a look, and we did and the rest is ton of history. Over the forty eight episodes of River Cafe Table Before, many guests have also shared memories of
eating at the River Cafe. Here are too. Edwin nfil editor of British Folk, but first film director and actor Maggie Gillanol.
I kept texting you and saying, oh, could one more person come? Oh, could just one more person come? Could I you know, and don't you always kind of want to say yes, right, like yes, like of course you can bring your boyfriend. This is interesting.
It was.
It really was a special night. And then I remember like we weren't sure. We're like, oh, is this enough past? And I was like, no, no, no, it's not. Let's get another two podta.
You know.
I remember that night that you were there, and I remember the feeling of it that you were. You know, you were so happy and you were so wanting to give.
We were there to do press for the lost daughter. We all had to wake up at like six o'clock in the morning the next day and go do press all day and then go to the opening night and we had all eaten all this food, drank tons of wine and champagne and chocolate cake. And I was thinking the next day about like consequences, what's worth it and what isn't you know? And I was like, this feeling I have today is totally worth it. I'm not blindly having this dinner and drinking wine and you know, eating
all this delicious food. I understand that I will sacrifice something the next day. If I'd gone to sleep at nine and had green juice or something, I would feel different. But what it gives me in exchange, I felt it was worth it.
It was a really muchical, even one of my one of the truly much cold evenings of my life, because remember the issue came out. It was a love story really to Great Britain, the country that sort of took my family and took me in, and we celebrated everybody from Naomi Campbell to Steve McQueen to Cake Moss and we had a duel on the cover.
It was a beautiful night and I think people, you know, again, over food overhind the food you wanted to be sharing plates, you wanted people to have antipasti. I remember something about that night, which was we were talking about whether we could do ravioli as a premi, and there was a conversation saying, well, you know, fashion people don't eat carps, they won't eat pasta. Nobody's going to eat the ravioli.
Not only did they eat it, they had seconds, gongs, and thirds and put on more ravioli on the plate. Every conversation of River Cafe Table for ended with the same question, what is your comfort food? Food is susten it's politics, culture, a journey of discovery. It is also comfort in love. Here is Jude Law on food family life, and they art feeding your children.
I enjoyed giving the love of it. I enjoyed looking after them. I always say this to friends who are expecting children, that you know, the satisfaction you get when you're about to go to bed and your kids all eaten, they're washed, they're in bed, they're safe. It's just such a fantastic feeling. It's a greatest sense of satisfaction and contentment that you've got there another day and they're all right.
You've eaten all of that. And that was an important part of bringing them up to me and the adventurousness. I suppose, because again it reflects I don't know.
You know, people go oh, no, I don't.
Like that, and you think, well, have you tried it? You know, that was always that's always the first question to the kids. And you think, no, just try it, you know, and you see them suddenly thinking, oh, actually, yeah, it's an octopus. You think, yeah, go and try a little bit.
It's really good.
Food also means joy and celebration. Austin Butler is the star of Baz Luhrmann's film Elvis.
There's a small group of us and it was the night that we wrapped and we we just we danced until the sun came up. We just put on vinyl records and we just danced and we ate oysters and we just we just lived life. It was like this feeling of letting our hair down. And then the sun started to come up and Baz looked out and he lived across the street from the sea, and he said, should we go swim in the ocean right now? And it's like five in the morning now, and we swam
in the ocean and so the sun's rising. And I was gonna not go that night as well, and I said, I said, Baz, I can't believe I was gonna go
to sleep tonight. And he started singing nessa dorm and he goes no sleep tonight and he went back to the shore, and I kind of took a second from myself in the ocean where it's just me, and as I sort of slowly walked back the shore, I look at Baz and he's holding a speaker above his head like John Cusack can say anything, and he's playing nessa doortermont, the Pavaratti version, and it's blaring at like five point thirty in the morning now on the beaches of the
Gold Coast. And then we made breakfast.
What was that we made?
We looked in the refrigerator and we thought, okay, we got eggs, we got asparagus, we got some spinach there, we got some tomatoes, we got some parmesan cheese. What can we do? And so we kind of just made this breakfast. And that's one of the most glorious memories of my life, was like after we finished this thing that was so terrifying and daunting, and that we gave
it everything we could. And then then we just sat there and as the morning sun sort of laid down on us and ate that breakfast, and it was so glorious.
Don't tell anybody I told you this.
Yeah, this is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, with memories of a college ice cream heist and food as an act of rebellion. We used to go at night.
They know now years later they know, but we used to go, like in the middle of the night, down to the dining room and break into the freezer to get ice cream. Now they was locked, so you can only lift it a little bit and put the scooper in there and pull it out.
We better not tell certain members of the house about this exactly.
It's hard to tell a flavor and the dark and the dark, and you could tell if it's chocolate or not, but peach, strawberry and the rest of that kind of comes together. And sometimes we would order pizza so that the guard, we'd say the guard, somebody would go talk to the garden, said I ordered pizza. I'm waiting here for the pizza wall. We would go down and steal the ice screams, steal the ice cream.
And so your college days were spent stealing ice stealing ice cream, icically, but food isn't only a subject for funny stories. On many episodes of River Cafe Tape before, we also heard about the politics of food inequality and the desperation of hunger. Christian Amanpor told me about her experience of reporting from Sarajevo in the nineteen nineties.
The very very first winter under siege, and it sounds like a cliche, and I didn't even believe it till I saw it, But literally, people were foraging, honestly, trying to get dandelion leaves and brasses and things like that that they might be able to boil up into something. Some of them may have had little vegetable gardens with lettuce or spinach or whatever it was, but there was no real protein. They could make bread because flower was coming in eventually by the UN, but it was basic.
And you know, I just remember living in the holiday in with all the press there. I didn't realize until afterwards the managers had to pretty much bribe the besiegers and some of the UN peacekeeping forces who came in to get things like eggs. There wasn't potatoes or tomatoes or anything because all the farming, all the all the just like now in Ukraine when it's bombed all the time and there's a scorched earth policy.
And the people of the city, yes.
Yes, they were mostly grateful for us to tell their story, but and I have to say it is important, they did begin to get angry. I remember them saying, you know, turn your cameras away from us. This isn't the Sarajevo Safari. You keep telling our stories and the world doesn't intervene,
doesn't help us. And those were very painful moments because you did realize that they were telling the truth, that yeah, we could go to them, talk to them, get their experiences, see what they were trying to cook for their families, which was pretty much nothing in their little kitchens, and trying to survive this war, and nothing was happening to help them. So then they would take it out on us because we were the closest for them. Yeah, and
it was painful. That was painful. So I have no ellue usion that we are welcomed with open arms and we're the great saviors at all. At all.
We do a job.
If we're lucky, we tell the truth and the truth gets out. And if we're very very lucky, it causes intervention.
It my love of food, my desire to know more about it, has just grown.
This is Stanley Tucci.
So it's sort of all I think about, and it's very much how I spend my time now.
We think about food and hunger, and it's also mental health, and it's also physical health. And we refer just now to the fact that you had cancer and that your wife died of cancer. How did you see illness and how did illness affect food for you?
Well, Kate went through so many different treatments, and you know, going through chemo and radiation and all that stuff made her very nauseous and she couldn't eat a lot at times, and then she would recover, and then cancer would present itself again, and then she'd go through the process again. It was horrible when I went through mine because it was an oral cancer. All the treatment was focused on my mouth, so I lost everything. You don't only lose
your sense of taste. Your sense of taste is destroyed and perverted so that everything tastes like you know what for months and plus your mouth is so compromised and so much pain. You're on pain medications and all that stuff, and you have a feeding tube. You're trying to put protein drinks through your feeding tube, which are disgusting, and not that you're tasting them, but they're upsetting your stomach. And then there's morphine you're putting through. It's just as
a nightmare. And for me, it was a real nightmare because food is everything to me. It's now how most of my life. And not to be able to eat properly, not to be able to everything smelled horrible, tasted horrible, and not to be able to sit and eat with my friends and drink with my friends and cook for my family, it was really really hard.
And did that come back? Obviously came back, But how did it just come back and you embraced it? Or was it slow?
It's very slow. It's still not I'm almost four years out from finishing my treatments and I still last night I made lamb chops. I didn't really eat them. I can't really because you lose your saliva, so I don't have all of my saliva. So if you don't have your saliva, it's very hard to break things down. So I eat a lot of pasta. But that's fine, That's just the way it is. I'm probably at the point now where this is about where I'm going to be. I don't know how much more I will recover, But
it's fine. I can eat most things. I can drink wine, I can have a martini slowly. It's fine. Nicroni negroni is yet.
Yeah, you know about the nigronie. As the climate emergency deepens, what we eat and how and where food is grown has become crucial to our survival. Former Vice President of the United States Al Gore is, as we all know, passionate about food, farming and the environment.
Well, agriculture can be one of the biggest solutions to the climate crisis. People talk about planting trees to pull CO two back out of the atmosphere, and it's something we certainly need to do, but we also need to remember that if you look at all of the carbon and every tree in the world, plus every plant in the world, there's three times that much carbon in the
first ten centimeters of top soils around the world. And by sharply reducing the amount of plowing and using natural fertilizing techniques and natural pest control techniques and using cover crops always keep roots in the soil don't let it lie loose. Use perennials where you can use rotational grazing agro forestry. These techniques can reverse the flow of global warming pollution out of the soil and actually put a
large amount of CO two back in the soil. So regenerative agriculture not only produces healthier foods and healthier communities, but it also contributes to a healthier planet by becoming a key part of our arsenal in combating the climate crisis.
For Paul McCartney, the politics of food, particularly animal welfare, is also key. He told me about a moment he shared with his first wife Linda.
We were on the farm in Scotland. We had a farm in a place called Campbelltown, which is south down the Argyle Peninsula, south of Glasgow, so we spent quite a bit of time there. The Beatles break up got a bit heavy in the business scene and you just couldn't deal with it, so we decided to just elope, even though we were married. We just escaped there and it was just a sheep farm. We were looking out of the kitchen window one day and there were lambs.
It was lambing season early in spring, and the lambs were gambling around so full of life, and it was like, wow, this is really cool. And I always say that what they seemed like they were doing, it would be about twenty of them. They'd start at one end of the field and then it'd be as if someone said let's go and they all go and run to the other side of the field. Let's go back. So they were just running up and down, gambling and jumping and everything
were going. It's cute and great. Then we suddenly realized we were eating leg of lamb. So that was when the penny dropped and it was like yeah, yeah, leg of lamb. Then it was just we said, you know what, do we try and not eat meat? We try and go veggie and in those days, of course, it was actually difficult, but we decided that we'd make it a challenge. It just became a fun challenge. Okay, what do you do? So we gradually begun filling the hole in the middle
of the plate. We'd keep everything else and then we'd just work on things to take the place of where the meat had been.
It's funny because the very early years were actually in Scotland and so we had a tiny little vegetable patch.
There Paul and Linda's daughter. The fashion design is Stella McCartney, who was also a vegetarian.
And I remember we'd always get into trouble because me and Mary would go down and pick There were always like sugar snaps and carrots and we would always kind of nick them and eat them before you could yield any kind of crop off it. And then when we got a bit older, we got the farm in East Sussex and then we had like a proper vegetable patch.
Well, it's very touching that you say that you and your sister would go and get a sugar snappy and a carrot as rather the way somebody might take sweets from the sweet cub. Know that you actually went to the vest.
And also we had horses, so we had you know, we were always with horses, so it would always be right Willie the carrot and the carrot heads. So the for the horses, you'd always have this journey between picking it, the soil, the smell that you know, your dirty fingernails, that kind of adventure to go out and have that process, and then you'd take it up and give the you know, the carrot heads to the horse and that would be like horse slow bree all over your hands, and like
so many different smells as well. I mean, I've worked on creating perfumes, and it's so interesting how smell has really been inspired by food for a lot of the
things that I've created. I mean, I, for example, one thing, when you're a vegetarian, there's so few moments of kind of extravagance, whereas with meat is so associated with kind of well cost or you know, there's such a kind of different kind of relationship, and when you're a vegetarian, it's literally only truffle season that you're like, right, okay, this is like, oh, this is this moment. And so I did a perfume with truffle in it because I
just always found that smell. It was so it kind of reminded me always of a time of year, and just everything associated with it seems so kind of sexy and mysterious and incredible. So I think the between this food and smell is interesting.
Edward Enifel, editor of British Folk, What do you feel about food and fashion? Is the idea that in order to look good and clothes you have to be thin, or you have to look elegant. You have to be a certain look or models have to look a certain way, and that would mean denial of food. It would say, in order to look that way, don't eat. Yeah, what's that strong.
Historically, those that you know to be fashionable, when you look at at least my Vogue anyway, it's everybody's welcome, you know, all shapes, all sizes or colors. And what I love now is three years later when you look in all the other magazines, everybody's also welcoming in all the other magazines. That that strict thing of or not being able to be a certain size, being sized zero is the perfect that doesn't exist anymore. Even the idea
of being a model has changed. How you can be short, you can be curvey, you can be you know, you can be disabled. Literally, to watch that industry change, for me, it's one of the great things about you know, doing my You make.
It sound rather seamless that this is what's happened another But it hasn't been a struggle for stores or for designers.
I mean designers now know that they've missed out on a whole market from size forteen to sixty. They've missed out. Why would you want to miss out on a section of a population that can make your business even better. So now designers have really sort of like, oh my god, they've wisened up. Okay, I just knew that the world we lived in just wasn't that Just wasn't that world anymore? You know, you have to be a certain size, yeah, or a certain color or yeah. The conversations that I
have been had now never would have been had. About ten years ago.
The artist and film director Steve McQueen talked movingly about the London street markets where he shopped with his mother, the comfort of home cooking, and the harsh reality is a food inequality.
One thing I was very shocked by when I was shooting in Chicago, shooting Widows was how I didn't see a grocery store in a black neighborhood. I didn't see any greens in a black neighbor You know, there wasn't a green grocer's, but there was always some sort of fast food place where people eat. So people are losing this sort of heritage of food. People are not aware of food and nourishment and possibilities within food and food
is politics in a way. It reverts back to what we were talking about right at the beginning of a conversation. It starts with like, in a way markets because markets, a lot of markets are on the threat, a lot of markets have closed. So this sense of community, sense of comaraderie, a sense of sort of love of food and love of each other is being sort of erased
in the sort of you know, working class areas. I mean, you get these markets, but they're so become like posh markets, aren't they They're sort of farmers' markets, they call them. And you know, the food is so expensive, so and I can I feel that they're they're becoming kind of food deserts in a way where kids are growing up on fast food and not being introduced to sort of love food in a way. So that's that's something which I'm a bit sort of concerned about.
Yeah, food is a connection, and food is a memory, and food is giving and sharing, and food is political and social, and it's also comfort. It's something that we go to and we need comfort. And so I suppose Steve McQueen, what would you say is the food you would go to if you needed comfort?
To me, the comfort food that I very much love and I appreciate. Is often the cold day, you know, and you come in and it's my mum's chicken soups West Indian chicken soup, which has the bones in it and stuff, you know, you suck on the bones, and it's the sort of you know, it's the time. It's the garlic. It's all kinds of stuff for you know, the sugred ingredient which she wants, you still want atomic, the dumplings, a bit of potatoes, a bit of peas.
It's wonderful. So those are the kind of things I really love. Yeah, and I could hear my dad sucking the bones right now in my head. Yeah, it was. It was a wonderful, you know, having those dinners together on those cold days. I remember it was. It was beautiful. It was beautiful and lots of great memories.
What's my comfort food?
I love chocolate. I love really good eighty percent chocolate.
My close friend Tracy Allman, who is a chocolate lover, say at the party we have to celebrate thirty years of the River Cafe.
I put my chocolate in the freezer and I break off one square every day, and I think it's very good for female brains and I can eat a piece of chocolate and then I can write and write.
Okay, well that's it.
That's beautiful answer why I love chocolate Nemesis.
The chocolate Nemesis so I can get the word is so funny.
Maybe always goes Nemesis Nemesis, and everything goes like Marston Scorsese film, you know, when they're taking drugs and goodfellas Nemesis.
It's ridiculous, Thank you, Jasey. The other thing we could do before we say goodbye and go have a piece of chocolate Nemesis is to sing a song. And would you like to sing your song?
I think our listeners should know. I had a very very brief career as a pop singer in the early eighties. I had a wonderful song called they Don't Know About Us, written by the late great Kirsty McColl.
So.
I sing sort of like Mini Mouse, You've taken Helius. I know you were so sweet and you rang me up and you said for your thirtieth And I.
Said, would I sing?
And I thought, why would Ruth ask me to sing? And I was so flattered, and I said, Watchles sing, and you went, do you know the song?
I like?
You were on the phone.
You went, It's very clear our.
Love is here to stay, not.
For forever and a day. The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know may just be passing fancies and in time may go, But oh my dear, our love is here to stay together. Weird going a long long way in time. Hi, rockies may crumble, just brought to me tumble, They're only made of clay. But I sang, oh is here to stay.
I love the.
Cathe and we love you Teresa almy, thank you.
Very enough so love me to do this in path.
And that's a wrap for season one. But we will be back in September with a new name, Ruthy's Table four. Gwadneth Paltrow, Wolfgang Puck, mel Brooks and more great guests will be joining us. Have a good summer. To visit the online shop of the River Cafe go to shop Therivercafe dot co dot UK.
River Cafe Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.