Welcomed to Ruthie's Table for a production of I Heart Radio and Adamize Studios. When you open a cookbook, you expect to see a photograph of the food with a recipe on the opposite page. But imagine if you are also saw something different, something completely unexpected, something that might inspire you. There's a classic, there's all some I don't know that. There's one opposite the chicken and milk, isn't it were the hands look like they've been dipped in costard.
Somehow it works as a combo, doesn't it. And the one with someone disappearing into the round chair in front of the cross stater, it's really nice. I do love the pink telephone with the sawbabe, because that picture of that pink telephone and found at home, and it just it is exactly where it needs to be. The other one I love is the one which is I think it's reveal with there's a car, there's a car up on blocks and there's a big square piece of ribs. I think it is it will be your ribs or
which is wrapped up? And I love that. Two years after starting The River Cafe, Rose Gray and I were asked by a publisher to do a cookbook. We replied sternly that we were chefs, not writers. But the more we thought about it, we realized that being a chef is about communicating to the people eating your restaurant, to the people who cook in the restaurant, to your family, to your friends. Thirty years and twelve cookbooks later, we have just published our newest, The River Cafe look Book
for kids of all ages. It's a collaboration between a photographer, designers, and chefs. When you hold any book in your hands, there's a story to be told about how it was created, and that's what we're going to do on today's special episode of Ruthie's Table four. Joseph Travelli and Sean wyn Owen are executive chefs at The River Cafe and co authors of The River Cafe look Book. In the smartphone era,
physical cookbooks offers something special and uniquely inspiring. As a kind of older adolescent, one of my first cookbooks was an Alice A Little Cookbook. Maybe that began a path that led me here. I don't know, because it's that same generation. So it was Alice a Little and then definitely on my twenty if I got the River Cafe Cookbook, but there weren't these kind of children's cookbooks. I can't remember.
I love them all, Like was it on Claudia Rhodin's Food of Italy and Michel Hazzan and the Rue Brothers and people like that. I really enjoyed that French cooking. And actually, when I started being a chef, I thought, I want to go and work in the Rits in London and learn every single potato dish that exists. I always read the classics, but I've never read the six I've read the classic cookbooks. I've got children myself, and you know, my oldest she is an avid cookbook reader.
She will sit in bed, the kind of cliche I used to always joke, you say, you know, I sit in bed and read cookbooks and don't cook for them. Sometimes not that much her all the time, you know. So she has all these books, some of which I find completely horrifying, loads and loads of sugar icing, but not just. She also really enjoys the Silver Spoon Italian Cookbook, as you'll sit there reading through and then you know,
quotes measurements to me, which is quite funny. Yeah, we're starting to cook now, and you know, we'll be leading up to this book, I think pretty quickly. To be honest, it's really good because it's going to open her eyes to a whole bunch of new things. At the heart of the book, of course, are the recipes. Sean Winnellen
and Joseph Tavelli. We chose the recipes thinking about all the young people that we knew what they like to eat, and a little bit, you know, because after all, we are parents, what we'd like them to eat, So we wanted to choose things that they'd find exciting but nevertheless straightforward, not super challenging, but also not patronizing. It's what we
would like to eat. And also their recipes that you're never going to regret learning how to spatch cock chicken that you've grilled or cooked in milk, or how to make a basic tomato risotto, and then you know, take from that, I actually know how to make a resutto, maybe I'll try and do something different, you know, And
so their recipes that they're not children fied. One of the things we wanted to do was do a book that was the chef's book for young people or latterly kids of all ages as if a chef was looking over your shoulder, as opposed to it being kind of a step by step. The thinking behind the tips was to give some pointers and to shine just a few kind of specific lights just to help that go smoothly. I think it's really useful photography and design bring a
cookbook to life. Matthew Donaldson took all of the photographs in the book. I think the first thing that we really did together was the thirty years of the River Cafe cookbook. It was like an education, you know, to see every plate of food that was put in front of me. It just wasn't something that I was photographing and had photographed before. Right now we're doing pastor, it's got to look like this. I didn't have any preconceived ideas the sort of minimal ethos and the architectural ethos.
The color made it incredibly easy for me because you Joseph and Sean, you'd already taken away a lot of the things that would be fussy, that would that I would be having to trot with anybody else would be having to get rid of. So often you do photography
and and people want it to be styled. They want a lifestyle or they want to dial so that involves we need to have cutlery or or salt and pepper, or we need flowers, or we need Although there was movement in the seventies and were the eighties, I guess I think I'm always looking for, um, what to take out of a photograph, rather than what to add in. I'm always, I've always always think that there's got to be something else we can get rid of. I think, and when you said to me, we don't have knives
and forks in our photographs, I was so happy. Maybe a lot of those magazines and um cookbooks were kind of aspirational that if you cooked a fabulous meal, people would be impressed, or you can make it different. Seemed like you were a different lifestyle. And I think what Rose and I started with the first book and then we've continued is the idea that you know, the immediacy of actually cooking something, putting it on a table, and
then taking a photograph of it. But I think one of the things before we get to River Cafe look book is shadow, and not in every photograph, but there is the beautiful, beautiful use of shadow. And I was wondering what is your thought in that it's a control I think if it's if it's always there, if if you have one thing that is like a control thing that makes all of the photographs it together. It was a real environment we had. We were using real light.
But I think that the shadow really holds the image on the page. I think that if you've got a white plate on a white background or something you really need something that it frames the image really in a way that it's allowed to be there. It also, particularly with the River Cafe, it suggests that there is some and there is light, and there is and it's optimistic and it makes you feel good, but it's not. I don't think we would ever and I might have done
it a couple of times. But the idea of having sunlight that sort of dappled is going into a lifestyle thing. It's putting ideas. It's trying to make a mood that I don't ever really want to do that. I just want to present the things as simply as possible, you know, and that you know, a plate of a dinner or lunch of the River Cafe is what it is. It really doesn't need any help from me. My name is Hamish I am one of the chefs here at the River Cafe, so I'm having to look through the look book.
Now I'm thinking about maybe doing these slowly roasted Dattini tomatoes. We've got seven fifty grams of red and yellow Datterini tomatoes, two cloves of garlic, two tablespoons of olive oil, ten sprigs of time tea, salt, and freshly ground pepper to season. I've preheated my oven to a hundred and fifty degrees, which is gas marked. Two. I've just gone and washed my red and yellow datterin ese and then pricked them all with a toothpick. They stopped them bursting when you're
cooking them. It allows the juices to flow. Okay, So the third step, after you've washed them pricked your tomatoes is to put them into a bowl with the olive oil, the garlic and the time And now I'm just tossing them around in the bowl and I'm going to season them up fairly generously with salt and pepper. Spread out your tomatoes now without overcrowding them onto a thin bacon sheet. So now we're just gonna put them into our preheated oven for about an hour and an hour and a half.
Mm hmm. Oh. They're beautiful, super simple, very delicious, not too overpowering in any flavor, which is why they're quite delicate and lovely to have with many dishes. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it. How those recipes you think are so simple, but they're so good, Like the simple cooking is actually maybe the best cooking. There's a cookbooks that are really challenging. Often not always, this can be disappointing because they're so
challenging and you get yourself in the right mess. You also don't maybe you want to make so much mess the rest of the times when clearing up, you just need like the best of us, few ingredients and just a little bit of knowledge and then you're away, you know.
And I think that's what this kid's book is. I'm here today with Stephanie Dash and Anthony Michael, the designers are directors of everything in The River Cafe, but especially these beautiful books River Cafe thirty and today what we're going to be talking about is The River Cafe a Look book. The idea for having the book in two different sections came quite late in the day. The book started off as a cookbook for kids and was based
around how kids might interact with making food. We would say, you know, as I say, by a tomato peel, the tomatoes squeeze a tomato, fried tomato, and we're doing it and we I think Anthony's definitely all of us thought and at a certain point it's been done before and probably done better than I could possibly do it. We
just felt uncomfortable with that method. It was very process driven, and we were doing it sort of a step by step, and then we did it and looked at it and it just looked no fun, and then worse than that, it looked patronizing. So I think we all just looked at it on everyone. Everyone just liked it and it was back to the drawing board. In any creative process,
there are moments when you feel stuck. What inspired the creation of the River Cafe look Book was a pamphlet I was given created by an artist, a photographer and two neurologiers funded by the Nesse Foundation, pairing diverse images. Matthew Donaldson or we didn't really know we were onto something.
I don't think until we had those books. There were books that you had at home that paired photographs together, and they were done by a doctor and a researcher for neurological patients to stimulate by putting pictures opposite each other, like a picture of a baboon opposite I can't remember what's opposite of a booon picture, but there would be a picture of her building or something. Something clipped and
something happened. I remember when Stephanie put two pictures together, and one was a picture of some stilly sits DeLine a soup like chicken soup, basically the suit that you're in my house and anyway, if anyone's ill, that's what
they've given tiny little pastors in a chicken broth. And Stephanie put it opposite a photograph of a fire escape, which I'd photographed in Los Angeles in and I had been lying in bed in my hotel room, and I looked at that every day, and I've just been very ill and definitely not knowing anything about the about these photographs of where they come from. And put the two together, and there was the view of the person who was
recovering with the suit. They should have been eating the thing that they were looking at, and immediately there was something in it. We went from kind of teaching in a very small way how to cook to a kind of almost inspirational book. You know, how do you inspire somebody to cook? How did you inspire somebody to make
a recipe? And we, you know, we thought it's not by perhaps having a photograph and then the recipe, because that could be intimidating or overwhelming, or you love the photograph, but then when you look at the recipe, it's thinking, well, maybe I won't. And so we did work are pairing photographs. Having worked with Matthew a lot, we knew his pictures very well, so we used the food pictures and then literally trawled through his instagram, which was relentless job, and
then matched the photographs. There was a really challenging process of how you put a vase of flowers next to a spaghetti anglais or you know, Roman villa next to a plate of piers. It's easy, somewhat obvious. Some just felt they were they were meant for each other, that they were they were separated at birth, and then others you have to work out what would you like to describe what we're So we're looking at a horse that's a Spanish decorated dress horse and a plate of tomatoes
in the same colors, all circles, all dogs. The relationship is really about. Yeah, I mean it's a very obvious relation, but putting the two together and having food next to an image which has nothing to do with food, and I think that came really from I think children have the amazing thing, whether they just are not they're not programmed, they're not programmed to think plate on a food recipe next to the page, and they have this amazing I
think their visual thinkers. I think they imagine things in pictures and they don't necessarily need this perfect picture of food and to copy it. And that's kind of what we didn't really want to do. So putting all the pictures together and doing that old druxposition just seemed to be to work. But I don't think it's a specifically child centric thing. I think a lot of adults think like that. And it's lying on your back and looking at clouds and seeing what you see in the clouds.
There's lots of things that children see that we all see, so things that remind you of things like so you sometimes you look at a piece of polished wood and you can see figures in there or animals in there, and you make the shapes up because I think your mind's searching all the time to see things to recognize. So when you present two images next to each other that have got an obvious relationship, you start to see
the similarities and it can make you smile. And I think that the books, the original books that Ruthie was given, I've got a much more serious intent that they're They're meant to open up pathways in somebody's head that might have closed. But these are these are just good fun. But it really Ruthie was the was the the instigator
and the pusher. She she she planted the idea and then the concept of it, and then and then we sort of took it with Matthew's pictures, and strangely we did the juxtaposition because I think Matthew probably there were his photographs, so us putting them together, and then we put them all together around the table and everybody sit around. Ruthie would changed we then at that point then we would all look at them and move them around until everyone was happy. Some like ones and not another. But
they're very they are very subjective. Some things are jarring, and I can imagine it's a bit like food as well. So if you put two flavors together, you sometimes think, oh my god, I can't eat that possibly, but once you've had it a few times, you think, actually, do you know what? I really enjoy that sort of bitter and sweets or something. I don't know. So I think
the pictures can do the same thing. So I think that there are ones that obvious couplings, and then there are ones that you have to learn to enjoy it to like. And then you decided that it should just be those photographs the book, the first hundred pages of the book. Let's say, I think it is hundred pages should just be photographs. Do you have a page that you particularly love. I like the one I mentioned earlier
with the Stele neighbor because of that story. I do love the pink telephone with the sorbet because that picture that pink telephone has been around knocking around my studio and draws and computers for such a long time, and I'm so happy that it found at home and it
just it is exactly where it needs to be. It does I mean maybe that I'm not allowed to say this, but we're I do look through it, and I have looked through it quite a lot lately because obviously it's you know, it's just arrived and so curious to look at what we did. I think that it makes it does make me. It makes me smile, and that can't
be a bad thing. Not in a cookery book. Joseph Travelli and Sean Wino and our executive chefs in the River Cafe and co authors of The River Cafe Look Book, every single picture of food we cooked ourselves, every single picture of the food we did, and it is as a recipe. It was taken in real time, wasn't It wasn't wasn't styled as such. It was just out of the off and onto the plate. And then trying to
select the image that went alongside it. That was maybe one of the hardest bits of the book because there was five of us, so it was Anthony and Stephanie, Matthew, Ruthie, Me, Joseph and trying to get five people to agree on what picture sits opposite spaghetti bongala for example. That probably took about a year. What's so nice I think we've been talking recently is about the way that especially you're a beginner cook and you get a picture and a
recipe you want to cook. You know the picture exactly, And what's lovely is that with the with the juxtaposition of the pictures, you've got these two images and you get more of a kind of feeling or something. And then again the recipe isn't right there. You've got to keep shuffling backwards and forwards. So I think that will
give people their ability to cook better food. Actually, but one of the things we thought, I I felt having got a teenage kid, is how they you know, giving them a book may not be the most popular present you buy a teenager, and so you know, knowing how image lead they are, I like the idea of the fact it is almost like scrolling through Instagram, where you are getting a lot of images that are just mixed up, and it's up to you how long you stay on
a picture. And then if you know, often some of the pictures you rest upon are actually not the food, and you're like, I like that picture of a telephone, but I don't know why. Or you might hover over a picture of as cream in a old and things I want to make that. But then also at the end, you've got all the colors. So even if you just look at the book just because you like the colors, it feels like it's you can use it in many ways.
But for me, I was interested in trying to get a teenager to enjoy it or to to want to own it as well. And I thought, you know, maybe that that element of image image image was might just get them to pick it up. Hi, I'm Monica. I'm a waitress at the River Cafe. I have the cookbook at home. We only just got it, so i haven't cooked from it, but I'm hoping that when I do have a couple of weeks spare, that I can make
the potatoes from it. Next to each of the pages, there's sort of a picture of kind of a visual comparisons. As I flicked through the book, I like the stairwell next to the Paranoma tarp. I think that the pair and Almontae is a transporting experience like a stairwell. I think when a lot of people come to the River Cafe, they really look forward to their desserts. I think the three probably most popular are the Paranorma Talk, the Lamon Talk, and the Chocolate Nemesis. I used Cope books a lot.
I think what makes the River Cafe some of the recipes so special is that they are accessible. One of the beauties of this book. And I think it was a challenge because you remember, we had all the photographs, and then how do we segue from these photographs into the recipes, you know, how do we do that? We had black and white and white and black, and we had and then one day you said two words to us,
and it was baracous airport. We used to have a client in Madrid and used to have to go to Madrid probably twice week to come a month, and I used to not like going to the meetings, but I and I just really loved the airport and just loved landing and seeing the rainbow colors on the stanchions as you as you came in. Just always always sort of
stayed with me for a really long time. So then when we came to the Rainbow Kings, all sort of came together and we actually used photographs and Richard's reference points for those colors. We've done the images, and we've done the cover, and we were trying to do the layout, and then we were sitting in the private room. And remember and we were just talking about something I can't
in the book didn't quite come together. We couldn't put a finger on what was missing it for like, had all this visual stuff, there's great recipes, but this somehow it was a bit of a disconnect. And we were just talking about someone was being in Spain. Ruth was talking about Madrid Airport and how Richard designed it with the color walk through different color zones. And then we were like, maybe we should do that with the book. And we didn't know whether it would work or not
because there's no ware testing it. So we did know whether there will be enough creep of the color into the edges of the pages so that we would be able to make a rainbow out of all the text pages on the edge, because we like to paint the edges of books normally. UM. And when we discovered that we couldn't for budgetary reasons then and the fact that we were we were, yes, we've extended the time quite significantly. UM. We were really hoping that this this rainbow would appear.
It was just so fun and it just thought, oh, this is maybe what it needs, because you know, it is also meant to be like a fun book, you know, and then it just brought it together. It felt like that was quite nice at the end. And so let's talk about the back of the book. I always say that the recipes from the writing of it were it's a book more verbs than adjectives. So it's mixed or
whisk bake, you know, plate serve, it's all. It's very it's very verbal, isn't it that you have a verb saying what you have to do, not what you have to sort of think about that came from the fact that you, with your chefs constantly craft these recipes to be as instructive as possible without being superfluous. There's no It is utility in the fact that it's it's very very it's it's well crafted so that everything is is done with the least amount of words to do give
the maximum effect. And I think that's a real skill in itself. That's a kind of book that you could take off to college and just have it in your in a repertoire of just recipes are so easy that you can take them with you through your young adult life as well or as a beginner. I suppose in this day age where you can get so many meals delivered so easily, or but you know, these are like ready meals, you know, ready for your teenager to take
to college with them. My favorite thing about the book is the fact that, you know, is the physical book, the fact that it's a book. It's not you know, it's obviously completely visual, but it's not an line thing. And of course you know we're all cookbook fans, but this one, with the soft cover and the way it's bound, it just feels really nice in the hands. So I think my favorite thing about the book is the physical form,
because it's soft, so that feels quite good. I like the fact that it reminds me of the restaurant in many ways, because it's not just about the food, is it because the restaurants about the design and the color and the people and the way it makes you feel when you walk through the door. I think that book is very much not one thing. It's many things, and
it feels a bit like where the River Cafe is today. Also, having been involved with the production of a few books, now um, this is the one that I just you know, having you know, we've lived with it for a couple of years, I'm just happy to keep picking it up and keep looking through it and scrolling through it, you know, really enjoy it. And I think, I mean Anthony and Stephanie, the designers are just unparalleled. Yeah, I was going to
say that is a very good example, isn't. It's incredibly long process and I think we did a hundred and eighties six different versions of this book. But I will I will say when we were very young designers, we went to a lecture given by Milton Glazer, the probably most famous graphic design of all time, and he showed us his work, and everybody was an auditorium of a designer is sitting there in awe this man, and he said, I'll just give you one piece of advice. It's the
only work for people you like. And at the end of the day, that's a piece we've taken it, and we only ever work for people we like. I think this is I can't remember said we say it's our twelve or thirteenth or whatever coup book. But I don't think I've ever given a book, and they've all been beautiful books, but I don't think I've ever handed a book to someone and said, look at the printing. Look at the quality of the printing in this book. I usually say, look at the you know, of course I do.
I talked about the colors, and I talked about the juxtaposition and everything we tried to do to inspire children to cook. But what really and you really blew me away. And you did tell me this on the telephone quite a few times, and we spoke that you were preparing this book to be printed in the most rigorous way. And I know that you worked with the printers, you worked with someone who you felt with. You know, I would say this book get the Nobel Prize for printing.
I do really think that on matt paper to see the qualities. Do you do you feel that way? I do think it's just And what did you do Stephanie's rigor? Again, there are there are things that you, you, as designed as you, you mustn't let go of. And some of those is some of those are the process of preparing the materials in the best way you can. And I think we start off like recording the beginning material is
always really important. Matthews. Pictures are beautiful, pictures are beautifully lit, They're so exquisite, and we get beautiful files to convert those files is a challenge, and the first couple of tranches of files we got through, we're not we're not right. But Matthew went through individually and adjusted every single one, and then the next step we got through or a
hundred times better. But it's it's again. It is this doing things over the wire, doing things by zoom, doing things digitally where you're not sitting in a room with people. It's very hard to understand. There's lots of ways of interpreting the same material, but Matthew is the person to interpret it because his picture, so he knew how he wanted them printed. It's the food, it's the cooks, it's the restaurant, it's the designers, it's the photographer, it's Ruthie.
I think you can see everybody in that book, everyone that was involved. I don't think you can forget Richard in this. You know, my first time I ever met him when he said that thing he said Ruthie. I got paraphrasing because I can't remember exactly, but I think it's in the film that we made. Ruthie is a
very good cook, and I'm very good at eating. You know, there's this everyone's every every I can't cook, but I can eat, and so everybody, whether they were actively involved or they were heavily influencing what was going on, will all involved. And that brings me more joy than any of it, that we all got to do it together. And I think, you know, I think that Richard loved the River Cafe, he loved food, he loved you, he loved your work, and I know that he would have
loved this book. Thank you, Matthew, My pleasure. The River Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops and online. It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks. The River Cafe Look Book Recipes for Cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production of I Heart Radio
and Adami Studios. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.