Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adami's Studios.
A few months ago, my good friend Lorne Michaels texted me to say that Tina Fay was coming to London to star in the movie. He knew I would love her from the first meeting. It became a friendship formed with food. Tina arrived at our house with a beautiful box of chocolates for me, as brought up to do by her mother, and I brought home a River Cafe Lemon tart for her. The first dinner, I made slow cooked tomato pasta. She ate two portions and then we played cards. Did I think baby?
It was three?
I'm actually, you know, being polite. Of course, millions of us have shared food with Tina Fay in thirty Rock, which he wrote and starred in, and even her name Liz Lemon was food related. Sandwiches never to be shared, hard cheese eaten at midnight, advice given to John McEnroe. I'm where to buy the best cupcakes in New York City. Her obsession with hot dogs resulting in a food warning from the street vendor, a snl, A brandy husband devouring
a cake. While discussing riots and weekend update and who could forget the cafeteria scene in the movie, She wrote, mean, girls, Well, you've just been in the River Cafe kitchen. What was it like?
Oh my god, it's the most beautiful dance happening in the kitchen, everyone working so perfectly.
I'm Sean Winnowen and I'm the executed chef at the River Cafe. Today we're making tomato tellier renni with Tina Fee. So we're going to make a tegler Reni with the slow cup tomato, sauce and butter. Which is probably one of Route's secrets is adding the butter to it.
Aha.
Now we know.
We love about a half a cup of butter, you know, one person portion. Oh it's not it, yeah, only because we can't court right into my mouth here.
At the station.
It's gorgeously Michael marry a non human entity.
I would marry this.
Plus thank you for joining for that.
Thank you you're here doing.
I'm acting in a movie called A Haunting in Venice, directed by Sir Keneth Branna. It's when Agatha Christie inspired murder mystery and it's been very fun to be here shooting in an ensemble with some really great actors Michelle Yo and Jamie Dornan and Kamilka Tan and Kelly Riley. And it's just been fun to be basically on the
Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World. I've just been inside that ride for three months because we're on this set that's like a spooky old Venetian palazzo in the dark all day, every day for three months.
Is the culture of filming in Britain in Europe in London very different? And back to food, fo is it a different food culture that it is a little different.
Our lunch is our hours are very civilized here. We stopped every day at six on the dot, which at home, depending on who you're working for, you could drift into eight o'clock, ten o'clock, one am, you could work really late.
Yeah, we s done.
Our lunch is very short. It's only half an hour, which was sort of we weren't used to it at first, but none I grew to really like it because then you don't kind of lose momentum. Usually you come back from Americans that you come back from lunch a little sleepy and you have to get a coffee. But this was a half hour lunch and then back in and just everyone offering you tea, constantly drinking so much tea, which is nice tea and digestives.
Is there a food scene in it?
I didn't get to do any on camera eating.
Oh that's shame.
There was a nice thing on set, which was again because food is the only way to communicate with people. Because the cast we're all from different places, we started kind of sharing our favorite unique snacks from our countries, which started because somehow it was Halloween when I first got here, and I was talking about candy corn, and of course no one here knew what that was, and so I had a friend bring me a couple bags of candy corn to share, and we started taking a poll.
We'd give it to the Brits and film their reactions, and people thought it was disgusting, which I respect.
I love it.
But it was a great conversation starter when we were all new to each other and we were like kind of an icebreaker. And then other people started bringing in a woman waking A Yoshihara is our head of our hair and makeup department, and she's Japanese, and so she started bringing in Japanese candy and we were trying like and some were great, some were disgusting. So she had
these plump candy that looked like a children's vitamin. I apologize to anyone loves these, but she was so amused to film each of us trying them, and it's so funny that something could be a complete comfort treat to her. That to my palette was horrible. And same with the candy corn. And then some of the Brits started bringing it was getting closer to Christmas, and Kelly Ryland brought in. She said, this is the cheap chocolate that we grew
up with quality street mixing chocolates. And then Emma Laird was bringing different kinds of crisps. And then we kept asking Camille Catan, who's French, like you know what's unique? What kind of weird candy can you bring? And she was like, I don't know what I can bring. And then she brought by the way, why am imitating her? Like she's Salma hiak like that, and then she Camille showed up with gorgeous cheese from France for the whole crew. She's like, we don't eat garbage. Yeah, so she brought
this like gorgeous, gorgeous cheese. The one thing I used to love with it's Saturday Night Live. Saturday was the most fun day because it's the day where it's finally all happening and you can spend a lot of time being worried, and then Saturday you just have to kind of go down the slide, you know. And we would have these crew lunch dinner. I guess we'd sort of rehearse from one pm till about five thirty pm, and you'd go down to the NBC cafeteria and have lunch
with everybody or dinner with everybody. That's one of my favorite memories of working there.
Actually, when you're producing a film or a theater, do you think about what people are going to eat?
I mean I always if I'm producing something, I want the food to be good and to be ample. And oftentimes, if you want to reward the cast and crew, you send more food. We send like food trucks, like pizza truck, coffee truck.
Yeah, the food is.
In my I believe food is the only reward in life.
In life good I like that, sure money, sure food.
Yeah.
We still have a wonderful lady who's no longer with us from an Angel who was in charge of what's called craft services on thirty Rock, which is you have your meals, you get in like there's a truck, there's catering does breakfast and lunch, but all the food that you just eat in between that all day there would just be a table in the hallway with food. And Angel had so much passion about her job. And she was Italian American from Staten Island and she would show
up with these things. Would be like, Angel, what is this? She would just bring them these beautiful like whatever, like balls of matsarel, these crazy breads, what was that? Like rolled up art of choke bread and all this stuff. It was so much more than what you would normally get, like a bowl of apples and some candy. And this episode of thirty Rock, there's a whole storyline about the
perfect sandwich. And there's this thing where I'm chasing a guy that I love through the airport but they want you don't go through, they want me to take my sandwich and that take no way.
Yeah, but first you have to describe that scene. I'm not going to do it because I think it is one of the great scenes and food.
Thank you, I will say I as an actor, perhaps my only specialty is on camera eating. I commit to it. I'm looking great at it. And so this is a scene where Liz lemon Is. She's chasing her love interest, who is played by Jason Sadaikis, who you all may know is Ted Lasso, and I'm chasing through the airport and I've been also the other part of the stories. I've been trying to get the team stirs the union drivers to tell me where they get these great sandwiches.
So I've got my special sandwich. And the security guard at the airport says, you have to leave the sandwich behind, you can't take it through, and I say no, women can have it all. And I'm going to eat this sandwich in one bite before I go through security. And I'm still going to catch the man. And so it came down to Angel, this woman who did our craft service. I said, Angel, this is a special assignment for you.
I need you to make me the perfect sandwich. Normally it would have been the props department, but I said, Angel, You're going to make the sandwich and and I need it to be I need to be able to eat it in one bite. So she went to these bakers that she knew in Staten Island and had them custom make I don't know what it was, the softest, still a chest bread. And when I tell you that sandwich, I can remember to this day. That sandwich was so delicious.
It was an Italian sub so it had like some salami and some what I would call gabba ghoul, some cheese. It wasn't a fake sandwich. And I ate it in one take, and I remembered saying they were like, we got it, and I was like, did we? Because if you need me to do it again, I am willing because it was so good.
But it goes to angel because the bread.
Like melted in my mouth.
One of the most delicious things was very simple. We lived at five stories up in this tenement and my mother would throw in it, throw down in a brown paper bag, a kaiser roll smeared with a lot of butter and almost a whole tomato sliced and salted that and it was the most delicious thing. You'd catch it, and I'd always catch it. But one time I missed it and splat.
Mel Brooks makes the world laugh. Watch the producers blazing saddles Young Frankenstein. Listen to the two thousand year old man, or read his autobiography All About Me, and you are guaranteed to find yourself laughing out loud. But for me, having known Mel for twenty five years, funny is not the first word I would use to describe this amazing man.
Hungry, hungry. Before I forget, I would like to do my imitation of a cat. That is that is a perfect sound. It's hard to do, hard to do. I do it in Young Frankenstein. I think it's it's a dart throwing contest and one of the dots hits a cat.
Wow.
Let's begin at the beginning, earliest food memories. What do you remember from you know, your early days. Did your mother cook?
Yeah?
My mother, okay, it was it was a standard Williamsburg, Brooklyn Jewish tenement food. So breakfast in the winter was always a hot cereal, cream of wheat or Rallston which was a kind of barige brown barridge, and then in the summer corn flakes, rice krispies or wheaties.
What year would that have been? How old would you I would.
That would be thirty five, I'd be around nine That's when I went my uncle Joe, shortest jew on earth, how short he was a character about four to four. And when when a taxi, a big checker taxi cab rolled down the streets of Brooklyn, and there was no driver, that was Joe. There was no driver. It was so short it get just about peer over the you know. Anyway, Joe took me because his friend Al was the doorman of the Alvin Theater on fifty second Street, and running
at that same theater was Cold Porters Anything Goes. I had never seen a Broadway show. I was nine years old, and Uncle Joe took me to see Anything Goes. I was stunned. I was. I couldn't believe it, even though we were in the second balcony, was far away from the stage as you can get ethel Merman was too loud, No MIC's.
She was just anything Goes? Did she say the mother?
Yeah?
Yeah, the woman. It's on a ship, isn't it.
And it's on the ship very good? Yeah. And Victim Moore was was the gangster the gang Yeah.
Yeah.
It was so good. At the end, I nearly clapped my hands over. I just couldn't stop clapping and screaming and shouting. And then I got back an Uncle Joe's camp. I said to him, Uncle John, I'm not going in the garment center. Everybody at three sixty five South third Street, between on Hooper and Use, three sixty five South third Street, everybody in that building worked in the garment center. They were shipping clerks, they were cutters, they were designers, they
were salesmen. They everybody I think on the street, these sixty one, three sixty three through sixty five, these tenements, everybody in the garment set. And I screamed at my uncle Joe, Uncle Joe, I'm not I'm not going into the garments that I'm not. I'm gonna go into the show business. I loved it. I loved it, you know. And it changed, but it did, and I did. And because he take.
You to food, but do you take you out to eat? I always went to the theater as a kid. And then there was the meal afterwards, lunch, before it was a day out.
We had some favorites that Uncle Joe would take us to, where one was called Gallagher Steakhouse. They had like half a cow in the window. I always had these half cows in the window you know, hanging gallaghers and the and the steak was incredible. And sometimes you go to Jack Dempsey's restaurant.
And what was that?
And it was great, but you know it was it was all meat, it was There never any fish in a restaurant. Yeah, And I never liked fish. I don't think I ever liked fish until I was seventy or eighty and I went to the River Cafe.
And so really you never ate fish.
I hardly ever ate fish as But.
It's interesting to me that you you describe a kind of modest home life in terms of going your food, but but you went out to restaurants.
So what's while a lot of Jewish restaurants were called dairy restaurants and they serve stuff like blinches with sour cream and old dairy. You never mixed meat and dairy with something some religious nonsense.
Did your grandmother cook for you?
My grandmother cook?
What did she cooks? Which grandmother? Your mother's mother's mother. I never knew, you never knew your father's.
No, No, my father's grandmother. I did know. She did say to her meals best olden meals in Bensonhurst where they lived in a big one family.
Did they come with their first generation?
Yeah, no, they were. They were European.
Yeah, and so do you think your grandparents brought their food with them, the food culture.
They cooked the same stuff. Mostly it was chicken, chicken and chicken soup.
And uh, briscuit.
Yeah, they made brisket. Absolutely, they made brisket and brown potatoes.
Do you know my grandparents came, They were They came from Hungary and Russia. And my father remembers my grandmother having in the lower East side a carp swimming in the bathtub that they would make it filter fish out of. So can you imagine having aok They would bring it a live fish.
Live fish. We would get a live fish. My brother Bernie and I were usually one week. We loved and we called them already, and we fed them bread crumbs and we chased them around the bathtub. And then it was unspeakable. I can't even describe it. Irving, my older oldest brothers Irving and Lenny, held us back. We were screaming, don't kill him, and my mother would say we gotta eat, we gotta eat supper, and she'd kill audience, serve him. It was and we would cry and we ate him.
And then would you get another carp and kill that. We got another carp It's so interesting that they had live fish swimming in the back in Yeah.
They it's amazing that you had to say.
My brother Michael, who you know, just wrote I have found that something my father had written about his memories of food and just living in the Lower east Side. But you weren't in the Lower east Side.
The Lower east Side, an extension of the Lower east Side was Williamsburg.
That was probably one step up, was it.
Well, it was one step up if you put it next to a section brook called Bronzeville, East New York, and that was really where they coldstoves they don't even have guess.
Yeah, And we.
Had electricity and way, I guess. So we were one step above Brownsbeil equal to the Lower east Side.
In September, the River Cafe will be thirty six years old, and one of the great joys of having a restaurant for so long is watching the second generation and now even a third generation of our early customers grow up. Adwa's parents, Charles Boa and Camilla Lowther, have been part of the River Cafe family since we opened, and ad was gone from being a young child ordering pasta, butter and cheese and then playing in the garden space outside with her friends to a formidable woman focused on the
political and social issues relevant today. After her own struggles with mental health and to support young women's wellbeing, she founded the organized Girls Talk, providing a safe space for girls to access resources, share experiences, create community, and feel less alone. A place to escape the chaos of.
The every day.
I think a.
Beautiful phrase today.
Ed was just come from the kitchen grilling scallops and frying zucchini. It's both moving and exciting for me to have Edward here.
Oh that was so nice.
Tell me about going to Vogue with Edward, because we did. When Edward Nfl became the editor, we did the party here. Remember that we had a party for him. I was a great party. You were the cover for his first year.
That was mad, that Vogue party. I remember that like it was yesterday. I remember I was driving here and I, you know, Edward, and I still laugh about it now. It's like it wasn't naivety. I think it was just this. We were just doing something that felt very special to both of us. It was like this we were embarking on this new journey, and it wasn't necessarily that we were. We were completely naive to how the world was going to embrace it. You know, not only just people in fashion,
but worldwide. You know, it really went and viral, do you know what I mean?
I think?
And so as we kind of pulled up, I pulled up. I can't remember who I was in the car with. Maybe it was like my mom and dad and system. We pulled up the Shepherd's Bush roundabout and it was projected on Shepherd's Bush round about.
What the hell is going on?
And I looked on my phone and it was just like going mad and I actually like broke out into hives. I was like, oh my god, this is so much. I don't even know how to deal with this situation. I pulled up the River Cafe and Edwin and I just giggled.
We could not stop laughing.
I think we were both so overwhelmed by what had happened that we kind of just like could not stop laughing.
It was mad. It still feels really.
We all had Ravioli. We had this long discussion before whether all the Vogue people, the models and the actresses and the young beauties of today would actually have gluten carbs, cheese, butter, and whether we would serve it. And we did, and BO was actually really cool because we said, do you want to find out what people want? They get and now we're done with that. We're done with you know, if you have a food preference, We're just going to
do the menu and what they eat. And everybody had ravili and everybody, a lot of people had seconds of REVIALI And yet the whole issue at the of being a model about your body, talk about being a woman in a profession that requires you to be a certain shape size.
I think I don't remember being worried. I think there were moments when I was at school where I was kind of worried about what I looked like. Sometimes I didn't I wasn't at a girls' school, but you know, I lived in a house of women. So sometimes when someone would get a bit like weird with food or they'd have you know, issues, it kind of sometimes bleeds into everyone else within the community, do you know what I mean?
We see that all the time.
And I think when I started modeling, I don't again remember feeling that pressured about it. I think I just felt like incredibly painful in my own body in general, So it wasn't necessarily like kind of weight related. I think there's always been like parts of my body that I haven't like loved, you know what I mean, And I've had to grow to love the.
Are you the kind of person that can eat but not gain weight.
Yeah, because I've always done lots and lots of sports.
But were other models that you were with? What did you feel that to be a model you had to be a Yeah.
I got weird with food for a period of time where actually when I got sober, and they call it that transference, you know, I think I was just trying to control something else.
In my life.
So I got a bit weird food when I was about twenty two. I think it was just control, to be quite honest, And and I think, wait for me, you know, if I'm myselfle with anxiety, you know, and so when I'm anxious, it just falls off. Yeah, I'm not the type of person sometimes I am eating, but it literally just falls off all the time. So sometimes I haven't even been like aware of like dropping way.
I think I've always done a lot of exercise and a kind of now do pilates, so I used to build a lot of muscle, So my body has changed, like you know, over the course of like many years, I think, And so.
I think.
Because I think when I got started modeling properly, I decided there was a part of me that hat that to do it, to really kind of walk into it again, I had to take on. It was almost like a It wasn't necessarily that I felt like that, but I had to be like, this is who I am, do you know what I mean? Like take it or leave it, you know what I mean. I'm not gonna be sucked into this idea that I should be thinner or look a different sort of way for you to kind of
appreciate me or want me. So I had to and that's not exactly how I felt all the time, but I had to sort of fake it to make it so. It wasn't necessarily I think I've always I don't know. I was speaking on the pod, my own podcast about this the other day. I think, I wonder if my relationship with myself will ever be.
What I wanted to be.
Whilst I model, I don't know if I have a to a certain extent, a healthy relationship with myself, but I wonder if my relationship with my body will ever be what I want it to be as long as I'm kind of within the industry. And yes, it has changed like drastically, do you know what I mean, the likes of amazing people spearheading different sorts of movements. But you know, we only have to kind of look at certain photos or fashion shows and we see the kind of the.
Pressure that's play and I almost find it painful.
I haven't been to that many catwalk shows. I think it probably it has when you see you know how and kind of serious and all that. You know, I know, it's there to just showcase the clothes, and so it's like being a hanger, but there is something as a woman to see women doing that job is a little bit yeah.
And also when you know that someone's like kind of unwell yeah, whatever that looks like for different people. When you know someone's kind of suffering with and you know, disordered eating, but they are praised and celebrated within the industry and they work even more. It's that in itself is an uncomfortable thing to get your head around. I think that's where sometimes the pressure for me lies. It isn't that I want to be onwell, it's just the fact that I see people doing well because of it.
Do you know what I mean?
And that's a that's a mad thing to get your head around.
When I told my friends that I would be recording a podcast with Rick Rubin this weekend, the responses were rapturous, what wow, incredible and can I come? It was the same in the River Cafe the other day when Rick was there. Grown men trembled, women found excuses to hover near his table. Chefs could barely grill the sea bass. Rick Rubin is a decade long creative force with a voice and influence that carries immeasurable weight. Co founder of
def Jam, winner of seven Grammys. As a friend in music told me, Rick is unique together with discovering, mentoring creating beautiful music with artists such as Adele Eminin, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Run DMC, and for me, most movingly Johnny Cash. His values, principles and kindness guide everyone he comes close to. Tell me what happens when you go into the studio. You've eaten definitely, I've eaten before and now the way it used to work for the majority of my life.
I would wake up, do whatever I would do before going into the studio, but once I would go to the studio, that would be it for until I was time to go to bed. So I would spend the majority of my time, and which also means in those days working in New York, it'd be a small room with no windows, and I would be there for as long as you know, until the sun came up, and
then I would walk or take a taxi home. So the majority of my life, I would say, for at least twenty five years, was being in a small dark room. So I had very little life outside of a recording studio because I worked so much so long. Now I've found a way and just through doing it enough understanding what's important for me to be there for, what's not important for me to be there for. And now I tend to have lunch, go to the studio, work from maybe one till six.
And what do you do when you say you were.
Listen to music and then talk about what we can try next. Sometimes we do it right then, and sometimes we're making a list of things to try after I leave in the evening. It depends. I always have anxiety when a project starts, because I never know what's going to happen. We don't go in with any script. I prefer to go in when we have songs. But then
there are a million ways to present a song. So there's always this sense of what's going to separate this body of work from the rest of the artist body
of work and everyone else's work. And I don't know what that is going in, So it's a real experiment and we come in and I'm nervous until something good happens, like ah, And then if that thing that's good, even if it's a even if it doesn't end up this way, if it's a clue of what the whole vision of the project can be, even if it's not what it is, I feel better because at least there's a solution, even if it doesn't end up being the solution, there's a possible solution.
And that feels good because I was reading about the way you work, and you said that you start with an empty sheet. You know that you basically start with nothing, yes, and then you move from nothing to what you're going to record that day or work in my own little way, in my own little restaurant, we come in with an empty sheet of paper? Can we write the menu? Of course, there are things that we always know.
We'll have montsarell.
We always know that we'll have four pastas, and we always know that we'll have two dishes on the grill, two dishes in the wood oven, then two dishes to roast. But it does start with an empty sheet. And do you have a parallel in that?
Absolutely? I come and we usually start by listening to any ideas that the artists have. Whatever they are, they could be. It could be a song. They may play a whole song and then talk about how to do it, or they may play a demo of a whole worked out arrangement of a song with musicians and everything. They may come in and with a riff, you know, just a little snippet of a song, or a melodic idea or a lyrical idea, and then we talk about ways of fleshing it out and what are the next stages
and what can it be. Sometimes they'll come to me with a whole body of work, like an album's worth of things that are in various stages of completion, and then we listen and see is something that we can Is this a starting point that we could build off of, or is this almost like a recipe that we could use to start from scratch? You never know it really is,
and then the experiments begin. We try different things, and I like the idea of in the case of where someone brings in something, I like the idea of stripping back the elements and listening to what's there and even if it wasn't done in an intentional way for the way that it's going to be used. Sometimes you find very interesting things that if you were trying to do it, you might not do. It could be very interesting to listen to.
It's also trust, isn't it that they trust what you're saying to them, or they trust what your thoughts.
It's like if I gave you two dishes of food and I asked you to taste them and ask you which one you like better. The only right answer is the one that you like better. Do you know what I'm saying? There is no right answer. It's with taste. It's you taste this, You taste this, Tell me which one you like. There's no same tell me there's no there are no wrong answers in taste. It is I've been lucky that when I'm true to my taste, other
people have liked it. It's not the case for everybody, but that's the best chance we have is to make the thing that we love and hope that someone else loves it. If you do something that you don't like with the idea that someone else might like it, what are the odds that's going to be good? Then no one might like it, at least at least I like it, you know, and I can go to sleep knowing it's the best I could do. I love it. If no
one else likes it, it's okay. A certain person plays a guitar piece and it's beautiful, and another person plays the same guitar piece and there's this other magical dimension to it that you can put a finger on. You don't know why it's I don't even know if it better's the right words. You don't know why it's different, because technically it looks the same. But one of them you want to hear over and over and over again
forever and you're filled with wonder. And the other one it's the same notes in the same order, at the same speed, played with great dexterity, but it doesn't have this other life to it, and I would say the same with food.
It's the same with the recipe, isn't it that you can say I always say that a recipe is part poetry and part science. Yes, and that the science is the cord of a teaspoon of baking powder or three tablespoons of sugar. And yet, as you say, the way it's stirred, in the way it sifted, the way it's put in the past.
So I have a question for you, how difficult is it to keep the consistency of the quality of the food with different people involved over time.
Yeah, that's a good question. I think that we have very few chefs, so it's not a big kitchen, and we don't have what you're doing in Los Angeles when I was in kitchens that you have one head chef and a lot of chefs on the line. So there is a kind of communication really.
Of how you do it.
But is that is what I look for every time if you come to eat, My fears is that you know, I'm grilled sea bass coming to the table going to be the way it was the night before, and you know, and very often when you're on the past, the head chef, I don't know how it is in music, but the head chef is the last person to see the plate that goes out. And it's tricky because sometimes you just keep sending it back to the chef who didn't quite get it right, and you're taking away their confidence, you're
diminishing them, and you're destroying them. But on the other hand, you know that you don't want to send something out, so it's a constant, you know, judgment. How can you tell a musician who's just the one that didn't play the guitar the way? What do you do with someone who's played something that isn't How do you give that?
I do my best to cast the people that can do the work, and if not, I'll do it again with someone else.
Tell me about some of the musicians and their food. As there a musician that you actually.
That one of the things that because the nature of the recording studio is this place you go to and sometimes you spend a long time knowing what you're doing, and sometimes you spend a long time trying to figure out what you're doing or waiting for the thing to come that you're there to do, but you don't know what it is yet. So eating in the studio is
a standard. And one of the things about Shangri Laud, the studio that I have in Malibu, is most studios have one runner, maybe two, and we have lots of runners. And when people come and order food, food comes very quickly, which historically in studio you'll order lunch and it might not come for two hours, whereas for whatever reason, at Shangra lab's very creature, comfort oriented, and we get really good food really fast, and sometimes we and have a
chef because there's a kitchen. If you ever saw the movie The Last Waltz, the band are in the kitchen at Changra La, that's.
The You came into my house today and the first thing you said was let's eat. Yes, you did quite quickly.
Is the habit.
A friend of mine once said that his family had a rule that there should be no longer than forty five seconds when someone walks into your house that they have a drink in their hand. And actually, what I think that does is actually very nice, because it means you're stopping what you're doing and you're giving somebody something when they come in the house, you know, And I think that means something. And so are the artists that
you do associate more with food than others. But then Johnny Cash, he eat.
Johnny Cash loved a restaurant in Los Angeles called the Ivy, and wherever he would come to town, we would always go to get it to the Ivy.
They're very few people who, even if you rarely see them, stay close to your heart. For me, it's Wolfgang Puck. I'm often asked who inspired Rose and I when we opened the River Cafe, and the answer is Wolfgang. Before he created Spago, the choice for choosing a restaurant was eat delicious food, but be sure to dress up and be prepared to feel intimidated by the soumeier chef or just the atmosphere in the room, or eat less well, but go out and have fun in a lively, exciting,
friendly place. With Spago, Wolfgang taught us we could do both, and he turned the world upside down. He made pizzas, luxurious, airport food, delicious wood ovens for cooking, and took chefs out of basement kitchens so diners could see them and they could see the diners. A few months ago, he came to the River Cafe for dinner with his family. To everyone working there, it felt like a visit from the gods. For me, it was a visit from a man I loved, but rarely see a man who is close to my heart.
Thank you.
Tell me about your family. Did you grow up with good food?
You know, it's very interesting.
My mother was a chef, a professional chef, but she didn't own a restaurant. She worked for a small hotel on a beautiful lake in Carinthia, which is the southern part of Austria next to Italian Slovenia, And so she was.
A good cook.
And my stepfather was a coal miner and totally crazy and alcoholic and everything, and my mother was like an angel. I don't know how the young and the young get together, but it's impossible. And when I was fourteen, I had to decide what to do, because you're the school finished. At fourteen, I was finished with school and we didn't have the money to go to Vienna to study. I actually wanted to be an architect, did you yeah, But then we didn't have the money to go.
So then my mother found me a job.
As an apprentice. My stepfather said, cooking, it's not a profession for man. You should be a cap and or you should be a mason, or you should be a mechanic or whatever cooking is for women. And he said you're good for nothing, because I hated to help.
Him and everything.
So I still remember when I left, which was fifty miles away where I was starting my apprenticeship, and I was fourteen years old.
I went to the train station with.
A little suitcase and then I take the train and as I was walking out the house, he say, oh, you're good for nothing. You're going to be back in a month, and then cry for money and everything. I said, I'm never.
Coming back at age fourteen.
At fourteen, yeah, And then I go there. I started my apprenticeship and the chef there was as crazy as my stepfather. So I went from to the next and you know, what do you doing it in the kitchen here in the kitchens? Yeah, he was drunk all the time too, and screaming like crazy, throwing think like crazy, like it happened in the old time more than you think.
Yeah.
And so like three or four weeks into my apprentic the ship on a Sunday. Sunday lunch was always the busy day, and I was doing the potatoes and making the mashed potatoes. That was like my job, and peeling onions and carrots, watching the spinach. And we ran out of mashed potatoes. We run out of potato potatoes. And at the end of the service, he's queened like crazy, Oh your good for not saying we'll go back home. So he told me, okay, you're fired, go back home
to your mother. And I was saying, I said, I cannot go back home with my special my stepfather.
Yeah.
So that was probably the worst day in my life. So I went on the thing and I said I'm going to jump in the river and kill myself. And I was fourteen years old. You know, I did not say I said I cannot go back home. So I was standing on the river there looking down and said, what will happen if I die?
You know, what is happening? Or what is hell? Or what? And it was all these thoughts were going through my head.
And then after a while, I said, you know what, I'm just going to go back to more and see what happened. So I went back back to the restaurant. Back to the restaurant, so I bent. I couldn't sleep all night. I went really early to the restaurant. Then the apprentice who was both me came and told me that. I said, oh, you're back. He was so happy.
I said, I don't have to build potatoes.
So he hit me down in the vegetable seller and I was peeling potatoes there. And after a few weeks the chef comes down and sees me and start screaming what you're doing here? He said get out of here, and screamed, and that was saying. And then I said, I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving, and then he called
the owner. The owner was a little had a little more empathy and sent me to They had another small hotel in town, and they said, maybe it goes over there, and there had they had a lady who was the chef, and she said, just do your job and be quiet and don't do anything stupid and everything will be fine. And sure enough I stayed there for three years, did my apprenticeship, and after that I left for France.
When you think of your own children, don't you. We think about how we treated four ten year old, how you treat your children. I saw you the night you came in with your children, and I saw the parenting. I saw the love, I saw the kindness, patience, and then you just think what you had been through. You know,
it's interesting. We had a young woman who worked for a very famous restaurant in London and she said that she was once taking soufles out of the oven and the chef came over and put a frying pan over her head and said, if these soufles don't rise, this frying pan's going to be on your head. And I said, what you should have done is put the soufles back in the oven, gone, got your coat, left the restaurant and gone to the police. You should go to the
police because that is abuse. But you know, somehow that idea that somehow, because everybody's under pressure in a kitchen it's okay, it's not okay. It's old fashioned and it's wrong.
Yeah, physical abuse wrong, Emotional abuse is totally wrong. And I think one of the lessons I learned from them, I said, I know, I want to be like my stepfather, and I never want to be like the first chef I worked for, because I think they did the opposite. And I said, you know, if somebody that makes a mistake, somebody does something wrong, I'm going to show them how to do it right.
And sometimes it takes.
More than once, but you want to teach people. And I think for me that was really an important part. And later on I opened its cooking school, so I had to teach people.
No. And so you got on the train and went to where did you went to? France?
So then I went down there France.
I went to Dijon first and worked in a restaurant called Trofezon. I was seventeen, seventeen, Yeah, so said I have a son now seventeen. I said, wow, if he would go, tell me tomorrow he's going to work in Mexico City or somewhere. Let's say, I don't know. If not by yourself, I'm gonna send a shutout for you. And so I went to France and then I was working there, and after like a year or so, I started to speak French. I didn't speak it at the beginning.
And then we had a party at a restaurant and it was because we got a star.
In the gid mischland right and had a store. It just got a new style. It didn't have one but the go down.
And then I took one of these red books, looked through it, and I said, oh shit, there it's one star, two stars, three star restaurant. So I said, I'm not going back to Austria before. I don't work in at least in a two star, hopefully in the street star. So I wrote to Bocus to throw go to La sal Or Total. You know all these famous three star restaurants. The first one who said yes was Raymondally at Bomagnier in.
Provence, Abomania.
Yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an amazing restaurant. But he was on hell yeah yeah.
He was the most amazing personality. Not only he started cooking when he was like fifty professional when he was fifty years old, but he was so passionate about the ingredients. He had a lot of land there too. He had six gardeners who bought like the best cavayon melon or strawberries or peas or green beans, really small.
You know.
So it was really an amazing experience to have somebody at that age.
He was already seventy years old.
But he was so passionate, and you know, going back and forth in the dining room, and then he used to come into the kitchen with Elizabet Taylor and who all of us young guys looked at her and said, oh my god. A one time he came in with Marcelo Mastroiani and Katherine de Nerve, and I said, oh Jesus Christ, I want to feel like him. So I stayed there for two and a half years, and he was the first person actually who respected me and says, you know what, He made me feel good.
Last night, after dinner in the River cafe, I sat with the chefs. Usually we talked about the evening service, what happened, who came, what we cooked. But this time, knowing he was coming to the kitchen today, we spoke about our guests, your term Atolangi. They've all the chefs read his books, they've all eaten in his restaurants, and like me, love his food. In short, they were thrilled he was coming. We both live and work in culture
as far from where we were born. Today we will talk about separation and connection, Eastern and Western family and friends. I did read that your first word was was it the Israeli word for Hebrew word for soup?
Well, it is the kind of the little dumplings that go into the soup, so it has the word soup in it. Yeah, it was something I think my mom used to spread on the table while we were waiting for the food, and I just used to kind of grab them and eat them.
And So, going back then, starting at the very very beginning, tell me about your early childhood in terms of food as well.
You know, yeah, so I grew up in Jerusalem and the food in Jerusalem. At that point, can.
I just ask you, were your parents born in.
Israel or My parents were born in Europe just before the Second World War, so, and they immigrated with their parents as little kids just before the war in nineteen thirty nine. My mother was from a German family, so they were German Jews, and my father were they were an Italian family from Florence.
Really.
Yeah, so my dad was born in Florence and they met in Israel and they so, yeah, they met in Israel years later.
Yeah, yeah, and.
Jerusalem was so I grew up in a very kind of a non traditional Jewish home, very secular food wise, Like we had pork, which nobody was unheard of.
You know.
My mom had that butcher in Jerusalem, the one and only one that sold pork, but it was under the counter and the brown bag. Yes, she used to come and buy a ham, and we used to get ham sandwiches for school. But you know, we were not allowed to say what's in our sandwiches and we were not allowed to share it with friends. So the cover story was that it was a turkey where it was a very pink turkey.
Great woman, very woman to come from Germany. She was from Germany, so she probably had pork in Germany.
I was not going to give that up.
Yeah, yeah, there were various secular you know, and so she just had to have poor. But it was you know, the stories about these things they sound quite you know inoccuus, but actually it was quite. It was a big deal. So that butcher and when people found out that he was selling pork, you know, his shop was vandalized and you'd have like people would like like glue in his locks, so he couldn't open the shop the next day, et cetera.
It was in Jerusalem. Food is not a neutral distance, you know, like all those decisions, all those things that happened, political implications.
What year would this have been?
So this was so I was born in sixty eight, so we're talking about the seventies and.
Eighties, so late as that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. So the food culture of the city was the food of the immigrants from wherever they came, the Jewish immigrants, but also the Palestinian population, which was so such a rich, wonderful culinary history. And I feel that I grew up in this world in which we ate very European food. At home, my father was cooking traditionally Italian dishes, and my mom was kind of an international cook, but with a very Germanic approach to cooking.
But outside, you know, when we went out, we used to have Palestinian food Arabic food, and that's the mix that I grew up having, and I always thought that I was quite lucky to have had been exposed to all those kind of foods from quite a young age.
Could your father find ingredients that he wanted for Italian.
Cooking, Yeah he could, so, first of all, had they used to have food, like I remember my grandparents, because they couldn't really separate themselves from their Italian background, so they used to have food sent to them, so we had to. We used to get like anchovy paste and olive oil and biscuits and cookies and things. So they always get these packages of Italian produce that arrived in Parmesan. They lived about an hour from where we lived in Jerusalem.
They lived in the suburb of Tel Aviv, and I used to come to their house as a kid with my dad and the smell was just completely different. It smelled of Italy in so many ways. So they kept the Italian connection going on. And they used to travel in the summer because they had a house in the hills outside Florence that we used to go to when I was growing up, So we had a lot of a lot of that. So in between the Italian and the Palestinian and the German influences, I've kind of had all that because.
I often think that I often say that in my history as an interviewer that many of the people, especially immigrants, talk more about their grandparents' food than their parents. That if you've moved from your culture to another culture, the mothers probably tried and adapt. So if you have a family from Ghana coming from Ghana to London, the mother would try and kind of still remember her food she
grew up with, but would try to adapt. Children completely adapted and would have the food of their friends, but the grandparents when he went to their house. They would cook the Danaan food or the Italian food. And my mother in law left Italy for London pre war, and her father, who's kind of Florentine site aristocrat, would send her candied oranges every month. You know that she craved those kind of Italian the Italian food of your culture totally.
And the only difference is that in Israel at the time, there wasn't like a cuisine as such. It was because it was just so early on and it was just so new and so young, So a national cuisine has not evolved. There was a Palestinian the Palestinian food was extremely evolved, but what people would call Israeli food is something that evolved later. But when I was growing up, there was the food that Polish Jews would have cooked, or Russian Jews, or Libyan Jews, or Moroccan Jews or
Iraqi Jews. Those each one had their own cuisine. But I always like to say, like in Jerusalem was like survival of the fittest, you know, like the best food from every culture would surface and we'd have, Yeah, that's really great.
So you would have the Sephardic and you would have so you'd.
Have the Sephardics, you know, salads and like and messes, and you'd have like the bubbkas that would come from the anaz and and in some ways like some restaurants in Jerusalem these days that then when you go, that's what's featured, you know, like the best of every culture that makes up the city.
Did your parents take you to restaurants?
Did you go out?
Yeah, so we didn't have we didn't have great restaurants in Jerusalem in the sense in the way we have now. So this whole, this whole revolution in food has not happened yet, so we ate when we ate out. We used to go to Palestinian restaurants. So the war just happened not long before the nineteen sixty seven war in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem. So in some ways this is the pre traumatic times. You know, it was all very new and obviously it was complicated, but it was
relatively peaceful. So I remember we used to go travel a lot into the West Bank. We used to go to Napolis to Jericho to have bron to have meals. So we used to go to Jericho and have like incredibly little meals. Oh, we would have these spreads off delicious things that you find. Some of them you'd know, and some of them you wouldn't, so from you know, like hummus or in Labana, you know the strained yogurt, but you'd also have like local herbs that'd be sauteed
in garlic and olive oil. They have incredible so they have wonderful oranges, so you'd have orange juice freshly squeezed a bit like Seville's, like they have some of them that are cooking and some of them mostly for juicing because it's so hot and humid, it's like perfect for citrus and lamb on the grails, so they have to cook lamb on open grill and right dishes like my cluba,
like upside down rice cakes and bulgar salads. And it was the wrong an amazing wonderful olive oil, wonderful olive oil, and great freshly baked breads, pizza breads, and and other variations on that fiend. Because of Palaestinas cook their bread in a taboon, which is that you know, that kind
of ceramic oven or earthenware oven. So all that was there, and I really have really really strong memory of driving down to Jericho and just having all these wonderful foods and coming back, but also in Jerusalem, I have such strong memories of the of these flavors.
That's a question that I ask everyone if there's a food we know, people that we turn to for comfort and places we go for comfort, But if there's something that you would want to eat? Is there a food that you reach for when you really need comfort?
So I have to say that from all the things that I've had, it's things that my father used to cook, or my Italian grandmother she used to make. And it's not just because I'm at the river fam saying that she used to make chi ala Romanah.
Yeah.
And it's the one smell that I have. As you know, people talk too much about, you know, those you know, moments of childhood, but this is really one that stands
so strong in my mind. In my head, that is the thinly spread semolina and yoki on a tray dotted with butter and cheese, and it would go under the grail and all and since they did get great cheese from Italy and they had great parmigiano and they she would put that under the grill and it would just smelt and that kind of semolina soft, you know, milky, with the grated cheese, melted cheese on top. It's just it's just such a childhood favor and that is definitely
the one that brings the most comfort to me. And I've never managed to do it as not even remotely as good as she's.
I know, well, we'll try and make it for if I know, we would have put it on the menu. Yeah, yeah, especially we have it on very often when we have white truffles because it's one of those delicious recipes, which it's still just without white truffles, but it does take because it's like it's almost going to be like a cheese and they are so delicious. So we're going to go ahead and have lunch in the River Cafe now
without Jockey and Romana. For the next time we do, we'll definitely have so yes, let's do it.
Thank you very much, great than.
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