Welcome to River Cafe Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios.
A conversation takes place every Thursday morning between me and Carrie Fucanaga. It begins like this, what are we going to cook on Sunday night?
You call it dramatic. It does look like a murder scene. It's like you're trying to hide the body of the fish. It's somehow been revealed by the elements.
It is a whole fish covered in salt. It's kind of an eccentric recipe, isn't it. That is kind of weird. Ever since February twenty first, when Carrie came back to London to direct the series Masters of the Air, we have cooked dinner together for the same group of six friends for twenty four Sundays.
I hadn't thought about it as being dramatic before I picked it, but I suppose there's a whole theatrical element to it. I remember seeing the way people do it in Italy, for example, and they sit there and they crack open the sawt and it's a whole process, and then using the two spoons, you know, slowly pulling off that soft, juicy flesh that retains all of its moisture.
You are destroying the evidence.
Afterwards, especially you.
Didn't say when you serve it and then you crack it open. Maybe nobody would know that.
All the best food he destroyed the evidence.
We destroy the evidence. Right now. If my voice sounds hoarse, it's due to celebrating the premiere of No Time to Die, including a screening in Monaco where we all planned not just what to wear, where to stay, but what we were going to eat. Carrie flew on to New York for more Bond, and the first text I received from him was a photo of a tomato sauce he'd made on arrival. Everyone knows Carrie is a great writer and a great director. I know Carrie is a great cook.
Your mother was Swedish and your father Japanese.
My mom was like a Midwestern Swede essentially, you know, and so like for her cooking was like I think, very Midwestern, but like for Christmas, her gift to people would be doing a Swedish meatball mix, you know, and give the sort of spice package away to people so
they can make, you know, Swedish meatballs. My dad had kind of his go to favorites One of the things, like when I started going to friends houses and seeing other people lived it was different, was that no matter what my dad made it could be spaghetti, he still had rice with the meal, spaghetti with rice, always rice. One was white rice inside within the rice maker all the time. And then in the morning there was always rice fried rice for breakfast.
So and did he grow up?
Was he born in Japan or I know he So he's third generation, which makes me fourth generation, and my grandparents are considered niece second generation, but they're kind of a special class because they were sent back to Japan for their education. So it's a different name, which was Kibe, and so they're more Japanese, I would say, than American. They would speak Japanese to each other and uh do you speak Japanese? Uh? You know, like like my dad's generation,
they understand it, but they can't speak it. And then my generation, if we speak, it's because we learned in school. So I studied after university and lived in Japan for a while. I was teaching English and French and snowboarding, so it's great. I was living in Hokkaido, which was like a really did you say snowboarding? Yeah? Snowboarding. So you're in the ski area of Yakaido, like northern Northern Island.
Is it a regional Japanese food? Can would you have a different kind of It's very regionally. Yeah. What what was it like then?
Well, it's a lot of fresh vegetables, soba especially, which is a big part of New Year soba uni, a lot of uni from Hokkaido. So it's just seafood in general. But yeah, I would say the buckwheat and the uni are like the two things I think of when I think of Hokkaido. After Hokkaido, I think q Shoe for me has like the next sort of most distinct sort of food.
Where is that.
Q Sho's an island in the south. My family's from the southern part of Hanshu. They're from the last county the bottom of han Shoe, which is Yamaguchi, which is right next to Hiroshima, and Qshu is kind of in that region. And Qshu, for example, one of the things they're known for is, aside from also a lot of different fish and produce, is horse meat. For example, horse
sashimi is a specialty there. I really like it, you know, it comes in a kind of you dip it in sort of a sweeter soy sauce sometimes with like you know, green onions. It's not super tender, but it's also not
you know, it's similar to beef chuck. I remember I had this moment the last time I was in Tokyo for work, where I was at a kind of a group dinner and there was a guy sitting across from me that he was half Asian like me, and I think he was trying to have one of those like who's more exotic kind of competitions of me, and I didn't realize it was happening until until he was kind of like, you know, what's the weirdest thing you've ever
had or eaten? And I was like, I think the two strangest things I can imagine eating are either like whale blubber or spiders. Okay, and whale blobber is in Alaska. A buddy of mine I was in film school with he was intuit, and he eat the whale blubber when you're on the ice because it actually has a lot of calories and it keeps you warm. And the spider was kind of an anomaly that when I was traveling in Cambodia late nineties, actually with the Japanese guy that
met one of the hostels. We were motorcyclan across the country. He wanted a detour to this town that was known for its stir fried sort of spiders. These giant spiders to me, yeah, tasted like crab crab.
I was gonna say, there's you know, we crab liked spiders, not a spider like spider.
But he wanted to one up me and he's like, well, have you ever had horse? Oh?
And you said?
I said I hadn't, you know? And he was really satisfied that he'd eaten a lot of horse, and I just wasn't sure. Really did he win that competition?
I think he won that competition.
He won that competition.
Didn't Maybe I had to say that you might have lost having played cards with you, that you might have lost that. What did spiders taste like?
The ones I had in Cambodia were so covered in sauce. They mainly tasted like this, with a kind of a crunchy texture, with the white meat of a spider inside of the legs. The body was pretty gross. I have to say, it wasn't mine. Maybe it's an acquired taste.
Welcome back to River Cafe Table four.
I was in Mexico in January. I was in Naith, so it was on the Pacific coast.
Do you love the food of Mexico?
I do. Actually, I realized when I was there how much I missed it.
I was shocked by it. Not shocked, but the only Mexican food that I'd had before I went to Mexico was that kind of Mexican food where you get so many dishes on a plate and it's also heavy, and then you go and it's so so clean, fine, and I love the breakfast.
Oh yeah, when I was so when I made Seen Numbre, we were based in Mexico City lot and when we drive to the studio, a lot of the early morning sort of commuter would stop at these vendors and get in line and order this like sort of steaming milky drink. And I didn't know what it was, and so I asked, you know, our location scout, if we could stop one time and have this. And it was a kind of a corn meal drink with cinnamon and sugar that was just delicious. And from every day on after that, I
would stop. My breakfast would be to have some of that.
Did you cook? On set?
They have this thing in Mexico you do with your crews which is different than the States, which is you work a six day week, with the six days just a half day, and at the end of the half day, it's not a written rule, but it's an expected rule that you have what's called a snack, and a snack is not like peanut butter on toast and hand it around. It's beer and tequila and a cook to launch and the entire crew kind of basically gets drunk together and hangs out and you sort of it's a bonding moment.
You get your any kind of tension that was building up out for the week, and then I'm sure a lot of new relationships started out as well. But the snack was like one of the best parts of the
filming week. And you had the rest of Saturday to recover and Sunday and then start working on Monday, and you know, usually like the rest of Saturday was usually driven by pace our production designer, you know, you know, leading the parade into whatever kind of shenanigans Mexico City offered on a Saturday it's like really common, I think in Latin America tonight dinner until after ten pm or
eleven pm. And I was talking to a friend of mine about they invited me over for brunch and the idea of like breakfast in the between breakfast and lunch is brunch, and there's lunch, and they had never heard of the term liner linar, which is lunch between lunch and dinner. Yeah, right, which then got us thinking about with then what's between dinner and breakfast? And then then
it's just dick fist. And then we realized that the dick fist really was the two or three a am, you know, food you had after going out to a bar or a club or whatever. And now, you know, one year of lockdown, none of us could remember the last time we had dick fist.
Yeah, when did you have fist?
Thus, I really don't think it's got to be at least three years now, because I was also just working so hard before before lockdown. But actually that's not true. On our night shoots to be at thick fist at four or five am meals. But in Mexico, what I loved was, you know, after a hard night out, you'd
go there's a cold place you'd go. So either like if you're in Guadalajara, you'd go out and you'd have tacos made of a tongue, like two or three in the morning, which are just delicious, like really really tender meat, you know, in a great way to sort of like cap off, you know, whatever hangover you might have the
next day. But in Mexico City, you'd go to this place it was like called the Blind Goat or something like that, and you'd have tacosa pastor that's that it's at Pastor to be the one that's sort of you'd probably equate it to the kind of schwarma you'd seen the Middle East, where the meats cooking on a vertical
skewer slowly rotating as a pineapple on top. But I think what really makes it popular it's the sauce they put on top, and it's kind of like a brown sort of pepper driven chili pepper driven sauce, and it's just smoky and delicious and rich with that little bit of pineapple the meat and that sauce and the corn to teas. It was like the perfect time in the morning. Would that be anywhere from like two to five am, you know, until the sun was coming up.
Yeah. Do you go to restaurants when you're filming? Dude? Like not used to come to the Riverman cafes often could.
Yeah, you know we used to have a kind of like every now and then a kind of crew catch up dinner just to get all on the same page while having good pizzas and wine and yeah, do you.
Work over food? Do you like have a beale out to just you would did that?
But we ate in a lot. We had a lot of late dinners at Pinewood, you know on Bond where the producers and Daniel and I would be there working on the script and just trying to sort out all the kind of you know, dilemmas we had in front of us used to get through it.
Are the dinner scenes in the movie? Are the food scenes in the movie.
There is a food scene in the movie. It was an interrupted food scene because and.
Two Detective my favorite of all time. There's a scene where he's with his wife with Matthew mcgonfy. He isn't he isn't a diner and there's no food and they're talking about something really personal about there.
He's at a scene with Michelle on a hand kind of deeper in the diner. But early, I think in episode one, he comes over to dinner at Woody Harrelson's character's house. Yeah, he drinks a little too much, or he shows up I think a little bit drunk. But what was interesting about shooting that scene is Woody, for example,
doesn't eat meat. In fact, he's vegan, and we were having spaghetti, and so we had to figure out a different set of noodles for him, and we ended up using these kind of spaghetti squash for his But I remember when we were shooting it and he was chewing and talking. You know, spaghetti squash has a distinct crunchy sound, you know when you're eating, and so in the scene
you have this. Actually I find it's a really pleasing sound, you know, as wood he's eating his food, it's got a nice kind of like hearty, kind of like you know, jaw and cutting kind of sound to it. And everyone else's kind of that sloppy nowdlely sound, you know as they're eating.
Did Jane I have a food food.
Movies, the home economist who makes the food on a movie, And we had an amazing one on Jane Eyre, who made this ham, the sort of Christmas ham for a scene when Blanche Ingram arrives with this big party. So the house is sort of buzz preparing all the food, and they had this ham there and I was just we're prepping the scene. I just happened to take a little slice of it just to see how it tasted.
And it was probably one of the best hams I've ever had, And over the course of the scene that I have got smaller and smaller eating and I liked this so much. I literally sought out the home economists after we're done, just to get the recipe to that ham, because it was she did, Yeah, oh, let's make it. I've never made it, but I want to know.
Okay, if you have it somewhere, we could try make that. Yeah, I was trying to think about food in movies. I mean again, it goes back to the drama of the sea bass and salt, and the drama of feeding people and the drama of watching them respond. You know, your creativity is there forever, we can watch the first movie ever made and it lasts. And I also think that I make something I'm really proud of and then it's gone. No, it's over.
It's very different.
Cook and you cook, and then they eat it, and then it's it's over done. It's over.
You know, there is something I think more meaningful in things that don't last, because you're forced to appreciate it in the brief moments it exists. And there's the immortality of film. So if you think about like Sunset Boulevard, Glorious Wanson walking down the stairwell saying I'm ready for my close up, she will always be that age for the people who watch that film. You know, even if she's long gone. There is something special about it existing forever.
But then because it's it exists forever, sometimes people may not watch it because they can just keep pushing off till the at a time where it's a great meal. You can't delay that. You have to appreciate it while it exists.
And also, it's memory, isn't it. I'm just when you were talking about your father or your mother or going
to a restaurant. It's the memories. I was trying to think when we met and it was a dinner, it was very the river cafe was actually cooking the meat and it was a dinner for Jake, Jill and all, and it was given by Cartier Jewelry shop, and we were sitting there, yeah, in this fancy place, and I remember I was introduced to you, and I said, well, how long do I have to wait until I tell you that the first season of True Detective changed my
life or whatever? But I think that it's nice that we met over food and we talk about food, and then I think the first text message that you sent me was a photograph of tomato sauce that.
You've made, and the specifically the butter part of it, that's right, which I don't know if I could say that out loud, if that's a family secret. Well, the secret is dropping in that stick of butter right before it's being served in the Pomodoro sort of pasta mix in the pot, you know. And I don't know why it tastes better, but because butter probably be better taste it.
But what did that jag? You made it when you used to cook.
I've never used butter before. That was it. I walked away from that dinner we had, which is different dinner with like, oh, I'm going to use this. I knew I was going to use this again. I actually asked another common friend I have with Jake, which is Greta Cruso.
I asked Greta for advice, like on a little napkin, we're at a also at a dinner, trying to figure out what's the best shape of the kitchen for someone like me who's not professional cook by any means that I like to cook and I like to have people over and cook for multiple people. I think during lockdown a lot of people experimented with different kinds of cooking
and baking and whatever. And I remember, as lockdown was easying and people could come over to the house, I decided to make ramen like tom Kotsu ramen, which was like an eight day process to get that stock and everything, you know, done by scratch, and then when you actually serve the ram and you kind of have to do the noodles right before you're serving a bowl, and all these other sort of ingredients had to go and everything has to be timed pretty precisely. I'd never done it before,
but I wanted to get it all right. So that was actually pretty stressful and like I'd just done bond and I don't think it ever felt that much stress as I was preparing that bowl of ramen and hoping that.
It did you have? I was it for?
I ended up making like eight balls of ramen. Yeah yeah, and then I still had enough like stock for about thirty more people. I think that kind of killed my cooking routine for lockdown, Like that was.
Like the kind Yeah, it's like people making a lot of bread in lockdown too, weren't they. I think people made a lot of food that took a long time, that took the process, and certainly for the first lockdown here, you couldn't buy flour apparently anywhere because everybody was making bread.
Yeah, because everyone was alone. You'd try to like do almost like virtual meals together, Like my dad and I did a virtual meal where we cooked the same thing, but like you know, I'm obviously ahead of his time zone, so it's my dinner, his lunch. And then like India and I did a pasta for my lunch, her dinner, you know, where we cooked the same things. So it feels like really's got to eat together.
But what about your father and cooking? What was it like growing up? Did your father cook? See the cook in.
He was the cook in the family, and like He was the one we talk about careers or jobs, right, He always had a job, never like a career that he loved. And I think he always dreamed about opening a restaurant one day, which never happened. But like enjoy cooking and cooking for lots of people. And one of our sort of like bonding things when I was a kid was like trying to guess the ingredients of a meal at a restaurant and so really to sit there and taste the food and to try to break down
its particulars. There was this Cambodian restaurant we used to go to when I was a kid that had this one special kind of pork chop that had like the best glaze, and we're always trying to figure out, you know, what were the elements, you know, in the sauce that created that flavor. Do you still do that, try to guess the flavors? Yeah, definitely, yeah too, Yeah, yeah.
Because I think there's a real palette, you know, I think of how I mean, it's interesting even with wine, how people you know that thing. I used to go and wine tastings with my again with Rose, and she would say, you know this wine tastes of chocolate and cigarettes. But it is it's all to do with the you know, the memories and the associations and the taste of food. And so I think that when we're you know, talking about sort of being together and food and memories, there's
also the sense of comfort of food, there's excitement. You're such a you're such an adventurous eater. I mean, I have to say that. You know, I think you're a pretty adventurous person, but you certainly are an adventurous eater. You know, spiders and you know.
Whale blobber, whale blubber.
No, we didn't have the horse.
I don't horse.
I'd like to beat your friend on the scale of adventure. He probably does with But you are, you are an adventurous eater, and that's really that's it's it's fun.
Well, you know, I don't know if I do it for the experience or the cloud is definitely from curiosity as well. I mean I can the whale in particular, I can. I'll never forget what whale tastes like?
What did it taste like?
Well, there's blubber, and then there's some kinds of fermented meats as well, you know, and one of them is you ferment, whether it's seal or whale. Me you can ferment it. And it's blood, and that's probably even funkier, Like the blubberer is kind of mellow compared to that.
But that taste of whale blood, that iron heavy whale blood is so strong that when I went to Nantucket years later, when I went to the Whaling Museum in Nantucket, I could smell the blood on the presses in the museum that hadn't been used in one hundred and fifty years, just because there was enough residual. You know, if you've never had whale but I don't know if you could connect those sensations.
But so it stays in your state. That's again back to the memory. Yeah, but did you like it? Did you? Did you like the taste? Is it's something that you thought, this.
Is really probably not like it was one of those things where, oh man, I really wish I had some whale blubber right now. Yeah, I don't think that that would ever occur, but it really was. When we were out negative thirty, negative fifty degree environments, it kept you warm. It really you felt the heat coming from inside you. But I mean, yeah, I would still say, as adventurous as those things sound, my every day sort of cravings
are quite normal. I think. I mean pasta I could eat almost every day, and I love slashimi and sushi. I think those two things are what I eat probably around you know, the course of a week, pretty often, probably too much pasta.
And if you said for comfort for.
Me, it would probably be fried rice. And it goes back. I think to you know, my dad for breakfast, as you know, watching cartoons or something when you're a kid and having a bowl of fried rice, and it was the most If I told you the recipe, it doesn't sound even Asian at all because it involves ketchup. Yeah, and I found out much later. I mean, for me, that's just what it was, that's fried rice. But obviously
later contextualizing where that came from. What it came from was so my grandparents were in the internment camps during World War Two, and my father was born in the internment camps as well as my uncles, and so you were given certain rations in the camps. In fact, my grandpa was a cook and one of them, and mayonnaise, ketchup, those kind of ingredients were quite common and so you make new recipes out of what you're given and you just make do. So my dad grew up on a
fried rice that wasn't made of soy sauce. It was mede with ketchup, and it was really basically you use whatever vegetables or meats you had from night before the rice, put it all together and cook it up. And my favorite version was the simplest one, which was just bacon, onions and then put an egg with a yolk, you know, still running on top. And that to me is like the epitome of comfort food. What's strange that the legacy goes back to an internment camp?
Would you make it now? Yeah?
Make it pretty? Yeah? I just like yeah, Like even when my dad would use other vegetables in it, like you do, like the real proper way of doing fried rice, I still prefer just the onions and baked and the bacon.
Yeah, so what you would it be? The rice? Just plain rice?
So whatever you'd made from dinner night before, you keep that rice. And this is something else I just in my family, we just left the rice out, you didn't put it in the fridge and the next morning and yeah, someone told me later on You're not, So that's like a pick no no, because.
Apparently it's they say the bacteria and rice is a most worse than anything.
But I think if you grow up eating it does not affect you. So like, you know, I would leave my rice out all night and the next day, you know, you make the fried rice, and they usually someone.
Start, so what do you do? Put oil in the pan, and then you take.
That r I use the fat from the bacon, so I start off, you know, I cut the bacon in pieces first, and then I slow cook the bacon so that the oil doesn't evaporate too quickly, and then salt and pepper the bacon, and then then add the onions, and then I add the rice, which is usually in big chunky bits because it's been sitting. Then you squeeze a bunch of like farting ketchup on the top of it, and then you chop it up and get that going. And then once it's kind of mixed to a nice
sort of light red pinkish color, blow it up. And then separately you can just cook some eggs to slap on top. It's really quick.
Okay, well, now I've got some expectations of when I come and stay in your house and we're going to have some rice, I could have the wrong then we could do that. It sounds. You know, you're a great cook, you're a great director, and you're a great friend.
Thank you, Carrie, Thank you Ruthy.
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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.