Welcome to River Cafe, Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios.
Can you hear me?
I can hear you, Darling? Can you hear me?
I can Darling.
Tonight, I'm talking to my friend Jeff Goldbloom.
I'm in LA and my closet with a couch.
You know I don't have a closet with a couch, but I'm going to get one tomorrow. Yeah, note to self.
I recommend it.
We're miles and miles apart, but through food, through movies, through politics, through memories, we're really close.
Let's start. Let's not waste any of this magic, and let's let's start the Let's turn on the chef. Are we starting? Are we?
Yeah? We could start the only thing. I'm a chef and I have a restaurant. But I may not be the best interviewer. So you can say, Ruthie, you're doing a bad job. Start all over again.
Okay, you're already an excellent interviewer and you can't possibly make a mistake more to a bad job. I think you're fantastic.
So I'm going to ask you if you would read the recipe that you've chosen.
Oh should I should? Kick it off with it. I certainly will. So I've got this book in front of me and I've turned to I've dog heared the slow cook fennel. Well, there's not much to reach. It's like a high coupe. I see, ready, here's my You don't like it, you can say, take take two. Well wait, I haven't taken one yet. Just a second. Okay, here's take one. You know how many takes Stanley Kubrick would do sometimes for a movie, No, tell me famously eighty seven?
What if I wish I would have worked with him. I love his movies, and he made movies around your neck of the woods there.
Yeah, okay, come on, read the recipe.
You are a good interviewer. I like when the interviewer claps your hands and says, come on, get come on there. Okay, here it goes. Slow cooked fennel serves six six fennel bulbs, five tablespoons olive oil, five garlic cloves peeled. That's it. That's as much as I have on the page. Is that it.
You've just read the ingredients. Now go down to the method.
Oh okay, okay, okay, so so far, so good.
And also I think it says, fennel cut into eighths, doesn't.
It No, I pride myself on my reading skills. It says, serve six six fennel bulbs.
Okay, your reading skills are really good. Now just go down to the method.
Here's what it says. Well, here's what it says on the rest of the page. Says in the River Cafe kitchen, we all have an opinion on the color of the fennel, brown or pale, but we agree on the classic rule that they should be cooked long enough so that you can cut them with a fork. New paragraph. Cut each fennel bull vertically into eighth So here we go. This is.
Keep the olive oil in a large saucepan, add the fennel, garlic, and some sea salt and black pepper, and cook over a medium heat, stirring occasionally, for about ten minutes, or until the fennel begins to brown. Add sufficient boiling water to come barely one quarter of the way up the fennel. Then lower the heat simmer uncovered until the fennel is
very soft, which will take twenty to thirty minutes. Stir occasionally and add a little more boiling water if necessary, but there should be no liquid at all when the fennel is cooked. End of page and the recipe. What do you think of that?
I think it's beautifully red and very clear. Why of all the recipes and all the books did you choose the cook fedel. It's one of my favorite things to eat. But I'm interested as to why you chose it.
I'm you may not know this about me. I'm easy to please. This is all the height of cookery, and this is all the most delicious things in the world. But I'm easy to please, and I like all food. There's anything I kind of haven't tried, wouldn't try and enjoy. It looks great to me. Look at that. My mouth is watering as I look at this picture. How'd you come up with this? This your recipe?
Well interesting because the recipe came for somebody who really influenced my cooking and my partner rose in the River Cafes cooking. Richard's mother, daughter Rogers, who came from Trieste and from Florence, came to London just before the war Second World War, and she kept her cooking tradition really close to her and taught many many people how to cook.
And one of the interesting things about the way she cooked was the way she cooked and weigh Italians cooked vegetables, cooking the feedle slowly and olive oil and garlic, but then adding water makes it all melt and absorbed the juices intensifies a flavor. So I learned this recipe from my mother in law, Dada Rogers.
What's her first name.
Her name was Ermine Garda, but they called her data. So who does the cooking? Do you cook for your children? Do you cook?
Well, that's funny. My wife now Emily, with whom I've been for about ten years. She was Emily Livingston. We got married four years ago. She's now Emily gold Bloom. She's from Canada. Her mom is French from nant and she's very close to her mom. Her mom is a kind of wonderful cook, you know, makes creps and all kinds of things. She prides herself on her cooking. And they love their food over there, and that family loves
their food. And Emily, she was in the Olympics. She early on got the bug to be a gymnast, and she studied some Bulgarian coach star and took her to Russia for most of the years between eleven and sixteen, much to her mother's anxiety, but she wound up being the Pan American champion and then she was in the Olympics. And now she has taken the cooking and learning some of her mom's recipes. She's been cooking, baking bread craps and croked monsieur and croke madam and so she cooks.
We had breakfast this morning and she cooked some scrambled eggs with cheese in them, and then she made oatmeal. See I I'm easy to please. I can have this every day. It was kind of sweetened with maple syrup. And she has this French butter that she likes to put a little in and had some cheese seeds in it like that. That's what why I had this morning.
Did you grow up what did your parents cook? What was food like at home?
Well, that's funny. I grew up in Pittsburgh. My dad was I think like your dad was. Wasn't your dad a doctor?
Yeah?
My dad was a doctor also, and his parents were from Russia and my mom's parents, her dad was from Austria. My dad's dad was named Kavartsik and changed it to gold Bloom anyway, in our house, we had four kids, the doctor and Missus Goldblum, and she used to cook. Yes, this is the fifties sixties in America, so this is meat loaf time. There was, you know, canned vegetables that were popular at the time. They even introduced us to one nights that they went out to Swanson's TV Dinners.
TV Dinners.
Yeah, Swiss steak and all that stuff. But she would make things. I remember this. She had a recipe for potato salad. My mouth is watering now and I'm getting a little nostalgic about it. She used to make it. It was her own thing. It was mayonnaise and potatoes and celery and olives. She had these green olives, the kind of you get with pimentos in them. I love that. But she would make also this spaghetti. I'll tell you, I love this thing. It was spaghetti, now that I
know it. I don't think she called it this bolonaise. I think she said, with meat sauce. And she put it in a great big kind of translucent green bowl, dark green bowl. Geez. I loved that so much. That was great. And then we got a barbecue outside. They liked to put steaks on the grill, and they went on cruises and stuff. You can imagine, the doctor and they went to Las Vegas for some you know doctor, you know, getaways and cruises and that kind of stuff.
Come back from Haiti with a couple of items, you know, and they paid in a shuffle board court on the cement in our backyard. Can you believe it? I was the only you know, it was a blue collar neighborhood. All the other kids in school were kids of steel workers. I was a fish out of water already, a very
strange boy in a strange family. I think. Then they had a little wet bar, I remember, and every couple of weeks they would have the chair news come over to play bridge, and I would listen from my upstairs bedroom, you know, just hear sounds going on. We were supposed to be asleep.
But it is interesting that food and memory so are memories of our childhood. You're remembering the costain the green ball. You remember it was in a green bowl, and you remember the is very strong for all of us, is the memory of our child is listening to our parents dinners, you know, when we're supposed to be in bed wondering did they eat different food for their grown up friends
as opposed to what beate around the table. When did you start becoming aware of other cultures, other food and rest Did you go with two restaurants with your pre That must be being a bad interview When did you become aware of other food culture?
You're a very good interviewer. I like that multipart question. I'm going to answer all of them. I can.
I was about to ask a multi part question.
I'll give you a doctor's excuse. You're doing very well. So here's your multipart question. And the first part that I want to talk about is the restaurants we went to in Pittsburgh, and there weren't many, but we would go to well this is of course the beginning of you know, fast food stuff. And I remember there's a place called Eaton Park that we used to go and get some stuff and eat in the car. And they had chipped ham that people from Pittsburgh will know that.
We used to come home and make kind of sloppy jos, but with this chip ham that we put barbecue sauce with his stuff that was kind of delicious. Then there was this pizza place on Saturdays we watched scary movies. Chili Billy, Cardilly and my older brothers they were starting to drive, and they would go to this place called the Junction and Pizza and bring back this square cut pizza. Man. I loved that. And then we would all go out
to Tambalini's restaurant, an Italian so called restaurant. I remember that's the first time I tasted this thing called a caesar salad. There was some hard boiled eggs in it, and I thought that was spectacular. And then we would go, wait a minute, wait a minute, go there was this one. There must have been others. There was one Chinese restaurant.
I think it was bill Uns, and you know, we would go on a once a month or something like that on a Sunday night and it was I think Cantonese and just you know, very kind of standard fair. But I thought that was great too, you know, like I say, every eating adventure was great. And then we went on vacations. We would go to getting a station wagon and all go to Atlantic City and get that saltwater taffy on the boardwalk. And we went to New
York City once. That was in fourth grade, and we went to Grantwich Village at the time, and had our pictures done, our portraits done by some artists, you know, beat nick artist on the street.
On the street. Hey, the first person I've ever met that had one done on the street. Oh no, I had one in the Piazza Navona once.
Yeah, it was.
It wasn't sophisticated at all. Do you know what, Jeff. It's so similar to kind of my growing up because my father would take us from upstate New York once a month, and what we would do is we would go see the big ships in the harbor at a docked like the Queen Elizabeth. Then he would take us to a musical in the afternoon, and then we would go to sam Goodies do you remember that music store,
and we would buy the record from the musical. So if it was I don't know, West Side Story, whatever it was, you'd buy the record and then we would we would have a restaurant meal, and then we would go home and then we would just play the record over and over and over until I knew every single song.
You're talking about now. We did grow up similarly. My parents both sort of flirted early on in their youth with a theatrical career some kind before it was going to be a doctor. Da da da, And so they were fans of the arts. They used to go on their own to New York and see Broadway shows and come back with the records, the cast albums of West Side Stork and Fiddler on the Roof and My Fair Lady and all those things. Yes, and I would listen to it over and over learn it. But yeah, very similar.
In New York, we went to this place called the Cattleman. I think it was a touristy kind of steak restaurant. We'd get take home and they'd wrap it up in some aluminum foil thing in the shape of a swan or something. I remembered. I thought that was unusual.
Do you take your kids to restaurants? Because I think it's the image of restaurant now so different for me, my parents eating out in the restaurant was a special occasion, and now I just see the way my kids and kids and families eat out like all the time. Do you take your kids to restaurants?
I agree, it's probably too much. And I'll bet with your sensibility. You love the home style cooking and I do too. And especially during this last COVID period, it's forced us to eat less in restaurants. We weren't doing it much before. We have a nice home life and a nice culinary home life. I like meals with the kids. I love breakfast with the kids, and we have dinner with the kids. It's really great. But before that, we had gotten together with my sister and gone to a
restaurant and I'll bet you would like here. Maybe you know it in Los Angeles, Musso and Franks, but we would go there. It's a kind of traditional restaurant. They say it's the oldest restaurant in Los Angeles. And we'd go with the kids and my sister. They have a menu that doesn't say sorbet. They still call it Sherbet, you know. And then we would go to a couple other places, but not many. But things are just opening
up now. And we went just this last weekend with the kids for the first time in a long while to Craigs, who kind of built an outdoor place and they're kind of Italian and this and that, and they had a good time there. But the kids like food. It's so interesting to see the kids eat and what they like.
You know, did you ever work in a restaurant?
I never, did you know? I was so lucky. I have an unusual story. As soon as I decided to become an actor, I went to New York, lived there four years, studied with Sandy Monizer, and then as soon as I finished school, even before I started school, I kind of happened into work and started to work, and have worked steadily for these last four decades or so without ever having to take another straight so called job, except for one week I sold pens and pencils on
the phone, but I'm too sensitive for that. I wound up in the hospital. I don't know, maybe related or unrelated, but anyway, that was the last time I did something not having to do with that or music. You know, I played music these days and go out and they give us some money for playing music. But I do all of it just because I love it. That's why I ever did any of it.
Now because restaurants, I just think that actors do gravitate to working in restaurants because they are theatrical, aren't they? Restaurants? Even and if you're in a bad mood, you have to be in a good mood, or if you don't like the customer, you have to pretend you like the customer. And also dramatic things happen in restaurants. I always say people do very private things in a public space. And Michael Kaine said he never ever did a movie without
doing the deal first in a restaurant. He said, all the movie deals were always made over lunch. But did you find that or is your generation different with restaurants for you working lunches, or is it always just pleasure?
It's been many different things. It has been a lot of business. There's a hotel near here near my house. I've been in the same house for thirty five years, and there's a hotel near here that has a very nice place, and I've had many meetings there with people on movies that I'm going to do and projects that I'm going to do, or just to meet people or talk about things. And yeah, that's happened a lot and
private things. And I like kind of you know, restaurants that are casual in a way where you feel very free for you know, and counter a human encounter that can be freewheeling, isn't so stuffy, you know. I like that. But I'd love to come now and see you and go to the restaurant.
You know what, we could put a piano in the River Cafe and we could play the piano and say we have a beautiful place for a piano.
I would love to because I know you opened Sylvia's and you've got live piano music there.
Yeah, we just closed Sylvia's.
Why what happened?
It's a long story, but it was just a small little space that they gave us for a short time. The landlord's It's sweet. It was named it after my mom.
Oh, Sylvia.
Yeah.
He was also an was Shirley. My mom was Shirley.
Shirley. That'd be a nice name for a little restaurant, Shirley's. Yeah.
So Sylvia's won't be your cooking there. And you took the piano that you were using there and you may put it back.
I'm going to maybe move it into the River Cafe. I just wanted to ask you about well, first of all, movies and food. When you're working, do you stop for food? Do you care about what you eat on set? When you're in the theater, do you eat before the play, after the play? What's the relationship between food and more?
Very interesting, Well, I think I have a system like a hummingbird in some way myself. So I if anything, I can run out of steam. I need foods. So on the set these days, and there's a lot to talk about it, different kinds of cruise and places you shoot movies where they have different things. You know, in France, I've made movies and they have a bottle of wine on the table and they take a nice leisurely lunch. But in this thing I just did, I did the
thor thing. And in Australia and they have a walking lunch, meaning nobody takes a break, and there's food that comes around and you just eat as you go. But these days, I like, you know, when I'm acting, I need fuel and the best kind of fuel. So I'm still experimenting with you know, whole grains, carbs and.
Thank you's outside.
I know I'm in my backyard. Did you see that? You saw it on radio? Here's my backyard.
Do you grow vegetables there? No?
Well, you know, I wish I was like you. I'll bet or my friend ed Begley Junior and had a whole garden and could really eat just from his backyard. But no, what we've got is I'm walking you back? Is I want to show you this low quat tree.
Yeah, I know about low quots.
That's an orange tree that there's nothing.
Now now it's cutting in and out.
That's good. Hey, you know what I came upon speaking of that fennel recipe, you know, tell me, I came upon a poem by Longfellow from eighteen forty two called The Goblet of Life that has a little snippet about fennel. You want to hear. It's just a few lines. It goes like this, above the lower plants, it towers the fennel with its yellow flowers, and in an earlier age than ours, was gifted with the wondrous powers lost vision to restore. How about that?
Oh? Well, fedel is a very romantic It is because it has these incredible leaves. You can have a fedal herb, you have the bulb of fenel, you have the stalks of fennel. It does feel long fellow ish. That's interesting.
But food is romantic, I mean it is talking is romantic.
When you were talking about Kubrick, I was thinking about food in movies, you know, and I was thinking about, Okay, this will put me in my generation. But the kitchen scene and the big chill and the scene around the table, and also this is a multi question question, but also the Budapest Hotel is about eating and sleeping and food and the politics and it's just it's all fits, doesn't it. It's so interesting.
I love movies about food. I'm thinking about Tom Popol off the top of my head. You ever see that movie? Yeah, But West, of course is a person like you, of terrific sophistication. And during the filming of Grand Buda Post Hotel, he had a chef come in and we all it took over this one kind of picturesque, spectacular little hotel and we had these lovely meals with a candelabra and d D every night that he did invite us to.
Can you imagine? And the movie itself, of course, is about provision of services, including food for you know people. It's it's delicious and romantic.
Yeah, And that's the thing. But whether it's in cinema or in real life, when you sit around a table and movies where there is food and there's language and sentiment and tears around the table in the kitchen, that's it's so important.
So it's so important in all our lives, oh my gosh.
And food is also political, you know, it's also social, and it's unfair, and it's you know, poverty and wealth and particularly now sustainability and how we're going to feed the planet.
Sure, food has everything to do with who we are, how we situate ourselves in the community and figure out how to make this world work for every single one of us, including every single creature on the planet, how to coexist with every other creature without exercising brutal dominion that we imagine we may have the right to over other creatures, and figure out how to peacefully and more beautifully coexist with each other. So it's a big challenge
and we must do it. And as you know, there's no reason why the planet is generous and ample, and it's only our political will and mismanagement that allows us not to figure out how to make it work for everyone, and especially how to get everybody fit. And like speaking of Grand Budapest Hotel, it's besides figuring out how to
share the food with everybody. Just offering things and cooking in a way that's gracious, elegant, artful and loving is an effective and high class political statement, isn't it in that movie which is about you know, fighting fascism and all that stuff. You know, just sweetness and elegance, you know, is an act of politics.
I think so. And I think that food is as you say, it's about love, it's about protection, it's about generosity and consciousness, memories, memories, memories, and it's also about comfort. We want to give other people comfort, so we feed them, and there's times when we need comfort, so we feed ourselves. So I guess my very last question, and I hate to leave you because I love you. What would be your comfort food when you need comfort? Is there something that you would go for?
Trying to be disciplined because I can be comforted by all sorts of food. Food does comfort me, and a lot of food could comfort me at a lot of moments. But if I had to show, and this is this is going to sound very primitive, I like cold cereal. You know, if I get up in the middle of the night, give me a bowl and give me some milk or milk substitute, it doesn't matter. I experiment with all those different kind of milks and stuff like that,
and cereal, and they're all kind of different cereals. You know, I try to stay low on the sugar, so I like to let them get a little soggy. I'll take that first couple of bites of when it's a little crisp, but when it gets not too soggy, but just medium soggy, I'm very happy about that. And I like a ball of cereal.
I think that's a beautiful answer. And we'll have your Mom's bull easy, we'll have meat, love even, we can have whatever we want, and we'll have cereal together. So we're just waiting for you in London and waiting for you to come.
I want to I'm going to take you up on that. I can't wait to see you.
And give you a piano in the River Cafe. We'll sing.
We'll play and sing all night.
This holiday season. If you can't come to the River Cafe, the Cafe will come to you. Our beautiful gift boxes are full of ingredients we cook with and design objects we have in our homes. River Cafe, olive oil, Tuscan chocolates, Venetian glasses of Florentine, Christmas cake made in our pastry kitchen, and more. We ship them everywhere to find out more or to place your order, visit shop the Rivercafe dot co dot uk.
River Cafe Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.