Welcome to River Cafe Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
Whilst campaigning and then serving as President of the United States, Barack Obama relied on Matthew Barzen, asking him to run the two thousand and twelve campaign, and then appointing him Ambassador to Britain during the heady days of the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums. Matthew, with his wonderful wife Brooke, redefined the special relationship by bringing art, music, and most
of all fun to the Ambassador's residence, Wingfield House. Recently, Matthew has written The Power of Giving Away Power, a must read book for a soul. He's in Kentucky right now, I'm in London. But if there is a special relationship between the US and the UK, there is definitely a special relationship between Matthew Barzin and myself. Matthew, would you like to read the recipe that you chose to read? Yes?
I would be honored.
Okay.
Fried artichokes serves four eight artichokes the small purple Italian winter variety are best for this recipe. Two lemons, two tablespoons plain flour, tepot zero zero is best one liter sunflower oil. To prepare the artichokes, cut off the stem, then carefully pull away the outer leaves until you get to the pale green heart. Cut off the tip, cut into quarters, and remove the center choke. Place the pieces in water with slices of lemon. Combine the flour with seasoning.
Drain the artichokes and shake dry in a sieve. Toss into the flower mixture. Keep the oil to one hundred and eighty degrees celsius in a deep pot. Add the artichokes and fry until light brown. Drain on kitchen paper, Season and serve with lemon.
Thank you, Matthew, Why of all the recipes of all the books, did you choose deep fried art of chicks. I'm so thrilled to do because it's one of my favorite things to eat. So tell me why it's yours.
Well, I love to eat them, and then I had the great honor of being able to prepare them when you let me. I mean cook is a strong word. You help let me participate in the magic that is the River Cafe one Sunday morning, and I was put in charge of the fried artichokes, or a piece of the fried artichoke process. And you know, it's funny. As I read it out loud, it says, you know, carefully pull away the outer leaves. That's actually not that hard until you get to the pale, green heart, and there's
something beautiful about that. This was the tricky part. Cut off the tip, cut into quarters, and then remove the center choke, which sounds straightforward, but if you don't remove it enough, you have that nasty stuff in there. And then I started getting paranoid, and your nice member of your team was gently telling me to remove more of
the choke. Then I went overboard the other way, and then there's barely anything left to eat, and so trying to find that balance was a challenge, but that's why I picked it.
And what are your memories of that day?
Beautiful Sunday morning. I got to put on the cool white chef's jacket, so that was cool, and then I got on my little station and I had the water with lemon, and I was amazed by the calm. And it's funny. It reminded me when I first got to go to the West Wing. I had seen the West Wing on the television show, which I loved, and then movies and in the movies they always show it as like hustling and bustling and it's kind of loud, and
it was just really calm. And I felt the same way about the River Cafe kitchen on a Sunday morning, before any of the guests arrive, it's just wonderfully calm and joyful.
It's very rare for us to have someone in the kitchen because kitchen is a dangerous place and there's a lot of sure, however calm it seems. But I think you have always been, as I said from our first conversation, really interested in food, in cooking and the process of cooking food. Yes, let's go back to the early days. Who cooked in your house when you were growing up? What was food like in the bars and house?
Food? Was it changed? Because my parents got a lot of things changed in my life when my parents got divorced.
I should say at the outset, I have a wonderful mother and a wonderful father, even though when I'm about to say sounds a little strange, which is when I was eleven years old, they got divorced, and in the summertime, my favorite thing to do was to go down to this little cottage, little series of cottages in Cape Cod, but it was my father's family's place, and so, for understandable reasons, my mother was not keen post divorced to go down there. And I said, well, that's too bad
for you that you got divorced. I'm still going, and they somehow listened to my eleven year old self. So I spent Monday through Friday all summer when I was eleven by myself, and then my father would come down on weekends. And so he was a really good cook, and his mother, who at this point had died, my grandmother, Mariana.
She was a really good cook and he sort of learned it from her, And so my memories of cooking were sort of learning to cook for myself and then learning to cook for friends to try to get them to come over so I'd have someone to hang out with during the week. And then the most fun was
on Friday nights, all the grown ups. So my father would drive down, my aunt and uncle would drive up from New York, and all these grown ups would arrive and be tired after a long work week, and I would make them dinner.
What would you make? Do you remember?
I do? I made gosh, what do we call it? It was poached chicken breasts in Vermouth with sort of prescudo and cheese and sage. It was sort of like chicken sealtumboca, but not really that a tow. But yeah, anyway, and I did it and they were so unbelievably appreciative. It wasn't very good, but they just thought, I mean, they didn't have to cook it, so that was a big bonus for them and that appreciation.
And what age were you eleven? You were eleven? Yeah, yeah, that's very young. And it's also a performance, isn't it that you had to know it's.
Totally a performance. And I got applause and that felt good and encouragement. So that those were some early memories.
In these conversations, I'm always touched by the presence or influence of a grandmother, even sometimes more than the parent that the people have memories. Tell me about your grandmother.
She died when I was ten or nine maybe, and so I didn't know her when knew were as a kid would know a grandmother, and she was quite formal, but in the kitchen she was a really good cook and chef, and she passed on to my father, and then he passed on to me. Now this isn't New England, right, So this is not and you remember back then, I mean there aren't lots of choices of what you got in the grocery store. So she had this curry recipe which I loved and I thought it was the only
kind of curry. Now I've learned more. But I got invited when I was ambassador to compete in up in Bradford in the International Curry Cookoff. It was really fun. Yeah, yeah, they did something and so as a stunt or whatever, the embassy people like, oh, he likes to cook, he'll
cook the curry. So I cooked my grandmother's curry recipe, which he'd gotten from a British friend, and they brought in some amazing chef from India and they were cooking proper curry and I was cooking the sort of water down curry and embarrassingly it had and there was lots of Muslim participants and guests and judges, and her recipe for curry had three quarters of a cup of vermouth, which of course would not be appropriate to serve, and
so without telling me, they substituted in white grape juice instead of vermouth, and it was the most disgusting curry. So I came in last place. Did you come in the last place? Yeah? Yeah, I mean just absolute last, and I deserved that.
Because it's also interesting that your grandmother in that period of time encouraged your father to cook.
Yes, And back to the divorce, I mean so I never associated my father really with cooking until after they got divorced. But then he would have us every other weekend, and he really made cooking a big deal. We got to each rotated. I'm one of four children, and we got to pick what he would cook, and we could say anything like I want fried Wanton's and he'd say okay, and he'd figure out how to cook them, and so that became a nice ritual.
It's rather beautiful that he chose that way through food to express love and to express I'm giving you attention on my weekend as a father, do you think, yeah, exactly. So you had this childhood of being between and cooking for yourself age eleven, performing for other in the kitchen for your family, and then what happened when you sort of started living on your own as a student. Did you carry that with you when you left home.
I really didn't. There was like this whole I was gonna say dark period, but that's sort of dramatic in it, not with bad connotations, but I mean I don't think I through college and then I lived out in San Francisco and the sort of dot com internety days, and I had a one room apartment that had a little kitchen on the side, and I don't think I ever ever, I mean toasted a piece of toast or made a cup of tea. I mean, I just didn't use it. We all just sort of ate out. Wasn't very healthy.
And so until I met my lovely wife, Brooke, who by the way, sends her love to you, Ruthie. And then we moved in together and she had a tiny kitchen. I mean you could fit you know, one person in it maybe, And we started going to the farmer's market. And then I started cooking again, and I started back after ten years of not cooking or eight or whatever, with scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs, ushrooms and time nice and
scrambled eggs. I think is a great demonstration because I've tried to teach my kids all are interested in cooking. And so it's been fun kind of trying to pass that along. And the point and you've made it to me and other who are amazing chefs that you could just tell you can certainly taste, but even before you taste, you can just look at a plate and tell if something was cooked with love or not. And there's something about scrambled eggs. Just do the love test on three
different plates of scrambled eggs. You can tell.
You can tell it's an ingredient, isn't it? It is? It is?
Oh, I love that it's an ingredient.
Oh that's good. We're living and you were living in San Francisco and eating out a lot. So what was it like eating out? Did you explore coming from New England and the family and the kind of things you had there? Was it? What was it like eating out in restaurants for you?
Restaurants? You know? Growing up? I mean it was it was a huge deal to go to one. I mean there wasn't one in our town, but there was one in the next town, and so we really looked forward to it. And so to have a city with so many right nearby and making money so you could go to them. It didn't have to ask for permission. That was really fun. And back then there was a famous Visa commercial that just ran during every football game that
showed the Fog City Diner. I don't know if you remember that anyway, So it turns out where I worked at CNET was four hundred yards from the Fog City Diner. I was like, I can't believe it really exists, and I got to go in and so I love that. And then a really famous place called, oh gosh, now I'm forgetting the name, Buena Vista, which was like a famous Irish coffee place that was right near where we lived. So that was good memories of San Francisco.
And I think restaurants it's quite telling the way someone actually is in a restaurant kind of. I think that's why people like going on first dates sometimes in a restaurant, because it does tell you something about the person, do you think, Well.
It does, and I'm reminded that the first So I got set up with my now wife Brooke on a blind date and I got good points. I picked a hipster call val twenty one in San Francisco, which was in the mission Valencia and twenty first, which is where it got its name, and it wasn't sort of the predictable, preppy kind of place that she thought I might take her. So I get some early points. But then Ruthie I did something terrible. The server comes around and says, you know,
here's the wine list. Would you like a bottle of wine? And this is a blind ad first aid, and I don't know why I did it, but I said, no, that's okay, Brook, if you want wine, you can have a glass of wine. I'm going to have a bud light. And she went back and she told her father, who asked, like, how is the date, and she said, oh, he's a nice guy or whatever. But he didn't split a bottle
of wine. He ordered a bud light and I had a glass of whatever she had and he's like, oh, dear, okay, well there are many fish in the sea.
Move on.
So it almost ruined it. It almost ruined.
Reverse exactly, Yes, the reverse. Yeah, people, that's so funny. But there you are. How many years later that was h twenty five? Yeah, and what about when you just mentioned before about the White House and the West Wing, And I remember in the series the West Wing, there was always a scene in the canteen downstairs, wasn't there Toopy and the Josh and they were all meeting over the food and the canteen. What was food like in the White House? Yeah?
Well I never worked there, so I got some friends of mine. Would you have the White House mess which is really cool and sort of neat and because of the show, it's great. And then there's the place sort of under the Eisenhower Executive Office building, which is just deeply unremarkable and just sort of like a cafeteria like anywhere else. But it is fun and all you know, you want to save the little napkin with the White
House logo and the little Aminam. You're just sort of like you become a little bit like a child in a good way.
I hope when you went to Sweden was that food? What was the food?
Gosh? Did I love the food like herring? I mean, if you had asked me if I liked herring going into it, I would have said no. And now I adore it. The mustard herring and the sort of just regular pickled herring and the sour cream and chives. I think it is so I love and herring for breakfast.
Weirdly, you know, that's there.
And then Swedish meatballs were fun to try to learn how to cook, and then they're famous. You know how some countries have the famously sort of disgusting to most people food. And our wonderful driver named Bjorn, who is just an amazing, amazing driver. He's an amazing historian and loves the culture. And he's from a part of Sweden called Sunsvaal, where my mother had spent her summer abroad when she was sixteen, and so I grew up hearing this story and I heard it sort of misheard it.
So I heard that in Sweden and Sunsvaale they take fish and they bury it for one hundred years and then they unearthed it and they eat it. Now that is not true, but the kernel of truth was sir strumming, which means sort of sour herring, and it comes from the herring at the bottom of the barrel and it is a delicacy. And so we had Bjorn serve it to the children and to me and to Brook and it is like if you open it, like there are rules against opening a can of this stuff in an
apartment building because people will just wretch. Yeah, there is there's a lot of death in that can, and it's pretty grim. I haven't learned to like it, but the kids were troopers. They all ate it, and I did too, And so I said to Burn on the way back, to close off these serres drumming story, I said, I said, well, it's rotten fish, and he very sweet. He's just like, it is not rotten. It is controlled spoilage, controlled spoilage.
And I thought that was such a nice distinction. And then his comparison was, you know, gorgonzola or French blue cheese or whatever that you don't call that rotten cheese, although you could call it that, but that's a different framing of the same product.
I like that contained controlled spoilage and spoilage. After Sweden, you went and you campaigned for President Obama, and presumably you traveled all over the United States, and what would you eat on the campaign trail?
I gained so much weight roofye on that campaign, and at the end of the campaign, thank goodness, we won. But it was a lot different from you were on that campaign too, that first campaign in two thousand and eight. Anyone involved, wherever they were London, back home in America, they would also have described it as like this amazing sort of wave that we were all surfing and it just felt magic twenty twelve, and I'm so proud of the work we did. It was not a wave to
be surfed. It was really kind of like a slog and so that kind of stress for me. Anyway, we would go to this place called Wildberry at the base of Chicago headquarters with my friend Rufe and Sam and Kevin and a lot of people, you know, and we would just eat there and we would eat really unhealthily. And so at the end when we won, their sort of thank you gift to me was a framed and signed menu from Wildberry because we had just overeaten there
for you know, throughout the campaign. And so then my lovely daughter Eleanor at the time, said right after that, she said, Daddy, you have a really cozy tummy, and she sort of pushes at my belly and I was like, oh gross. It was like a lovely way of I mean, you could frame it differently and it was kind of
like controlled spoilage of weight gain and cozy tummy. And then I thought, okay, I need to really lose weight, so I did, which I had never really done a diet or anything like that before, but then I did and that worked.
So and so from Sweden to the wild Berry, back to.
London and then to London and then the food was great again thanks to you, and the food was.
Great at Winfield House. Did you did you influence them? Did you talk about the kind of food as an American ambassador that you wanted to serve at Windfield House?
Well, I remember I had a phone call with my predecessor because there are certain questions you sort of can't ask the State Department, or you don't feel comfortable, sort of petty householdie things you didn't want to really bother them with. And I said, well, look, if it's a Saturday morning and I just want to wake up early and make the kids pancakes, and you know, do I do that in the upstairs little kitchen? Ad do I do it in the big kitchen downstairs? That kind of thing?
And he laughed and he's like, you are never going to set foot in that kitchen. And I knew that he was, you know, he wasn't into cooking. And I was like, no, no, no, you don't understand, Like I'm into that thing. I certainly will, but he was more right than wrong in the sense that there was a wonderful team there who did it. I mean I did go in. I never really cooked there, you know. I would say, can we try this? And they were amazing, but I didn't really do And I really miss cooking because that
was to the earlier point about my father. I mean, it was a way I tried to show love to my kids and I was gone a lot, you know, out every night, and was sensitive and they picked up on that because they're smart and perceptive, and so I thought, oh, well, at least I can cook and try to show, you know, if I'm missing their games or whatever, at least I can cook. But I kind of couldn't, so that was too bad.
But I remember the food was very good there. You're going to the residence with you and Brooke was always it was warm, and it was it was also there was a formality, which we wanted. We wanted that formality. I always felt that I liked that expectation of going to the residents of the American Ambassador. But we had fun, you know, and you made being an ambassador of fun and you made us feel welcome. And I can remember the meals, and I can remember you taking me into
the kitchen to meet the cooks. And you know, my grandchildren can remember the chocolate fountain. You know, Oh my god, I did have a You did bring something very very important to the food when filled out.
Well, that team was amazing and I'm glad that worked. I mean, I remember, you know how everyone loves like sea salt chocolate, and there's just that sort of salty sweet magic or popcorn with you know, milk doudgs in it or whatever. And so I felt that the formality of the place was so obviously formal and kind of intimidating to people, and so we would have fun doing the sort of fancy silver trays, except with paps blue
ribbon cans on them, you know. So it's just sort of like sweet and salty, formal, informal, and trying to mash that stuff up I thought was a way to not be overly informal, but also sort of lighten up a little bit.
And now you know, you've left us and London is a sadder place, and you're in Kentucky. But what about food in Kentucky? What about food? And Louville?
We have an amazing food scene here in Louisville. And I don't know that this is true, but when I moved here, I was told that there is something like more restaurants per capita here than you know, let's say, any other American city. And yeah, it's great food. And then the joke is, if you come here, I mean, people will be like everything has bacon in it. And our mutual friend James, when he came was joking, and as a Jewish guy, he was sort of like, oh
my gosh, is there anything not with bacon? And then at this restaurant they had bacon ice cream, which you know, proved his point. And I was like, no, not everything has and I was like, oh, well, yes they do. But I'm cooking as we speak, Ruthie, what do you make it? I am doing a slow cooker. I don't want to. Don't judge me, but I am making doctor pepper slow cooker pulled pork shoulder. It's sort of like cherry coke. But the root flavor I am told is
actually prune. Now, for reasons that are obvious to everybody, they don't market it as prune soda because that wouldn't work. But it's sort of like cherry coke kind of thing. So I've never done this before. I am trying it and my hope is that it'll be delicious. But we'll see.
You know, you've written a book, The Power of Giving Way Power. And when you were writing it, did you have a way of working and eating? Is that change the way you ate and worked? How did you write? And tell us also about the book?
So the Power of Giving Away Power, How the best Leaders learned to let go is in a nutshell about the lost habits of interdependence. And I talk about two different ways of thinking about power. One I call the pyramid top down, in, out, up, down, even bottom up, and that we get trapped in that pyramid, and that there is an alternative to that. And I call it the constellation, a way of looking at yourself and those around you. You're your own self, You're a star and
everyone around you is a star. And what kind of combinations can you make to make things more useful and more powerful than you ever could all by yourself. It actually comes from the American logo, which you can see on the back of a US one dollar bill. There's that funny pyramid with the mini little pyramid with the all singeye on top, and then there's the other side, the US Seal, and it's got the eagle that everyone remembers the shield. But right above the eagles head is
this thing they called the constellation. And this was supposed to be the crest and the overall essence of the whole thing, and it's called the radiant constellation. And underneath that radian constellation is where our famous national motto goes, epluribus unam from many one and you could say, hey, from many bricks one pyramid. I think that would be an incredibly depressing world, and too often we act that way. But it's supposed to be from many stars, one constellation.
And that's how you can get unity without demanding uniformity. You can get all the energy from diversity without succumbing to division if we choose to think of ourselves and those around us as stars in a constellation. And so when I walk into the River cafe, I see this constellation of talented people and of the customers eating there. It's the opposite of hierarchical and the way you run
that place. So it's an inspired constellation to me, as the process of writing it, eating was kind of the reward. I mean, I basically write all morning and just drink a lot of coffee and write and eat. At the end, I got my days writing down and then I could go enjoy something to eat. And I'm trying to kind of stick with that.
When we talk about food and children and family, we talk about being together, the influence of food, the connection through food, and I think my memory is being together in Tuscany with your children and making zucchini flowers and making believes and cooking together. We hadn't seen each other for a few months. You'd been in the United States, I'd been here. We've all been doing what we did.
And I think the first thing you arrived at about four o'clock in the afternoon at five and said we're starving. You'd come, I think from Sardinia, and it was just in immediacy, and also it was for me a way of being with your children in the kitchen and doing
something together, connecting. So I think if food is a connection and it's a way of expressing our love, it is also a comfort, yes, And so we when we're hungry, we when we want to show off, we eat, when we want to have a laugh, but sometimes we eat for comfort. So is there a food that you turn to for comfort?
I do, and it's probably it's back to when I was eleven and this was the other thing I would cook for the grown ups when they came on Friday night, and it was harder for me, and I still it is probably my number one comfort food, and it is chicken parmesan. I mean sort of New England, you know, not fancy. I mean, you know, breaded, fried and then put in the oven. And I just love that. So that's what I will eat if someone else will cook it for me, or I will make it myself.
Thank you, Matthew.
Thank you.
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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.