Welcome to River Cafe Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
I remember turning to you once and you said to me, well, Ruthie, how many people do you employ? And I very proudly said, I employ one hundred and ten people. Bob, how many do you employ?
It?
He said, how many?
It was like two hundred thousand.
That's a lot. Say the name Bob Iger to me, and I think of my good friend who cares passionately about what he cooks, the vegetable garden outside his kitchen, and what he feeds his children, grandchildren and the people who work with him. Say the name Bob Iger, the former CEO and chairman of the board of Disney, and everyone will think of the man who acquired Pixar, Lucasfilms, and Marvel, giving the world some of our most loved movies.
There is much more Bobby has done for Disney and for us, and this is what we're going to talk about today.
That was very involved in the food program at our parks, and not only have we hired a lot of great chefs, but we also have quite a wine program. We believe we're the largest buyer in the largest cellar of wine in the world, interestingly enough, which you wouldn't expect to
hear about Disney. This recipe is for pasta al lemone two hundred and fifty grams of spaghetti, the juice of three to four lemons, one hundred and fifty millilters of olive oil, one hundred and fifty grams of parmesan cheese, freshly grated, two handfuls of fresh basil leaves picked and chopped, and finely grated lemon zest. Cook the spaghetti, then drained thoroughly and returned to the saucepan. Meanwhile, whisk the lemon juice with the olive oil, then stir in the parmesan.
It will melt into the mixture, making it thick and creamy. Season and add more or less lemon juice to taste. Add the sauce to the spaghetti and shake the pan so that each strand of the pasta is coated with the cheese. Stir in the chopped basil and a generous amount of lemon zest. And there you have it, pasta. I'll do my head.
Just hear you read it? Taste of summer, doesn't it? You've just woken up. Haven't you this early? There we're in different times, as have you had breakfast?
I did have breakfast, Jack, Okay, tell me about your breakfast. I get up at four point fifteen in the morning, so by six I'm starved. Yeah, And I'm a creature of habit when it comes to breakfast. I always have Greek yogurt and a nice portion of really good granola and a cup of coffee every day of the week, every week of the month, and every month of the year.
I do think you have a routine. That sort of lack of decision, you know, you wake up and let you know that's what you're going to have, is quite in a way comforting, isn't it that you just know your days beginning in the same way. But I think of you was such an inventions eater and a curious eater. Did you going back to the beginning, begin at the beginning, What was it like growing up in your house? Did your parents cook?
Well? Interestingly enough, I live with my maternal grandmother and my parents. My maternal grandmother lived with us, and she was from the Old Country. Which country she was from Poland? But she was a nice Jewish grandmother, so her go to meals that are the most memorable were a pot roast and stuffed cabbage were the two big ones. And she liked to make mats of ball soup as well. But she also made a mean apple pie. Interestingly, my mother, who picked up some of her cooking abilities, was not
very adventuresome. And you know, in the nineteen fifties in the United States, what was available was actually quite limited. We didn't have access to great fresh produce, at least not in New York and supermarkets even the big chains didn't have great produce sections. I don't think you'd ever get fresh basil, for instance, And so a lot of what we ate were canned foods, canned peas and carrots and canned green beans and what like. But adventurous cooking
was not my mother's middle name. She made some good desserts, but that was about it.
Do you think that as an immigrant you bring the food of your country, because a lot of people I've spoken to, whether it's David Adjay talking about growing up as a Ghanian in London, bringing that culture to the society that you've moved in, which might be alien, might be frightening, might be anything that the food that you have is part of what you bring with you as an immigrant.
Absolutely, I think you know you bring you know, a good thick Eastern European accent and in a number of recipes.
Yeah. So did she do the cooking in your house?
She shared the cooking with my mother, Yes, but but cooked often.
And would you all sit down to a meal together? Was that a big deal?
We did. She died when I was sixteen, but she lived with me, you know, up until then, and she was always part of our family meals. Yes.
What about your father? Did he cook? No?
My father wasn't much of a cook, although I remember him making scrambled eggs from me on occasion in the morning. And he liked to make a good Jewish deli sandwich, you know, he'd buy meat from the local deli and Cancot great sandwiches. But beyond that, no, he loved a good hot dog Nathan's hot Dogs. Nathan's was the famous Coney Island hot dog emporium, and he loved that. But he wasn't much of a cook. He was a trumpet player, not a cook. Would he perform, yes, he played occasionally
in the house. He had sort of lost his lip by the time I was born. He had played some professional trumpet in his day, but he took me to jazz concerts. I grew up listening to jazz and some great jazz players. I saw Louis Armstrong play, I saw Duke Ellington, for instance, and that was a great influence on my life. And music is a true love of my life thanks to him. And his trumpet still sits in my office at home, does it.
Yeah, So you grew up with this, which I think a lot of American as you say, Americans in the fifties. So did you find food yourself when you went to college or when you went.
To Interestingly enough, it started with a cookbook. My father collected a lot of books, and for some reason we had a Life magazine book Food and included the great restaurants of the world in it at the time and some recipes. And I decided to impress a college girlfriend by cooking some Italian food for her, and I actually
loved it. And then when I went into New York to begin work after college, I started cooking for myself quite avidly, and I ended up taking a cooking class, a number of lessons with a French woman of I think Egyptian descent, and it was a Mediterranean cooking class, and I fell in love with cooking. And then I ended up in jobs working for ABC Sports that took me around the world and that's when I first got truly introduced to the world's food.
Yeah, that exposure again, going to different cultures and saying it. But back to the girlfriend, I want to go back to that girl. Did cooking an Italian meal?
Firs?
Did that work?
Yes? By the way, I think it was rather basic.
Do you remember what you cooked?
Yes? It was. It was a pasta with vegetables, very basic. But I made my own. I guess it was a light tomato sauce. I remember making my own also for the first time in impressing myself. But I think I kind of used cooking as a means of presenting myself as an attractive date to folks. I remember actually when I met Willow, and I remember telling her that I cooked. She said, you cook, and her eyes lit up. Suddenly. I was far more attractive once you discovered that exactly.
And then when you started traveling, what was that like? Where would you travel to when you were working? Then you were explited.
I quite an amazing experience because I started working for ABC Sports when I was twenty four years old and I worked there for thirteen years, and I worked on a program called Wide World of Sports, which covered sporting events all over the world in rather exotic places as well, including you know, visiting Beijing in the late seventies, and South Africa, and certainly all over Europe, but also Central and Eastern Europe and then the then Soviet Bloc countries
as well, and Latin America. So it was almost no place that I didn't visit. It was quite it was quite amazing. And we lived well when we traveled, and that's we ate well. And so you know, I remember going to Tyvon in Paris, which I think business going to by the way, but it was the thing to do. And I remember the hotel to Perry in Monte Carlo and trying to remember where I would be. Oh, I remember there was a grill at the Connaught.
Yes, yeah, London.
I remember having a steak there the grill at the hotel.
Cannon And did you keep cooking?
I cooked really until I became CEO of Disney, which was in two thousand and five, and I and time management became a little bit more challenging, much to my wife's chagrin, but it's one of the things that I look forward to doing, having the time to cook more. And I love shopping for food too. I love going to farmers' markets and discovering new things and tasting. I've got guts to pick up a book and pick out
a recipe, you know, I'm trying to remember. I've cooked from a few River Cafe books a few times.
Do you find it relaxing after working to cook?
Yes, I find it relaxing, incredibly therapeutic. And I must have a glass of red wine open to sit from. And I like to listen to music, and I don't like intrusions. I like to take over the kitchen.
I get that. So it's a long way from the cans of vegetables that you.
Did.
Your mother and father. Were they part of that explosion of food for you? Did you cook for them when they came to visit.
I did cook for them. I tried to be a positive influence on them in terms of healthier eating, but I failed at that. It's interesting because my dad and mom both had heard conditions and bypass surgery in their fifty at early fifties, and I could never quite understand how, somehow I know that didn't change their diet afterwards. My father, I think, used to taunt me. We'd go to restaurants.
If I took them to an Italian restaurant and I ordered the grilled salmon rocket, he would order spaghetti bolonnets, and then when the bread would come, he would wonder why there was olive oil and not butter.
Yeah, generational, But do you think about when you eat.
I'm a very healthy eater, mostly a Mediterranean diet, high in seafood and low in carbs, although I allow myself a good bowl of pasta every once in a while. And a passion of mine is pizza. I've been trying to hone my pizza making skills. We have a nice pizza oven at the house, and so I've spent some time doing that.
When you traveled, when you traveled for Disney later on, what was that like? Did people really try to give you their culture through food? Yes?
First of all, it was always a priority of mine when I visited a city to find a good restaurant, and over time, because I visited a number of cities often for instance Shanghai, I visited Shanghai over forty times. I always made it a point to have a nice meal out and I typically like to do it with a small group of people and enjoy a good bottle of wine. And it was my way of relaxing when I traveled and not being on just literally being able to kick back a bit and enjoy a good meal.
And I love the food of the world, and so it was always on my itinerary, and often I would go back to ones that I'd fallen in love with, obviously River Cafe being at the top of the list.
I always say, when we go to a city, you know, we try and find the market, because I think a market tells you also about the culture. You know, if you go to the rialto it's noisy in this fish. You go to a small market in Nice, it's about you know, the piece of basil and small bunches of salad. And I think markets tell you and restaurants tell you. Food really tells the story of a culture, doesn't it.
Yes, by the way, the market and Nissa it was course a lea, I can't remember the name of it. Yeah, it goes on for blocks and blocks. I remember, I remember seeing more olives than I'd ever seen.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a wonderful market. There are a few in Paris too that I like and would visit.
What about the markets in La?
There are farmers' markets. Willow visits regularly. But we also we have property in La that has allowed us to plant quite a nice sized.
Garden, that's right.
Yeah, and we grow a lot of citrus. We have great lemons, including Meyer lemon and oranges of all sorts. But we also have a thriving garden and frequently vegetables from our own garden, which is fun.
And what about when you're on the boat do you put on the boat?
We're on our boat. I do no cooking. We have a great chef and she spoiled us, but we are always interested in her shopping and provisioning, which she enjoys a lot, and at times joined her to go to a local market, which is fun, or to find great seafood, you know, find. We were in Croatia this summer in a town called Corchula, flying the streets looking for a great fish, for instance. That's always fun too.
Tell them about wine. Did you study wine?
Yes? Yeah, it started when I worked at ABC, and I lived in a building on the west side of New York. At the corner of the street that my building was on, there was a wine shop called sixty seven Street Wines and Liquors. And I had time on my hands as a single man in New York, and one of the salesmen took a liking to me and taught me a tremendous amount about wine and got me interested in an early age, well before I could afford
a good bottle of wine. Years I've collected wine, and I think I probably enjoyed it more than I've collected it, but I collected.
Do you always have wine with food?
I very rarely have wine at lunch. I mean it's got to be a very special occasion, although a good glass of rose sitting outdoors at a cafe on the Place de Votes in Paris that's licensed to have a glass of wine. But at dinner. It's interesting because I probably had wine maybe three or four times a week pre pandemic. It's probably six times a week, since I like a good glass of wine right before dinner and one had a meal.
Do you work over a food? Do you go for business lunches?
Somewhat? I probably pre pandemic. Would have two or three business lunches a week, and the other days I eat at my desk and get work done. And I shunned business dinners, but that was mostly because I wanted to be home having dinner with my family, and I never
believed that a business dinner was a prerequisite for being successful. Yeah, but often I found both business lunches and dinners was always an excuse to turn what could have been a half hour meeting into it two an half hour meal, and I didn't think that was a very efficient way to manage time.
It's interesting how people use restaurants. I would say that, you know, very often people do very private things in a very public space, and sometimes people will use restaurants to you know, fire someone, or to hire someone, or to have a marital conflict, to see people crying in restaurants. Not very many people crying the River Cafe. But what do you look for in a restaurant?
Food is obviously critical quality of food. I like mood or ambiyonce a lot. And you know, thinking about your restaurant, what strikes me is that it takes it's food seriously, very seriously, but it doesn't take itself seriously, so the meaning it's not arrogant in any way. It's inviting, which is great. I love that it's also but it has a real professional feel to it too, and it is the kind of place you do want to hang out in and not just to enjoy the food, to take
it all in. And it's also a great crowd, great people watching, and I've also fought it's a nice place to have quiet celebrations.
Yeah, celebrations. The way people are at a restaurant does tell you about the person, do you agree.
How they treat the people who are serving them is very telling, and also the degree to which they appreciate what they're being served. Yeah, that's very true. By the way, I fell in love, I fell in love with my wife over dinner.
Did you tell me about it? But that's the story.
We had run into one another at an event in New York and a variety of complicated circumstances. It took us eighteen months to have the first dinner. Eighteen months, which is extraordinary.
That's a lot of patience.
Yeah, but for both of us. And there I was thinking about this woman that I had met eighteen months ago, trying to figure out where to take her to dinner, and we went to a restaurant called Allison on Dominic. Dominic is the street in downtown New York, which was not only a really good food but quite romantic. And that was our first official date, June thirteenth, nineteen ninety four. We still we celebrate the anniversary of that date more
than we celebrate our wedding anniversary. And I mean, she claims that she knew that night over a good meal at Allison on Dominic. I think I probably did too, But it was the beginning of a great romance. And now twenty five years.
Of marriage, is the restaurant still there.
No, the restaurant is not there, but we've carried on a tradition of having dates since then. I think one of the nicest parts of my life, and there are many, is just being able to go out to dinner alone with my wife. If I know that I'm doing that, I look forward to it all week. It's one of the things I missed the most out of from the pandemic is my dates with my wife's. Occasionally we bring food into the house and tell our son or our sons were going down to We have another building on
our property to have dinner just to escape. In the graduation speech that I just delivered at the University of Texas, which is where our older son graduated, I talked about being bold and getting out there and changing the world, because there's certainly so much that needs changing and fixing. But I also talked about embracing life and my equivalent of smelling the roses, which is truly appreciating every moment
of your life. Life is savoring great pizza. So I put that into my speech because I do love pizza. That is my go to comfort food.
I was just going to ask you tell me about pizza.
A good marguerita pizza I don't need. It doesn't need to be fancy. It can be very very basic. But I'd say, if I can only have one meal, that's what it would be. But I talked in the speech about savoring the finer things in life, including friendships and relationships of course, but a great piece of pizza.
Well on that we can end a really lovely conversation about fact of connection and memories our friendship, and let's have more meals together and I'll make you a pizza the next time you come to the River Cafe. To visit the online shop of the River Cafe. Go to shop Therivercafe dot co.
River Cafe Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.