Welcome to River Cafe Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
Gwyneth Paltrow worked for a day in the River Cafe kitchen. She arrived early dressed in professional chef whites, ready to cook. This memory speaks to how professional Gwyneth is. An Oscar winning actor, she built Goop from a simple newsletter into an influential and uplifting business with energy, elegance, and strong values.
Another memory. Ten years ago, just after the death of our son, Beau, I asked Gwyneth if she might surprise the River Cafe team and sing one song for them at our Christmas party to thank them for their care and concern for me. Gwyneth not only said yes, she sang four songs, danced with everyone, and stayed to the very end. In the River Cafe history, we still talk about the time Gwyneth Paltrow came to sing. I admire Gwyneth for being a brave, smart entrepreneur. I respect Gwyneth
as a writer of recipes. Most of all, I love Gwyneth for being there with me that night and here with me today.
Oh boy, I wasn't expecting that.
That was so beautiful.
Thank you. So, if we were going to start at the beginning, what is the beginning? Where were you born? Where did you grow up?
I was born here in Los Angeles, in Hollywood. We kind of went back and forth between New York City and Santa Monica a lot. I did a lot of preschool in New York City, and I did first and third grades in New York City while my mother was on Broadway, and then the bulk of the rest of elementary school here and then moved permanently to New York City when I was eleven.
Can you remember the kitchens as food? I described the kitchens, but they're very different.
The La house and the kitchens were very different. So our kitchen in Las Angelus here had a brick floor, red brick floor and a tile counter, sort of like very country kitchen. Lots of windows, and you could see the backyard in the pool, and we were in there a lot. I mean, I think with every house, you're in the kitchen more than anywhere. Our New York kitchen
was on the ground floor. We grew up in a townhouse, almost no windows, but we had a big fireplace in the kitchen, which was really nice, and it was more of a modern kitchen had been done by a Swedish architects. It was kind of minimal and who cooked well. When I was little, I remember, I mean my mom cooked. My dad started cooking a lot, but that was later. He got very into cooking, kind of when we were older teenagers.
And when you have meals around the table together with you and Jake, Oh, my parents sit down, what were they like?
They were really nice. I mean it was I think we felt special being included the dinner table, even though it was a nightly event. It felt, you know, like if they had friends over. We sat with them at the table and had long conversations. It's something that I've carried on with my kids as well. You know, we always have dinner all together as a family, no phones allowed at the table, and you get into great discourse
with them and hear what they think about things. And I think my father made me feel that I was valuable during those dinners because he really elicited our opinion. He asked questions, and my brother and I were very much a part of the conversation.
It was his background.
He grew up without money, he grew up on Long Island, and they were you know, They were kind of a working class moving trying moving up into middle class Jewish family, but they didn't have a lot of disposable income, and they didn't they didn't go out to eat. So when my father finally made it, you know, like his and he loved food and all the.
Beautiful things in life.
You know, he loved beautiful fabrics and paintings, and you know, he would take me to every museum in the world and we would walk for hours. And I think food for him was really an expression of life's beauty and our blessings and good fortune to be able to eat something that was fresh and delicious and really well conceived and thought about. And he was so proud that, you know, we ate oysters and you know, things that he hadn't
come across until really later in his life. And I always remember, and I wrote about this in my first book, that when we would get into the car to go out to dinner, like no matter how many times we had gone, like, he was so excited. It was like the greatest thing of all time that we were going out to dinner.
Did you travel with your parents, Did you go to Italy or Spain?
We never went to Italy, until you know, the first time I ever went to Italy with my mind. My father he was when he died. He died in Florence, he died in he died in Rome. And we were doing our first kind of road trip after my thirtieth birthday, and yeah, he kind of died on me, which.
Complicated the trip.
It is a complicate Italy for you.
It did complicate Italy for me for a long time. I didn't go back for ten years. And when we were on our road trip and I found out that he was sick and he had been coughing up blood, and I said, we have to go to the hospital. You know, he'd been hiding it for me because he didn't want He really wanted to finish our trip. And I was like, this is so, we're going to the hospital. And he was like, no, we got to get to
the Splendido. He really was trying, and I was like, we're not going to the like, we're going to the hospital. And he ended up dying. And then I had a
real aversion to Italy for a long time. And then, very sweetly, Chris Martin, my first husband, on my fortieth birthday ten years later, and I was having a lot of anxiety about it anyway, because I think turning forty, I mean, I'm about to turn fifty and I kind of don't give a but forty I was like, really had so much anxiety about it, and he by that point, I had the two kids and we got on a plane and I didn't know where we were going, and we all of a sudden, I realized we were landing
in Genoa and that we were going to the Splendid Though, which was so sweet. It was such a nice surprise. So it was like a completion, but it was. But Jake was with me and my two best friends Mary and Julia, who've been my best friend since one since I was four and one since I was eleven. They were with me, and they my father was like a father to them too, So it was it ended up being a really beautiful experience that we all got to
be there and kind of come full circle. And now I'm you know, we bought a little farmhouse in Umbria, so just south of the Tuscan border.
Great food in Umbria, Yeah, tuffles in the fall, you have lentils and you know, boar, it's great.
I know, it's really it's a really special place. So I'm excited to spend more time there and to learn some Italian.
But what about Spain of France.
Spain so France. Well, I kind of told this like now now it's kind of food. A famous story about my dad taking me. My mom was doing a filming something in London when I was ten. We still lived in Los Angeles, and we all made the trip over to visit her, and then my dad took me to Paris for the weekend and just he and I and we stayed at the Ritz and we went to the Pompei dou, We went to the Louver, we went to all museums, and my main thing was that I wanted
to eat French fries, like actual French fries. So that was the first thing we did when we checked into the hotel, is that I ordered French fries. And he took me all around, you know, we were eating all kinds of things. And on the way back to London, he said, do you know why I took you to Paris, just you and I? And I said no, and he said, because I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who will always love you no matter what.
So sweet. I mean, what you've been talking about is memories of a man who loved food, loved you, wanted to take you and indulge in new experiences to do with eating and cooking and spending time with you. And I think that you know that is about what we do. Food is memory and food is love.
Oh, everyone, hope you will sorry to be familiar.
I just am because I'm here. They always look.
Like what.
He's quite familiar that hello.
I can't say how many times when arriving in the River Cafe in a taxi the driver will turned around to me and say, is this the restaurant or Jamie Oliver cooked the other day? One even informed me that the River Cafe was owned by Jamie, and I thought, why correct him? He is a prodigal son or the brother who knows that when he walks in the door of the restaurant he is home.
Like the old days.
When was the last time you're here?
I try and get here at least two or three times a year if I'm lucky, and I have to say, it's a bit like therapy really see Charles, which always makes me very happy. We normally go through the same old jokes and then crack onto a bit of new news, friends and family. But there's lots of nostalgia, isn't there. I think one of the things you always said is that you love the reset of coming back to the River gap, something you and.
Beggsy always said. Yeah, as you go out.
Into the world, and then it's quite nice to get back to your roots and taste a bit of that get that River Cafe experience again. It's like being home, which is lovely.
Jamie came to work with us when he was just about twenty, I guess almost thirty years ago. Rose Gray interviewed him for the job and as always said, it was love at first sight.
Thank you, Euthie. Well, I love that. I remember the first time Rose interviewed me.
Tell me about it.
Well, I had been working at the Neil Street restaurant for a year and a half and I knew it was time for me to move on. And I just read this book, the first River Cafe book, Blue, and it just like changed everything. It was like it's like a moment because just from a design point of view and a feeling point of view and the black and white reportage photos, and it was like fresh air and I knew I had to get there, so I owned up and I came in. I was quite skin and
I had my first suit that was a really cheap suit. Honestly, it was if it had gone near a candle. We had gone up in flames so quickly, and I turned up in a suit with a terrible tie because my dad always said, like, make an effort. And I remember the head chef at the time and all the chefs looking around just thinking like he's in a suitcase.
You don't really wear suits.
Of the River customers, but we we definitely bonded on them. I think Ravioli was the place that we kind of connected and then the rest was history.
Then did you come straight away? Yeah?
Yeah, And I couldn't wait.
And it was like it was an amazing time because you know, obviously you always look back with romance, but it was an amazing time in Britain and the River Cafe was on fire and had come from you know, such humble beginnings. But was this extraordinary, unconventional John doing incredible things, run of course by Ruthie in the amazing team, but you know, cool Britannia, the music scene, the fashion scene,
the photography scene, the part scene. I remember cooking with you for a new labor before they got in and during they got in, and and I remember the Millennium Dome as a sketch on a tablecloth, and I remember it as a as a model that was just a few meters away from the pastry section while making chocolate Nemesis. And then I remember the real one.
Did you do you remember I was I was nineteen.
Yeah, I was nineteen years old when I came here, and I was.
Ninety wondered Blair when the election wasn't ninety seven. And then, as you said, there were a kind of excitement, a kind of melding also politics and food and as you say, culture and excitement. I certainly remember Rose calling me up. I think I was away clearly when you were. When you came through an interview in the suit, I would have remembered it. And she said, you know, Ruthy, this one you're going to love this.
This is somebody else.
I was so keen.
I was so keen, and it felt like a family straight away, and I'd grown up obviously in a family restaurant.
I know.
My last bit of advice from my dad to me was like just whoever you work for, just treat their business like yours. And you haven't got one job, You've got every job. If the phone rings picked it up, if your floor needs moping, moping. And I remember just sort of coming to the River Cafe and it actually felt like a family, which is actually it is more rare than it's not that common even now in restaurants. What you and Rose were doing was so untraditional from what the kind of machine teaches.
I remember.
I remember thinking about crying for about three weeks, not because of you or the team, but just because of the stress of a new menu twice a day.
Was completely outside of what I knew.
But then you get used to it, and I learned what you created was thinkers. Yeah, people that could adjust and react to seasons, and everything that was happening in the industry was about protocol and structures and safety, whereas we I don't know, it was so exciting to have two women as bosses and owners. I think very male driven kitchens, and I'm not saying this for any effect, like quite aggressive, often flooded with drugs, and it was quite scary. Yeah, And I knew those kitchens and I'd
worked in London and abroad and things like that. So it was, you know, even when I come in today, you can see there's this lovely fifty to fifty balance of them. And that's the holy Grail, I think. I mean, I think if.
You skew one way or the other, you can get issues.
But you know, it's but the thinking was so different.
One of the amazing trajectories was when we did a film called what was it called A Christmas at the Christmas at the River Curvet, and that was a film that you know, really I remember, you know you've fried mushrooms, didn't you.
Yeah, well we did, I think Paul Ketta and Ret Yeah. And then I think I was on HOTS two one night, and obviously I can look at it back now sort of seeing because I think, correct me if I'm wrong.
You were filming for.
A couple of weeks, the show that you were making, and I wasn't supposed to be working that night. I don't know if I ever told you this, I don't know that. So the night that I was in the background of your your program, I wasn't supposed to be working. I was off, and my wife Jewels was off as well, and she worked at the River Cafe in the front
of house. We hadn't had a night off together for ages and the phone rang about four o'clock and one of the team had gone sick jewels, you know, with all the best in the world.
I had to come and put the shift in.
But that's when the crew was there, and actually they were kind of in the way because I was catching my tail because I was an hour and a half late for the shift to cover someone and I was running Hots two, which as you know, is one of your busiest sections. I'm sure it still is now. But it was free to miss the tagleteleia I remember with Girol's and Risotto, remember I do, I do remember, and the slow of course.
Yeah.
I didn't think anything of it, and the night went out on TV like many months later, maybe six months later. Possibly I didn't know I was in it because I was working. But then the phones started to ring. The next day, literally the next day I came in.
I would say that I came in that morning and said, wow, Jamie, you did a really great, great thing with those mushrooms. You were amazing on television. And then the phone rang, and I can remember where it was. The phone used to hang up on a hook in the kitchen just when you came in. It was before we had the really open kitchen, and it was a call for you from Pat Lewellyn came over to me like, Ruthie. Somebody just called me up and asked me if I wanted
to do a screen test? What's a screen test? Should I go? And we didn't know anything, and then they said, Ruthie. The newspapers called up and said do I want to do it? Calm? Can I go?
Sure?
Damien.
Then a supermarket is called up cold and I say that within a very short time, you had a column in a newspaper, a television show, an advertising campaign with the supermarket, and they knew, they knew that you could do all this, and you showed them that you could and you did.
I mean, when I think about it, I mean, I remember when I had my twenty years anniversary and there was loads of people together, and to think that it really genuinely does come back to that phone court four o'clock saying can you cover.
Some weeks ago? Ian Wright and his beautiful family were sitting here in the River Cafe garden celebrating Nancy, his wife's birthday, Ruthie the waiter said to me, please go and ask him to do a podcast, especially for all of us. We know he loves to eat, but we want to know more about him. He is our hero. Ian does a lot that I could never dream of achieving,
for instance, kicking footballs into nets. But we do share a lot as well, concern for healthy eating for children, advocacy for social justice, a more fair society, and an end to racial discrimination. Today, on table four, we're going to get to know each other better, discussing all this and more, including having delicious lunches with our family. Thank you so much for doing this. Nice and you're going to stay for lunch? Yes, yeskay, because you do love to eat out. Yes, I see you here and you
always seem so happy. Did you eat out as a child.
No, This is probably why I love eating out so much. I didn't actually start eating out until obviously, I think I'm probably twenty one. Yeah, I didn't have a lot of experiences of going to restaurants, and even when I started doing that, I started eating past the very late in my life, and my mum never There wasn't a lot of variety, a lot of West Indian stew chicken. It was curry, golt, mutton, tripe, pigs, trotter's oxtail, white rice, rice with peas, boiled dumplings. So it was that kind
of food all the way up until that point. And I remember when I started playing football in Crystal Palace, I used to get very nervous about going to like we used to have to go to hotels, you used to have to go to restaurants and communal eat all of us together. And I was very insecure about it because I didn't know I didn't know foods. So and then we had older players who were really they were
quite mean. Let's say things like, you know, you know you've got duffin wires on there, you know you've got sour ta potatoes, And they'd say things like do you know you don't even have to spell duffing wa? You know what I mean? Do you know what potatoes are? Can you afford steak? So what I would do is I would I would end up then getting my mum
to make me something. I'd go down so the boss would see me and then I'd say for a five minut and then I'd leave and get my food warmed up by the people in the kitchen, and I'd eat in my in my hotel room. And that's what we used to do when we was younger. You to all eat either in the bedroom, in the living room in front of television or stuff like that. So I was more comfortable doing that. But my problem was insecurity about
ordering the food. So you know, it's intimidating. It was, and it was intimidating to the point where the manager, I've done it a few a few times, about three or four times, you didn't see me at dinner, and I remember in the morning he said, where are you. I'm not seeing you at the dinner. That's how I get together. And then I explained to him why, and then he kind of sorted that out for me. He
had a word with them. You know, obviously, you know it didn't help because obviously when people it was it was, it didn't help. But then I just I just blasted through it. And so offer the back of that, yeah, you know, you start to because you get into a situation where you can go to nice restaurants and so when I love it.
So when you talk about being excellent at your sport, being able to do what you do so well and that you are on a team, and then going to a meal time was painful, and it was painful because you were made to feel unable to feel it in.
Theory, to be honest, if it was about I was twenty one. In fact, it just turned twenty two when I joined Crystal Palace, so it was very late for me. A lot of my experiences started to come as learning on the job, about mixing with people, different people, worldly people, you know, knowing you know, even just the knife and forks from you know outside in you know, knowing what
to do. You know, you sit there and you're nervous, and so those were the kind of intimidating things about going to a restaurant or eating with people that used to really frighten me because I never we ate on our laps literally all the way through.
It's obviously was your mother working. Was there a table where you could sit.
No, the kitchen wasn't big enough for a table for the four of us, So it was my it was my mom, my stepdad, my older brother, me and my sister. So you know, there wasn't enough space for all of us to sit and have that dinner and have that chat. We've never done that. You know, that's something that's happened to me later in my life.
Would you tell me about Arson Venger?
Wow? The thing with him, Ruphy, is that he was how can I say, a visionary, a visionary in the way he came and changed the diet. Are we talking about nineteen ninety six, ninety five ninety six when he got there, and you know, food for Arson Vinger was fuel to perform. He came in and he changed the diet from steak and chips and anything you wanted to
proper food, like everything that is good for you. But the thing what it was with all the vegetables and the rice and the chickens steamed, you know, no seasoning, no salt, no salt, no seasoning, no nothing. All we could do is drink water and eat this bland food.
Where was he from.
It's kind of Austrian French, it's on that border. And when he came in, it's the first time I realized that it's not about liking what you're eating. It's the fact that you have to be eating this for that slow sugar release that you need when you're performing at a level where you need your energy and your energy has to be there constantly. This is why sweet things and certain things to shoot you up like that during the game, you'll have to come down because if you
shoot up, you have to come down. So this is why pasta and broccoli and cabbage and carrots and all those vegetables they give you that slow sugar that burns continually, so you can stay at a certain level and you can continue to perform. And it was very difficult at the start, but when you started to see everybody doing it, and you could see and obviously we had vitamins to go alongside that. But when you saw everybody starting to do in it and enjoying it, then they're taking it
into their home lives. They do the same at home. Then all of a sudden, you're realizing this is for us to perform to the best of our ability, to the point where when you go to restaurants you'd almost feel guilty to have anything that wasn't going to enhance you. You know, ars Vengas, he had no problems after the game for you to have a sugar rush like a donut or something. But then Monday or is that you've got to be back on that. You train really.
Hard it's tough.
And then what happens is is that you realize that if you're not eating right, you're not taking the vitman's right. You will see that you are, you're lagging behind the guys who are doing it religiously, to the point where again you go into a dressing room, Rufie, and you know it is very competitive, very competitive, especially when you go into a dressing room where you're trying to attain
and achieve everybody. The margins are very small. Yeah, we practice and we're trained to a level where we say, well, they better be training as hard as we are, because if not, we are going to destroy them. And that is what we were striving for.
On the mains, while we've got these beautiful, really sweet grapes at the moment which pass so well with the grouse.
And there's turbot and sea bass, oh my worms, fish you can have everything. We have had people come and order everything on the until they stay for a month or per month. Yeah, name Judy Dench is not just a national and international treasure. She's an interplanetary treasure. If there is life on Mars. They're talking about her most recent performance. I always say a recipe is half science and half poetry, and so we're going to skip the science and read the poetry. How about that?
Yes, well, I would love to have read a recipe, or even given you a recipe, but we'll come to that later. But you are talking to the worst cookie in Britain. And wasn't a sonic about food? But I just know this one poem, but it's some Hilaire Belloc, and it's about Henry King, Henry King, Henry King.
Here he goes.
The chief defect of Henry King was chewing little bits of string. At last he swallowed some that tied itself in ugly knots inside. Physicians of the utmost fame were called at once, But when they came, they answered, as they took their fees, there is no cure for this disease. Henry will very soon be dead. His parents stood about his bed, lamenting his untimely death. When Henry cried with latest breath, Oh my friends, be warned by me that breakfast, dinner,
lunch and tea are all the human frame requires. With that, the wretched child expires.
The wretched child. So as he worketh this poem, he was quite a lectural Bellock, wasn't he. He liked to tell everyone what to do and children how to be polite.
It's ather sad, it was rather grim.
I think, well it's beautiful. I think it's you know, there's a message, right, don't snack? Is that the message? Or you might don't snack? So doing the menus. Eliza had a blank sheet of paper she came in the morning. It's rather like your house. You go in the fridge, you see what's there, you see what's been ordered. You've sort of also, you know, we're always thinking about what I always think, what would I want to for lunch today?
Or I'm so you're not coming to my house Bridge and I beg you are.
I was so excited to make this beautiful clam taggerini, which I know is one of Ruthie's favorite pastors, where we cook the bongolay in advance with garlic and parsi stalks in chili, and then we pick all the clams out of their shells and reduce the white wine and the olive oil and the butter, and then we toss that through fresh handcut taggoerini, which is one of my favorite things that I've ever had at a bit of
a cafe. And we've also got this amazing slow cooked pheasant and partridge sauce which is a ragou that we make with lots of different wildbirds at this time of year, and we put chestnuts and mince panchatta in and that's really wonderful.
Now we're really talking.
We do write our menu every day.
It makes it special and exciting, which is what a restaurant should be and isn't very much.
What was it like when you came to London and food wise? Were you on a budget? Did you have to cook?
Eat out?
What did you do? Never? Never?
I have to tell you a story when I was awarded the OB and my agent at the time had been in Central with me, Julian Belfridge. He came down to lunch and I gave him lamb cutlets. I made an enormous effort. He finished them and whatever I gave him I can't remember for a dessert. And he sat back and he said, well, I'll tell you something, Judy, He said, you didn't get the Obe for cooking. Nothing like having a support of It's good to be told, isn't it.
It's good? There was What did you eat? There you are going to.
When we were old that when we got well, when we got to central, Oh, it was it was glorious.
We used to go to it.
Was somewhere in Kensington High Street. But we used to also go to a restaurant called a Capernina in Soho and that was the greatest treat.
So that was Italian food. That was Italian food. It was absolutely and it was affordable. You could do so they are on a student budget.
Just about just about it. But it were nice to be taken there. I must say, that was an enormous treat.
Do you remember a kind of multicultural restaurants? You remember Indian because a lot of you know, the cheapest food, certainly when I came in the sixties was Greek, Indian, Chinese.
I mean that was a huge treat to be able to eat, you know, to eat Chinese and as always say, Italian, and it was.
A real luxury.
And suddenly to be able to go to go or be taken to somewhere and you have the luxury of really the choice of things to have to eat. And you know, I'll never take that for granted.
I don't think.
Last week I spelled on a paddel with Vanessa King, or celebrating International Women's Day. Listening to Vanessa that evening, it became apparent that it really wasn't necessary for the rest of us to be there. It was her views on social justice, women in business, creativity and leadership that
everybody wanted to hear most of all me. Her path towards Chief Business Officer of Conde Nasty International is a story of a young girl from Kenya a chieving remarkable amount in a British world through sheer, intelligence, motivation and determination.
The way is that vocals is each magazine kind of dominates a floor.
So I worked on GQ for years.
I was running that business and I was that's the first floor, and then you graduate up in Bogue's a fifth floor. There was always this idea that nobody eats at Vogue, you know, so people would deliver you'd see in the reception of Vogue House, you know, cakes and these amazing things being delivered, and we'd all sort of scoff, Oh, well, you know they'll be in the bin. No one eats them up there. And actually it's a big misconception because we were, yeah, we work really hard. It's a really
hard working team, the Vogue team. I still now I'm overseeing all of the brands at Conde in US, but I still sit with Edward on the fifth floor and he.
Loves to eat. We love to eat.
We love to plan a dinner. We love to incorporate a bit of our culture into dinner. So even when we did his wedding, his wedding was at long leads and it helped him to plan that.
It was amazing. But we were saying, you know, we.
Need to have John Off in there, which caterist can. Yeah, we did, and we had you know, he loves spicy food anytime he comes here, or can I have chili and chili island, So we had chili sauces and everything. So it's talking about food eating. A lot of times he and I will eat our lunch at desks across from each other. So he'll have steam vegetables and you know, some fish or chicken or something, and I'll have sushi. But we sit together and eat it if we're doing
a working lunch. Otherwise I'm out with clients.
Where were you born?
So from the very beginning, I was born in Kenya, in Nanuki. My father is Kenyan and my mother is from Saint Kits in the Caribbean, s and Kittenita's tiny into the islands, and they met here in London. It's kind of a strange pairing in the seventies, and it was quite a radical relationship.
There's because.
At that time Africans and people from the Caribbean did not spend that much time together. They certainly didn't end up in relationship. And London is the great sort of unifying space, right It's a true melting plot I think in the world. They met here, they fell in love, and my mother moved with my father to this strange
land where she knew no language or the culture. Lots of her family didn't speak to her because of the move, and indeed lots of his family didn't speak to him because someone, yeah, from a different culture, and he was a very eligible bachelor. Was it a small village, quite a small village, yes, and it's in a sort of mountainous area. His family were in Coffee, so yeah.
Quite rural. But they were very well off.
But my mother had a very difficult time settling in there. And this is where food comes in, because she was encountering women who didn't understand her literally and figuratively. She only spoke English, and they often spoke five languages, you know, and so the language barrier was there. She didn't speak Swahili, she didn't speak the dialect as well, and so food was her way to connect with people. She used to say to me, it's quicker to learn addition than to
learn a language. And I think one of the most ingratiating things you can do in a new culture is, you know, know some basic words to greet people. And she looked at food in the same way. If you could cook the food really well, it was a show of respect. So she learned to cook, which I also found strange because she had cooks and nannies and all of those things.
But she loved to cook.
And she loved to cook before.
Yeah, my grandmother was a great cook.
And grandmother and Saint Kitts.
Yeah, so we're all over the place. But two we went to live with my grandmother. My mother and father got divorced. My mother came back to London to try and re establish herself by a house and all of those things, and we stayed in Saint Kit's with her, visiting frequently with my grandmother so I was very young, so I was stuck to her all the time. And she is definitely the most powerful sort of figure in my life.
My mother's a very powerful figure. We're very close. When my grandmother is almost my heart, you know, and.
I gosh, I'm welling up even talking about her. It's because when we spoke about this. No, she's not, but she's very much alive in I think about her every day, not only through food, but also just her advice was amazing because it's so funny. It's really evocative thinking about this, I'm getting emotional.
No, it's kind of happy to you know.
What was her food?
Like?
Describe was she in the kitchen all day long?
I don't remember her not wearing an apron or some sort of overalls. So she made food that was needed, constant nurturing, you know.
Her house was also.
Where everyone dropped in, so my sister and I lived there on and off. Four of my cousins lived there, my uncle's children, and then she was sort of everyone's grandmother. So her house was Oh, it was so fun. It was a wash with children all the time, and I was the youngest, so I was always with her. I slept in her bed, and I was literally on her apen strings.
So her food was very rich. It was like.
Almost like a warm embrace, you know, hearty, and lots of sort of stews and meats and heavily marinated delicious comfort food dumplings, and you know, sort of starchy, delicious things. And she kept her own little farm, at least it felt like a farm to me. She grew her own vegetables, She had her own fruit tree. She would graft her own strains of mango. She grew herbs and things that people would come and visit her to buy. And she kept her own animals. And I used to help her
tend to those little gardens. And then she'd make up these amazing dishes from food, and she'd tell me stories of the food as well.
So did she grow up in poverty or did she grow up any Yes, she did.
And I look at sort of my life now, which is so much on her shoulders, and all of the opportunity I have now, and I think about how important circumstances. So she was a really intelligent woman. She was the most prolific reader I ever knew. She was either cooking or reading. But she was forced to leave school at fourteen. Her mother was a She also had a slightly strange parentage in that her father was.
Previously a slave and her mother.
Was So your great grandfather was a slave, yeah in syn kids, Yeah, and probably like the Civil warab Yeah.
But her mother, which is really strange, was a Portuguese woman from a slave owning family, so it's really really unusual that way around. And her mother was not very maternal at all, and so they fell upon hard times. Her mother was seen, I think as having made bad decisions, and so she didn't grow up surrounded, as I understand it, by lots of love, and so she created this love loving world. But the reason that it's important at how she grew up is her food was very much work of food.
You know, she made food.
That they would have made for men and women who worked picking cotton. She was picking cotton fourteen years old in the fields, and then after that taking books under the house to read them in the evening and cooking and supporting the households and so on. So she had this really eclectic upbringing where she really valued education and missed her opportunity, I think, to have a full education.
But food was also the key joy.
Yeah, and so would you sit down? Would you go to school and then every evening come home and sit down for dinner? Would that be a dinner on the table for you? Yes?
Yeah, So we would have great mounds of kind of rice and vegetables and these kind of incredible and everybody would pile in and pour in and go for second plates. It wasn't a very formal sit and the table was also off the kitchen, so it was kind of part of the action, and it was just a really lovely way to be connected with the people around you.
I'm often asked if it's intimidating cooking for celebrities who come to the River Cafe. My response is that the guests who really worry me are other chefs. It's a bit like that today, as I'm about to interview the interviewer mary Ella frost Rop, especially since I was watched the subject for Guardian's Lunch with mary Ella, Mariella wrote, despite such eloquence, Ruthie is a disaster of an interview. My questions get longer as her answers get shorter, and
inevitably end with a question for me. She's all, don't you think and do you find and have you noticed? But I'm reminding myself that I'm not here with Marielle the journalist.
But Mariella, my good friend.
A friend of mine, gave me a job in his recording studio and so I did that until I left for London. In Dublin, yeah, that's when I met you know, all of the people that we have in common. I recorded U two's first demo tapes when I was yeah, fifteen and he was seventeen. He hates it when I remind him that he's older. But yeah, that was all when I was working at Keystone Studios. But after my father died, I took the ferry from Dunleary with my.
Friend in London. Oh, you had another friend.
She didn't know she she just had an address for us. There was a she had some Irish friends who were living in a squat or friends of friends who were living in a squat in Stoneleigh Street in West London,
actually not very far from here, off Latimer Road. And we arrived there on a bright summer sunny morning and were greeted at the door by just this crowd of Irish men mostly And I was like married, What was the point in coming all the way here if we're just going to live with the whole house full of Irish people. But they were incredible to us and made
they were so hospitable. Sixteen sixty, she's eighteen, and they gave us a room that there was already two of them living in, but we were allowed to share it. I mean, there were amazing days. You know. I think it was a really great time to be young. You know, there was huge adversity, but at the same time life just felt full of possibility and you could afford to rent places for cheap.
You know.
We were only in the squad for about three months and then I got a job at the Blushes on the King's Road. I don't know if it's still There was a wine bar and it used to be so amazing on a Saturday. Then you know Bob Geldof and.
Paula because they live right around the corner, and they used.
To arrive on a Saturday morning at about eleven o'clock at the tube station on the King's Road and then they would promenade up the King's Road and they would be followed by this sort of retinue of it was like a medieval you know. It was like Henry the Eighth that arrived and all these people would be following along in their wake, and again it was like theater watching, you know, and it was punk and it was just incredible and exciting.
Do you remember what you ate at the time? Would you would you go to restaurants or would you cook at home? Or would you I'd cook it at home. I'd cook at home.
Food wasn't great, and you know, it wasn't and I didn't really care so much. I mean, I was so obsessed with just survival and getting on, survival and getting on. I mean, it was the nineteen seventies. It was quite a bit of sort of beef berging yr and you know, black Forest getter, nothing to write home about. Everyone was eating spaghetti bolonnaise because that was very exotic and Italian,
but not Baudelais nouver. That was always quite exciting. Yeah, I remember that through the eighties, but not so much the food.
Really. Did you have a domestic life as well? Did you live with anybody and have to think about a kitchen or food or bringing shopping home or did you just basically food? Was you smoked and so I spoke and drag Botel nouve.
But I did get married when I was eighteen to another lost soul who's a wonderful and old friend of mine now called Richard Jobson, who was the lead singer in this punk band called the Skids.
Yeah Skids, Great, Yeah.
Into the valley working for the Yankee Dollar.
Come on.
Anywhere.
But Richard was a really interesting and unusual character. He was another lost kid. He's left home at sixteen. He had, you know, huge intellectual aspirations, many of which he went on to realize a huge determination. And I think we sort of fell together out of loneliness and we tried, you know, we gave it our best shot for two kids, and we stayed together till I was twenty one, so young. So we had a domestic life then and very rudimentary.
I used to make things like grilled pork chops with mustard on them, and a lot of potatoes, spaghetti bolonnais.
Cookbooks, do you remember using.
I had the Constant Spry cookbook that my mum had given me because that was sort of her bible.
She came from an English family.
She's half Scottish, half English, was Scottish, she was Scottish really, but she learned, you know, we used to.
She used to.
She taught me how to make love scass, which is a it's a very rudimentary Norwegian stew, which is beef and potatoes but cubed very small and cooked in their own broth for quite a long period of time. And she used to make these things called milkering, which are that's sort of yogurts basically that Norwegians used to make. And it was very weird because both she and my
stepmother used to make these yogurts. Once I left her house and went went to live with my dad, every cupboard you opened would have yogurt, you know.
Breeding. Yeah, was your father's second wife.
She wasn't They weren't married, but I mean Sheian, No, she was Irish, but you obviously had an interest. They all wanted to impress one. He had this thing, you know, which clearly worked for every woman in his life. And I don't think my mum and my stepmother were the only ones either, So yeah, he had a.
Cooking for you know, seduction as well that people can remember. Can you remember me or where you wanted to impress somebody and you cooked.
I've never cooked when I wanted to impress.
Were you're joined by Judy Dirk, she said the same thing