Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeart Radio and Adami Studios. Ahead of our big launch of series two in December, We're going to celebrate the season of art with London's Freeze, the Paris Art Fair, our conversations with Edra Sha, Sam Taylor Johnson, Jonas Wood and Ashes so magnificent once again, our close friend Tracy Emma at the River Cafe. Our own art book, The River Cafe Look Book with recipes from the River Cafe Kitchen is
out now. Food at art, art and food artists and chefs. Let's begin.
I just had a show in La for the first time of four years.
I think guys in Yep in twenty fifteen. I arrived to work in the River Cafe and on my desk was a large envelope which, even unopened, felt that inside was something special and it was. Jonas Wood had been for lunch and left me a drawing a spiky long cactus, its leaves reaching over our headed paper. Jonas brought La to London and a cactus to the River Cafe. His
show was at the Gigosian Gallery. I called and we spoke, promising to meet one days now here I am in Los Angeles, in his blazing white studio filled with his own beautiful art and the art he loves, with cactuses everywhere. Let's begin with a recipe.
This is marinated fresh anchovies, and it served six one kilogram fresh anchovies, two teaspoons crumbled dried red chili, a bunch of fresh flat leaf parsley, finely chopped juice of two lemons and two huns, and fifty mili liters of extra virgin olive oil. Okay, so you filet the anchovies by pulling the head and spying away from the fish, then cut off the tails and fins. You'll have two filets for each fish and a serving dish. Arrange a
layer of anchovies side by side, not overlapping. Sprinkle with a little sea salt, black pepper, chili and parsley. Pour over a generous amount of lemon juice and some extra virgin olive oil. Repeat the layers, making sure the top layer is covered with.
Oil and lemon.
Marinate for about two hours before serving with either salad or brushetta.
That sounds good when you.
Know you're gonna have a long day in the studio. Would you have a breakfast and a lunch and a dinner. Would you not eat?
Do you one?
To know?
I have like a breakfast in like a lunch here and like bakfast. I usually have like a couple of eggs and some toast and some like berries and iced coffee.
And then you stop for lunch. You eat with the people who work for you.
Oh with them, they kind of have their own thing going on. Yeah, I like to lay low by myself.
Is it solitary here?
La? Is cool?
You can be solitary and you have your own you know, sort of like bat cave like like I feel like I do.
Like my own space.
But then you're able to go and see a lot of people if you want, you know what I mean, like and then you plant it out I think, you know, depending on your.
Level of social activity as well too. You know.
I have a young family, so we don't socialize as much as we did when we were younger and didn't have kids, you know, because when we didn't have kids, we would just stay up late and I would do more drugs and then I would I wouldn't have any responsibility of you know, and time was different, you know, So I'm not sotally tapped into everybody, like the nightlife scene or how solitary you can be here. But I feel like you can be very solitary here and also very social.
And so maybe going back to the beginning, where were you born?
I was born in Massachusetts.
What was food in the house.
I grew up with a lot of like cafeteria food. My mom worked at a boarding and day school in the town that we grew up in, So we were at this school all the time, and they had a cafeteria, you know, so you'd get a tray and there was like some options and you served yourself, you know. And then at home not so much cooking. That was like it was I think it was frustrating. I love bagels.
Would you sit around the table at night together as a family or.
Not that much? Yeah, yeah, A lot of times we were at the school late. I think family like get togethers and like where the bigger group of family was getting together. We'd be together for like holidays, for Jewish holidays, and those type of meals were kind of more memorable.
Yeah, you know, well, if your mother was working all day, that's.
Really it's like to work a lot. I think food was like stressful for my family.
Yeah, where did you go after high school?
I went to Hope William Smith College is in upstate New York, and I studied like psychology, and I thought I was going to be like a psychologist. And I after three years of city in psychology, I was like, I think I want to learn how to paint. Yeah, and kind of like pivoted off that and learned how to paint my senior year. And then I went to grad school like right after college and University of Washington in Seattle for painting and drawing.
And you had had you painted as I was making.
Art like my whole life.
And it was definitely something, but it wasn't something that I was consciously thinking like I'm going to be an artist or this is something for me. I think my parents, I think I responded to it well and my parents put it in front of me and then they really supported it as like just something that you do. I went to the University of Washington in Seattle.
You dubbed was it a good school?
It was great for me? Yeah, yeah, it was great for me.
What about the food good fish there, the food there.
I had my own apartment, so I was cooking for myself, and I was I was like sort of learning how to cook, you know, And I would go to supermarkets a lot, and on the way to the studio and I would get like a bag at and like some bread and some like cucumber and tomatoes and make like a nice kind of like your European bag at, you know, and then maybe get like a coffee and then some fruit,
and then just be at the studio all day. And then at night that's when you go out and drink with and eat at some crazy bar with the rest of the rest of the students.
You know.
It's interesting, is it, Because the whole history of the art the artists of the seventies and the sixties, of the Dakunings and the Rauschenburgs and going to Max's Kansas City and drink an enormous amount of alcohol, and it was very much part of that life of the artist who was solitary during the day. And then I guess we were talking about that with Edvarsche yesterday, about how the artist has to be alone during the day, but then at night when it's over.
Did you find it totally like there was a microcosm of that in Seattle at this grad school, we'd all go out and get whiskey sours at this place called Flowers, which was an old flower nursery store with like marrid ceilings that used to have tons of flowers in it. We'd all go get whiskey sours because they were like a dollar or like two dollars. So there was a
mini version of it in school in Seattle. And Seattle is the first time I've ever been around a bunch of artists, two people who were like, I'm an artist, you know, I never really thought about it before. But I only stayed there two years, and then I moved to La.
Did you stay west because you were in Seattle? Do you think did you ever tempted to go to New York or Oh?
When I went to Seattle, I was so surprised because I was coming from Massachusetts and and you know, just the East Coast mentality of.
Like you got to get it done, like let's go, let's go, let's go.
And then I went to Seattle, and you know a lot of people were sitting around not doing much and drinking coffee, and I was like, wow, like do people what are people doing out here on the West coast? People just chill out, like you're not in a hurry. And I really vibe with that. I felt one as my personality being so like workaholic, love to work, love to make stuff. Like the fact that I was going fast and everybody else was going slow.
I was really hip to that. I like that.
And then when I thought about moving to New York, I just thought about my youth and people saying, Oh, it's going to be really tough, and it's the gritty streets in New York. And I had one friend who lived in LA and he was like, oh, LA's great. I lived in New York. You get way more space out here. And it sent me all the time, and
I was like, yeah, that sounds good. I think that New York would be hard, harder, and not that I was trying to avoid a harder place, but I think I really liked how it felt to be on the West Coast and away from sort of a different kind of intensity than the East Coast.
And what about the food scene when you came here to LA, did you find that?
Yeah, food team was like kind of open opened up for me a lot too, because there was a lot of different kind of like Mexican food and stop at Mexican food, just because I don't even know how to describe it if it's if that's not even the right way to say it, Like Latin food. It's just like food trucks blewe up. When I first moved under two thousand and three, four five, six seven boom, food.
Trucks were everywhere.
So it would be like, oh, I'm going to lunch outside this job at this food truck, and there were just tons of different kinds of like tacos, and you know that part of thing, just going out to restaurants, Like I love Sushi Park and I love going out to sushi.
Everybody's saying about Sushi Park.
Sushi Park is major.
It's it's in like a second level of a strip mall, and it's run by this great family and it's just like Oma Casse. You know, they don't serve anything else. You can just tell them when you want to stop. You have to give them a couple you know, peace of sushi heads up, so they can stop making it and they'll just keep making it and make it and you can order like edamame and peppers and alcohol and that's it. And it's just amcasse yeah, and it's just
I don't know, it's spectacular. Each one's better than the next. I like the Albacore there's incredible. But they have like fifteen different kinds of sushi that are good, like a hundred different kinds that are good. It's just incredible in the way that they serve it and how sort of nonchalant it. There's like a little sushi bar you can sit at and it's very casual. I think people like it too, because you see sometimes you see like you know,
Denzil Washington sitting there or something like that. I think, yeah, maybe not so me. I'm sort of anonymous. But I mean, in the last two years, I started eating a lot of fish.
Okay, was that because.
I changed my diet a lot.
What were you eating? Before?
I would eat like.
Red meat and chicken three to five meals a week, and I switched to like eating about half of my meals to be being fish.
It's something incentivized you to change, did you.
I started working with nutritionists and it was like the easiest way to eat like really clean protein. And there's like so many ways that you can cook fish.
Do you go and buy it or do you Yeah, like this today.
I see today, I see her it some tuna.
Where do you catch your fish?
A couple of different markets. There's one in like Pasadena and one in Glendale.
You said that you're saw a nutritionists in change your food? Was that during COVID?
Yeah, I was like working out and one of my friends was like, You're never going to lose weight unless you change your diet and change what you eat. And I always love food. I love food so much, you know, just like the next guy, but I love food. But I had never really learned about how it all all works for me. And as like a man getting older and like gaining weight for a while and gaining weight for a while, like I lost forty five.
Pounds forty five yeah, forty five.
Yeah, almost fifty pounds forty five pounds a how long the time? It took about like nine months to lose ten months to lose that weight. And then I've it's almost been like a year and a half since I was so much weight.
Really, yeah, so a lot of it had to do with what I was eating.
Did you want to lose forty five pounds or did.
You I've always thought about like getting in more shape and like eating, learning about I think that I grew up like always being a little overweight, so I sort of always overweight an overweight person, you know, So I think maybe anybody who's overweight you think about like you're eventually going to lose weight.
And then I don't know.
All this time I had during COVID where everything was really quiet, and I was like, oh, well, now seems like the time I don't have any I have no excuse now because I have all the time. I had a lot of time in the world and.
During the time when you sometimes when you have time, that's when you eat.
Because well, I hate a lot of vegetables.
I guess, did you paint.
Yeah, I painted a lot.
Yeah.
I draw a lot of still life stuff.
So anything related to like fruits or vegetables or things.
We have a garden.
What do you grow.
Wild hours in marijuana? I'm in marijuana leaf.
It is beautiful leaf.
Yeah, it's a very beautiful plant. I just want to grow it like a forest and live with it.
Yeah.
Hi, I'm Jess and I'm cooking on hot Swan today. I'll be doing dava soul in the wood oven with anchovies. The anchrees that we get here a whole and preserved in salt, and then fillitted and washed by hand. Today we'll be marrinaging them in lemon and raisberry. We add them to the dava solt in the last minute of cooking. It's a particularly delicious combination.
I like to learn how to cook myself. I worked at restaurants when I was younger, so it forced me to kind of learn how to cook. When I was younger, you know, when I was like four teen or fifteen, I was working at a First I worked at like a bagel restaurant, and then I worked at a real restaurant a couple of years later, for like a couple
of summers. It was like kind of sou chef, yeah, kind of like sou chef, Yeah, a little soux chef in in my hometown, preparing some stuff, learning a little bit about cooking.
When you went to work in these restaurants, did they teach you skills or did they teach skills?
Yeah?
Stuff that I like still remember how to do about how to Like the first place I went to where the guy was cooking, they cooked kind of like New Age kind of like text mes, like a lot of chicken and vegetables and cooked in a certain way that was cooked for like a deli counter, like a nice food cooked where people would take it away. So it was a lot of things that you had sort of
like prepared in a certain way and then grilled. To remember how I was taught how to grill chicken and how to like criss cross the back, you know, and then what to marinate in at like putting spices in it that made it taste a certain way. I was always remembering that, you like sixteen.
That's young young to be in the kitchen, you know, doing those jobs.
Yeah, it was fun. It was fun to learn how to use a big knife.
And do you still cook some that in mind? Yeah, do you remember when you were when you were first able to afford to eat well in the restaurant?
Yeah? Yeah, and like tipping.
After I had my first show in two thousand and six and I thought I had a lot of money, I quit my job when I made like twenty nine thousand dollars, which is crazy in retrospect, but yeah, like going down to a nice restaurant and like tipping, and yeah, but where we went that we that we were into was mostly just yeah, like really fancy Japanese restaurants like
om Case. Yeah, you know where it's like you just throw down the money and they're just like, you get what we serve you and you're gonna like it.
And I really dug doing that.
Is your wife's Japanese? My wife is so does she cook Japanese food?
Yeah? Some?
Yeah, but does she cook Our favorite thing that she makes still is not really cook but just just making a bunch of sashimi and you know, the kids loved nori and wrapping it with salts, and there's some other things that she makes. And I'm spacing on the name. The ceramic vessel do not be where you sort of put everything in and you cook it with fish and vegetables and some other things and it comes out and it's all just steamed perfectly.
Have you been to Tokyo? How did you find that?
I love it?
You love it?
Yeah, It's it's mesmerizing and beautiful.
Yeah.
We try to go like once a year. We haven't gone the last couple of years.
She's from She's.
From the north part of the main island, so not too far.
I went to Tokyo a few years ago, and every time I go I'm just amazed at both the precision but also the wackiness of the culture, but also the ricor. It seems that you know, people wear incredible clothes, but their are so clean and kind of size, and then you have beautiful food. I loved it.
Yeah, it's totally a different walk of life, that's for sure, a different vibe. I love the all the different scenes. You know, you can go to like hard Juku and you can go down these different streets and you can go see place where there's just like a bunch of old pots or there's there's so many different ways to to like navigate and go see and we've only just started and it's fun to go with the kids.
Still with your diet, do you eat out restaurants mostly Japanese?
Yeah, yeah, whatever, I just don't eat out all the time. Yeah.
I think also since the pandemic grew, attle bit more change and they closed down, didn't.
But there's always delivery.
But when that that's sort of like what happened during the pandemic, Like instead of going with delivery, I went with like even more like home cooking and like kind of learning how to cook everything myself.
What else did you cook.
I love grilling chicken.
We start my wife started making like hummus and pewter bread from scratch and baking breads and like zitar with a fresh pew bread with the chicken kebabs, and then pizza. We made a bunch of pizzas that was really fun. And then yeah, our favorite thing to make as a family is like this. They want me to make a burger.
And basically I just like go through the refrigerator and take like a little bit of like the leftovers vegetables here, and like some cheese and like onions and soy sauce and like salt and pepper and oil, and like an egg and like a little bit of like stale bread and like you put it all. They like when I make like a crazy, like kind of mixed.
Up burger, so you don't need pee.
Once in a while, like maybe once a month. About alcohol, No, I like tequila. What do you like?
Tequila? That's all I drink. Actually, I lived in Mexico for six months and I stopped drinking. You know, I just never had wine, and I thought that actually tequila goes so well with food. You know, you can have a glass of tequila in the class. I'm not very popular in my own restaurant because, of course, Italian wine is what you have with Italian food.
Yeah, but I like it with a little lime and like a little bubbly water.
What do you I've never had it with water. I don't like an ic no ice, no, I I just have literally, because I don't drink very much a lot of amounts. I get it and then I have it and then I have another one. Do you like mescal?
Yeah, that's pretty good.
If you've been to Mexico, Yeah, yeah, where did you go?
I've been to Guadalajara a couple of times. We went to this ceramic factory down there. But I actually like, almost like sacrilegiously, I've never been to Mexico and Mexico City.
Everybody, yeah, like we should have to go there. I need the full tour, like the whole full food tour. Yeah. Should we do it?
Yeah, let's do it. Let's go maybe tonight. Yeah, you ready to do?
Well?
We did something we have. I did Mexican. I did a visit a Mexican filmmaker who did Roma called Alfonso Quiron, and you know, he's amazing, and we talked a lot about Mexican food. For me living in Mexico City, it was the saddest time because my husband had that accident, but it wasn't one of the greatest months of months and months that I spent because first of all, it's a very green city. You never think of Mexico like that. So you walk and you know, you walk and you
have trees everywhere above you. And then you have a culture of kindness with people. I would get to the hospital and they would just be Mexican architects sitting there. You have the energy of really young people who are doing things. You have street food, you have beautiful architecture of Barragon and Legoureta, and then amazing restaurants where you can go and sit IGUANAO. Okay, we'll go. It's usual. If I lived where you lived, I'd be there all the time. It's harder for me.
I need to drag myself down there.
Oh yeah, yeah, we should definitely go.
There's a bunch of galleries open up their beautiful museum.
Yeah did you say you haven't seen that? That's by a friend of arts called David Chipperfield. And the art looks great there. And then there's this great Archaeological Museum, And do you like do you like the Mexican because I'm very interested in the Mayan and they clas tech art, you know, so it's very it's very undecorated in a way. You know, if you go to Thailand or you go to India, there's a lot of stuff, you know, everywhere,
but the Mexican is much more like your work. It's kind of it's silent, which I like.
I'm kind of a little late to the game of like cooking and like really getting into it and learning more and kind of challenging myself with with different recipes and stuff.
The more you cook, the better you cook. And actually they that you have here is the ingredients. That's what you're so lucky.
Yeah, I like the tradition of like certain family meals and how excited we made some We got into making some fried chicken at the house and the kids like love Japanese style fried chicken.
You know.
Can you tell me how you make Japanese fried chicken?
Yes, So we chop up some chicken chunks of like you know, I guess it would be boneless thigh, maybe you use a breast, right, and then I think we put it in eggs and then soy sauce, salt and pepper, and then like a little bit of uh. I think we throw it around a little bit of flour and then just throw it right into our fryer, which usually fries like a lot of not a fire, like a pan that we don't clean that usually cooks a lot of fish.
So it has like a little bit of like a like a like a fishy chicken fry, which we really like, and the soy sauce with it, and then we usually do that sometimes with sashimi, so you can kind of dip both of them in a little oy sauce and you know, some white rice.
It's pretty good. Do you entertain a little bit in the last couple of years.
So we just moved to this new house like two years ago, right before COVID, and it's like a big entertaining house. But we haven't really sort of gotten. We had one party for our whole studio and then they like made everybody put the masks back on.
But we have now.
I think we're looking at some end of the year pool parties for the kids and their friends.
So food is you know, we go to when we're hungry when we want to show off and we cook something special, or we want to feed our kids, or we want to entertain and we want to run to a truck to eat something. But sometimes we need food for comfort when we feel life isn't you know what we want it to be, or something's happened. Is there a food that you would turn to for comfort?
Yes? There It could be.
On like a toast sandwich, or it could be pea bread but peanut butter, bananas, raisins and then honey on top.
Is it? This is?
It?
Either can be like toasted sandwich where you toast the bread and it's like peanut butter, layer of bananas, raisins, honey on top, cut in half, and you can do the same thing on peita and it's like it's it also like kind of takes me back because I used to love peanut butter and bread and banana when I was a kid too, So it's a little bit like a throwback nostalgic comfort slash really really yummy.
Did you make that up? Or did you?
I don't think I made it up. I think it must have been something I had when I was a kid. But I think the raisins and the bananas and the peanut butter and honey. That's kind of like that might have been me taken into the next thing.
Something like that would give you comfort. Yeah, Okay, on our way back from Mexico. Well, we've got plants for the future.
We just need to get a driver and we can start drinking some tequila.
Yeah, then we can have the golf. You can harvest your barjuana.
We can we have a great Yeah, we have some harvested. All right, be ready to go.
My reputation is going to be sung. You realize. So gorgeous. Okay, thank you so much.
It's great.
Yeah, so nice. The River Cafe look Book is on sale. One hundred pages of beautiful photographs that will inspire you to cook. It's a look book. It's a cookbook. Order one now. Ruthie's 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.