Ruthie's Table 4: Mike Bloomberg

Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.

A few years ago, Serpentine, a small museum in the center of Hyde Park, gave a party to celebrate its new chairman, Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. There must have been three hundred people in the pavilion and we listened to the Mayor say, when government can do everything, private philanthropy has to step in. Which is lucky enough

I would be happy there. Okay, serve six two tablespoons.

Oh you need to say linguini with fresh and dry.

We started that who's running this?

We both are.

Linguini with fresh and dried oregano. And since I have not had lunch yet. This is a perfect time to focus on it. The size of this is it serves six unless I eat two portions.

How do you do it?

Two tablespoons fresh oregano finally chopped, one tablespoon dried oregano crumbled.

Don't be obsessive.

Here twelve red cherry tomatoes, twelve yellow cherry tomatoes, one hundred milli eat is extra virgin olive oil, one tablespoon red wine vinegar, three hundred grams of linguini. I want me to tell you how to combine these things. Okay, Well, you mix the fresh and dried regano together step one. Step two, chop the tomatoes and combine with the olive oil, the red wine vinegar, sea salt, and black pepper. Three you set it aside to marinate, which means time to

Don't touch the plates. You need to have a hot plate, because the sauce isn't hot, it's tossing in.

Always do it that way. When I make a regano at home.

Always make it.

So tell me about my mother cooked everything in a pressure cooker or straight out of the can. Okay, my mother never saw a kitchen she liked.

Really. One time I did come home.

From boy Scout camp and I said the food was better at boy Scout camp than at home, And she said, why don't you go back?

Oh? Okay? And so what did you eat at home?

Then?

What would you have?

It was delmoni peas straight out of the can, cooked in the water that comes with the peas. It was brisket or chicken.

Oh, briscuit.

So she made briscit, Yeah, you know, in a pressure cooker or something.

I don't remember.

But the recipes that she used were good enough to get her to one hundred and two years in perfect health.

Yeah. And to give you an appreciation of food or did that come later? If you grew up with this food? What was it like?

Food was relatively plain. Most things that I see on her menu today, she wouldn't have known what they were, and certainly didn't serve them, but the food and the process brought us together. And there was my sister and I, sister two years younger, mother and father. Father worked as a bookkeeper, made six thousand dollars, the best year of his life.

But mind, what are we talking about.

He was born in five I was born in forty two, so this is let's say fifties, early fifties. And we had a rule, my mother's rule. We waited for my father to come home. And they didn't travel in those days, so it was always together. But we waited. We sat as a family six o'clockish. My sister and I set the table. My father helped in clearing the table and doing the dishes. My mother did the cooking and the dishes, and we sat around and my father had a procedure.

Would you be thinking about what you were going to say about your day?

But did you Yeah, you had to think about it because yeah, well, oh, here's a good rule for everybody. And if they followed this rule, the world would be a lot better place. Don't do anything that you'd be ashamed to tell your kids about when you went home at night. And if everybody followed that rule, we'd have a lot less problems.

Would you continue this conversation or every dinner that until you left home?

Maybe we missed it occasionally, I don't remember, but yes, Basically.

It also teaches you to listen, doesn't it. It teaches you how.

To defend yourself, teaches you how to speak to others.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because I have in the last few weeks, I've talked to Nancy Pelosi. I've talked to President Biden's sister who's just written a book about, Yeah, Val Biden. She worked in the campaign, and she's just written a book called Growing Up Biden. Because when his children, you know, his son and his wife were killed, she kind of moved in to take care of the two children and cook for them aged twenty six. But she said, you know, there is a lot of description from that

I have three grandkids, an eight year old boy who hits a golf ball almost as far as I Candiday JD. A seven and three quarter year old granddaughter who's learning Mandarin, and a ten week old grandson.

And do they have family meals the way you did with your parents or is it a different way?

Yeah?

I think so. I don't think it's quite as organized. And you know, today families come and go around the table. We do not have what I call the Norman Rockwell families anymore. Norman Rockwell used to paint the pictures on the cover of The Sad Evening Post was a seven posts and he one of his most famous pictures was a father, a mother, a boy and a younger daughter, the traditional family with a turkey in the middle or

There's too many people having to do two jobs or working night shifts.

And yeah, but society is different. You know.

We think that the zoom replaces the water cooler at work.

It does not.

And we think that families can come and go without serious conversations between parent and child, and parents are unwilling to who face difficult issues with their children confront them, help them, guide them. Is more of an attitude of Oh, education is responsibil is the responsibility of teachers. No, education

But I also think you invested in education, and I think that if we do invest in educating people who will be parents, then they will also be better better.

Well, if you want to solve the problems of poverty and crime and discriminate, those things can only be done if we work together.

If your father was born in nineteen oh five, where was your grandfather.

Born someplace in Eastern Europe, so they emigrated. He wasn't even sure where he came from.

Both your mother and your father's parents immigrated. They were immigrants.

My mother's parents were one generation earlier.

Yeah, And did they bring the culture of food that they grew up with? Do you think did they have Eastern I.

Don't remember any well, no, because keep in mind, my parents were born in America, so were.

Your grandparents around at all in your life.

Grandmother on one side, grandfather on the other. But in those days, coming from overseas, you tried to strip out and throw away all the culture, whether it's food or clothing, or religion or even names. We anglicized our names. Today it's the reverse. I'm a Dominican American, I'm an Italian American. In the olden days, you would say I'm an American. In the great migration waves in the twenties, it was become as American as you could possibly.

Melting.

The melting were talking about it.

Sometimes it was comical because they didn't really understand what they were doing though, or that they thought Americans were doing something they weren't. But it all worked out, and those were the days when America really added an enormous amount to its culture because it came from all around the world.

And the food culture of New York, you know, it is identified by Chinatown about.

Little absolutely an those Tokyo Chinatown is down to one street, and on either side of those streets there are other cultures that have movedthnicities that have moved in, and the Chinese population has spread themselves around the city or out in the suburbs without being interested in as being as close to others of the same ethnicity. There's still areas

And in terms of the culture food, when I've talked to a lot of people who are children of immigrants, it seems like the grandmother kept the food, you know, the mother assimilated and the children totally rejected.

And the children never speak the language. When they say they speak it, it's a joke. They don't really. America, somebody once said to me, is the death of foreign languages, and that's basically true. I don't think that the world understands how isolated America is. Something like two thirds of the members of Congress and the Senate don't have passports.

George Bushton only had a passport because his father was the ambassador to China. Isn't that right?

Think about that? And they vote on things that impact the world.

Very scary, scary.

What about when you moved from your mother's house and father's house?

Did you I went to college in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins. Then I went to Harvard Business School, and I lived in Cambridge, fifteen minutes away from where my mother was living. My father was deceased already, and if my mother hadn't lived close, I never would have gotten through because she had to type my papers. I can't type and I can't spell. For sure, much to her Americas.

To Harvard Business School, she was a type two papers. Yeah, did you eat on campus? Did you go to rest? Did you start?

They had had a lunch at Hall, We'd eat there. I certainly never money to go out to many restaurants.

Did your parents ever take you to a restaurant?

Yes, we went to Carol's Diner. In Medford Square and one restaurant in Malden. And I met somebody recently whose family owned Carol's Diner.

It was just one, was there, Yeah, the only diner.

Did we ever go to a fancy restaurant? Probably never, at least I certainly don't remember a miniscool number of times.

When you moved to New York?

Were you when I was?

When I got to New York, I cooked all my own meals for the first two or three meals three years.

What would you cook?

Baked beans and hot dogs and that sort of stuff. I remember on Sundays, I'd make French toast and read the newspapers and eat an enormous amount covered with maple sugar, syrup and salt.

Did you use cookbooks?

No? I did have some cookbooks.

I must have been interested, because I did have it, and this still on bookshelves someplace in my house now. But I'd look at the pictures and then they'll probably never get around to doing it. I didn't know there were two kinds of a regano.

We didn't know there was dried to Recordnow you crumble on fresh nuger, now you know.

But that's what restaurants before, and then now I go out virtually all the time. Do you so what girlfriend likes to cook? My attitude is there are twenty five thousand restaurants in New York City. Each one probably has twenty different things on the menu.

So yeah, that's an.

Awful lot of twenty five thousand. Double this fifty thousand plus a zero is five hundred thousand, five hundred thousand possibilities if I go out one if I stayed at home.

Did you always know that you wanted to have food creating a company like Bloomberg?

Well, when I started at Solomon Brothers. For the fifteen years I was there, we did not have food. They might have been coffee, but I don't even remember that. But when I started the company, it was in a one room the first day, two rooms a second day. I went and bought. The first day, I was the only one in the company. Second day I added three other people. But the one thing I did is I went and I bought a small refrigerator and a coffee pot. And it was from a department store which was on

I don't know.

I would take a bores Head, nottwork and Boston baked beans over anything.

Well, they said. When I just went outside and talked to two people, I went up to them, and you know, I said, okay, can I just ask you what you like about sitting here? And she said, well, we hardly knew each other. We're working in the same department I've just started, and sitting here in this space makes us want to get to know each other, talk talk about our work.

And think as any question. Does it work?

Yeah? No, they love it.

If the CEO walls her or himself off, what kind of a CEO? I don't want that person in my company. I have the same sized desk right in the middle of a bullpen like everybody else. And I came back from twelve years in city Hall, and I had had an agreement with New York City. I wouldn't go to the company or visit them or talk to them about it.

I was totally separate.

I get back and I'm talking to some people, and we had to rule no offices, no private offices. And there weren't any private offices when I came back, but there were a dozen people who had a desk right by a glassed in conference room where they had their family pictures in it. On Monday, they came back in the walls, the offices were gone. I had them taken down over the weekend, and then I realized that they had bigger desks as well. You know what happened the

But do you cook? Now?

When you're going to shaking baked chickens? The last thing I made. You get this stuff in a bag, you put the chicken in it and shake it and then broil it in a frying pan. And I put an extra amount of it in the bottom to soak up all the grease and burn it and that's what I eat. Not good for your waistline or your cholesterol, but it's really good for.

You like that. I mean, what about when you used to take your did you cook for.

But I don't remember cooking. Maybe I did, but I don't.

Remember taking a woman out.

We go out to a restaurant. You know.

Somebody told Sam that you went on the Staten Island ferry and ate hot dogs.

Yeah.

Yeah, And I used to go when I was a mayor. I spent a fifth of my time in each of the burrows, and I was on Staten Island a lot. And it's very different than the rest of the city. Not that there's a couple of fancy restaurants, but much more plain kind of food.

But I loved it.

And the people on Staten Island were as nice as you could possibly be. The smaller restaurants would serve wine out of paper cartons. You know, get the people that drink elegant wines these days, make fun of them, But I'll tell you they were as nice as people because you ever want to meet.

And the wine wasn't that bad either.

Do you drink wine?

I have not had a drink in two and a half years, and I keep saying I'll go back because I love white wine and red wine and beer. Yeah, I didn't drink a lot of hard liquor.

But I don't know. If I'll go back, I'll see.

And so what do you look for in a restaurant? Is it the food? Is it the atmosphere? Is it the food?

Food?

I could go to a divy place. I love diners where everything comes in five minutes, no matter what. They got fifty things in the menu. How they do that, I don't know, And it all tastes good and I'm not fancy. But if I go to a really great restaurant, I appreciate the food and I like it.

Can you tell something about a person when you go to a restaurant with them? Do you think can you tell what they're like?

Yeah?

I think if I if I had lunch of job interview at lunch, and if they had an alcohol drink at lunch, it would sort of turn me off a little bit because just wine's appropriate with dinner, not at lunch. Just in my mind, maybe that's the way I grew up or something.

Well, when you told me that when we had dinner last time, it was quite funny because you said, if I interviewed somebody and they ordered a glass of wine, I might not want to hire them. And Norman Foster said, if I interviewed somebody and they didn't order a glass of wine.

That's what makes a market right there. There's room for everybody.

But I think that I asked my children and they said, you know, they drink wine. They said, we would never have a glass of wine if we were being interviewed. Do you notice the way they treat a waiter or.

How people treat each other. So yeah, if they were snapped at the waiter and when nasty or something like that, I would notice that that would be.

A turnoff as mayor, as a political person, through and through as a owner of business. What do you feel about government and food? What is your you know, how do we look at the poverty, the insecurity.

Well, I think, you know, government has some responsibilities. One is, if people don't have enough food, they've got to find ways to get it to them, particularly children. I think government has a responsibility to make sure that the food that's sold in stores is not dangerous, and I do think they should warn against certain things and point out the calories. Two things that will really kill you are two biggest causes of death I think in America certainly

Yeah, yeah, and what about obesity, what did you do, Wes Mayor.

To, Well, you can't and I don't think you should stop people from eating, but we tried to have much healthier food in the schools and have warning labels.

And then you know me.

They used to joke about the big gulp when I wanted to have people get smaller cups of soda when they bought it. You could still buy as many as you want to drink as much money, but just a smaller cup. Chances are you wouldn't go back for the second cups.

You would drink less.

Mexico at that time was the most obese city and the smitty still is. I don't know, but they had a maximum size permitted in cups and it did help them. So I think government had some responsibilities. But in the end, you are responsible for yourself, and I don't have a problem if you're not very responsible, you just paid the penalty.

Your generosity and feeding and taking care of the people who work here is extraordinary. But there was a time when you had to close your office and food was not available. What did you do during the pandemic.

One of the things we did.

We all our employees got paid, but we also paid the companies that provide services. We use outside services, you know, electricians and plumbers and some cleaning and security functions. Companies would tend to outside and we made sure we continued to have those people paid while we were closed. So if you had worked here for another company, we didn't pay the company we paid, had them send the money directly to the employees.

And so food is something we do to encourage people to come to work, to feed them well, to feed our citizens well. It is also delicious, and it's exciting, and it is family. But it also is comfort, isn't it In times when we sort of think about what would make us feel better in ourselves. If you're down, if something has happened, you might turn to music for comfort, you might turn to art for comfort, but you also might.

Turn to food and use the word nibble nibble.

So I was going to ask you what would be your comfort food.

Well, I'm addicted to popcorn with probably too much salt. Although the doctor says I have love blood pressure. So he said, you don't have to stop cheese. Its are an American little biscuit, probably not good for you. But I could eat bags and cheese. It's love it, jelly beans, those kinds of things. I try not to eat too much fattening stuff, and I do watch my weight.

You look very fit.

The last couple of days I've eaten more than I should have.

Is that because you go out for I was.

Just where the food and stuck in front of you. Yeah, the conversation wasn't boring, but other people were eating, and so I went.

But I would.

I don't eat a lot of red meat anymore. I'd love a big American steak, but I wouldn't have one very often, maybe once every two months or something. Hamburgers and hot dogs, love those, but a lot of times I would have a piece of chicken or fish just because of lower calories.

Well, we're going to see each other on Thursday night where we celebrate you.

And I ask what the menu is.

Might be a surprise, but it might involve a lot of vegetables. And pasta to start, and then you know, I'm sort of slightly going off the idea of a big main course, and also we're not eating till nine, so I think we'll keep it kind of light. Do you like that idea?

Sure?

Do you have suggestions?

What would you like?

No, I'm going to have a hot talk in Hamburger before I leave. No, looking forward to it, and thank you. And then I'm getting a plane and going back to dealing with American cooking.

And then you'll come back to us.

Used to come here an awful lot stop during the virus starting again. I've been here three times in the last two months.

Well, London's a better city when you're here.

I'll come back, but I think London's a wonderful city. My former wife, who is still one of my best friends, is a brit father was in the RAF. She grew up around here. Mother came from York, father from the Isle of Wight, and I don't know that she cooked British food, but I do remember when we first when we got married, she had a hot water bottle. Yeah, only the breads, and I didn't know.

They did that.

Thank you very much, nice.

My pleasure. Thank you I'm looking forward to dinner.

I know I have a nice time. Thanks.

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