Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adami's Studios.
For years, I've wanted to sit at his table and talk to Nick Allett, one of our most favorite regulars at the River Cafe, who when he walks in, absolutely lights up the restaurant with his deep voice and his
deep warmth. I imagine we would talk about the musicals he's produced, Lay Miss Katz, Carousel, Hamilton, but he's doing now, his political battle to save theaters during the pandemic, and the great love he had for his best friend, the late brilliant restaurant critic Adrian gil and of course about the food he's going to order. But then I remember the line in the classic movie Casablanca when Ingrid Bergmann asked the manager of the Cafe American for Rick, her
long ago lover Humphrey Bogart, to join her. Madam. He responds, Rick never sits with the customers, never the same with me. So I say hello and then leave to have whoever it is, be with the person they're dining with. But today Nick all it is not a guest in the River Cafe, but a guest on Ruthie's Table four. And we are here to talk. He's just come from the kitchen where he baked a lemon tart with the pastry chefs.
He'll tell us how he made it, and then we will discuss the food he grew up with when he cooks at home, theater and food, food and friendship. I think even Rick would approve and appreciate how lucky I am to have Nick with me a man I adore and for a while online.
Ruthie, what a joy to be here, thank you. So I've just come from making the River Cafe lemon tart. So this is how you do it. You take one quantity of sweet pastry baked, then for the filling you take a finely grated zest and juice of seven lemons. And that is quite a sure in itself. If you've got a soux chef in your kitchen, you can do that work for you. That makes life much much better. And indeed I once had Adrian Anthony Gill as my shoe chef grating the lemons for me. Not very well.
I hastened to adding three fifty grams of caster sugar, six whole eggs, nine egg yolks, three hundred grams of unsalted butter, which are softened. You preheat the grill to high, and then you make your filling. Put all of the ingredients except the eggs in a large salcepan over a very low heat, stirring until dissolved. Combine the mixture with the eggs, return to the salcepan, and cook on a low heat until thick. That getting it together so it
doesn't curdle is a real, real school. You have to do it very, very slowly.
My name's got a tubs on the head, Pastry Chepherd there of a cafe, so we're nearly there. So if I had a spoon, it would definitely be coating the back of a spoon. Right now, you can kind of see it round the edge starting to tick again.
When it says that and you draw a line through it, should it hold completely.
Orders well with this in particular, because we're about to put it under the grill. If you think about it, the grill's going to add a whole another layer of heat, so you don't What you really want to do with the lemon curd before it goes into the tart filling is actually do it slightly under have it quite a have be quite a thin curd, so that again we're very particular about the spots that we get under the grill. Well, you can really tell when something's been overcooked. The spots
are absolutely tiny. As with something that's been perfectly cooked. It looks much more like a sort of giraffe print, and you want that kind of beautiful mouffling over the whole thing. We grate the pastry into the tartshell and then we press it around the edges, and then we go around with a knife, and then our trick is we freeze.
The top shells.
We have a whole stack once it's made, and then we can throw it in the oven without bacon beans and it doesn't side stone shrink, so very much like a pizza. We're just going to slowly rotate. It doesn't matter if there's a slight wobble to it at this point, because it will will eventually settle.
What ideally is the temperature you serve.
Then if you.
Put it in the fridge, the pastry goes sob You want it to be lovely and Chris.
How beautiful will there? You go?
Choose to eat it for lunch, might be.
Or just in one slice. Yeah, I know, It's definitely one of my favorite puddings. Here.
As you say that you choose a dessert, do you like.
I love cooking. I came to cooking quite late.
Well.
Growing up, food was never a big part of my life. I come from an army background. My mother was a very competent cook, but when living on army bases all over the world, in Germany, in Hong Kong and Australia. We didn't live in England until I was in my teens, and really the ingredients that she had available to her were those available from the NAFI, you know, the army store.
She wouldn't go into the local Germany.
No, you were discouraged basically from leaving the base. This was sort of late fifties, early sixties, so post war there wasn't that much integration still in the NATO bases, more so when we moved to Australia. But again, we had a year or two in Hong Kong when I was quite young, and it tended to be what you could get from the shop that was available. I mean, we never left the bases. I went to school, went
to army schools or my friends were local. When I told my friends I'd lived in Germany for I think ten out of the first fifteen years of my life. They said, do you speak fluent German? Not one word. You just didn't integrate. So for her with a bit.
Of mature had she had a career at all.
She married quite young. She married my father quite young, and actually being an army officer's wife is a career because you're responsible for so much hr and looking after the army officers wives and organizing charity drives and things like that. That was pretty full on.
Was your father on the base he.
Was, No. He was away a lot of the time. He was away on maneuvers. He was a cavalry officer, which didn't mean he read a halls. It meant he drove tanks and things like that, and he was away a lot for exercises.
So did Jim, who cooked in the house.
My mother cooked. It never occurred to me to actually offer to help. I wasn't that interested that family. Myself and two sisters, and you are the I'm the eldest, So our relationship with food was not one of It was not indifference, but it wasn't a key part of my life. I used to years and years and years later, more recently, up until she died, I used to take my mother to really lovely restaurants and she's going down and it's really lovely, but I mean it's awful lot
of money. We could be doing better things like going to the theater, and well we can do that as well.
Yeah, So would you sit down for family meals every we did after school? You'd come home and sit down to the family suffer.
We did by your mother and I would watch I'd watch her, you know, prepare you have to do a lot of entertaining as an army I do. You have to do the other officers wives and visiting offices and things like that. As you move up through the ranks, you then start to get staff. And by the time that my father died in ninety sixty nine, he was a commanding officer at a large base in Dorset and we had I think a permanent chef and two or three other staff.
So and then what did that change the food in the house?
Not really, it was sort of pretty simple. Staff. The army didn't necessarily engage in Courdunbleau Andtyle sixties. This was late sixties, mid to late sixties on my relationship with food, As I say, it was one of not particular interest. Unfortunately it changed quite radically because my father tragically died in a helicopter crash when I was fifteen, and my
younger sister abroad. No he was He was killed in a helicopter, was a passenger being flown to a conference on the other side of England, and to this day no one really knows what happens there was it was raised in the house and there was an investigation, but essentially a lot of helicopters were coming in and the helicopter flying in in front of his when it took off, instead of going out at an angle of forty five degrees, went straight up into the air, straight into his helicopter coming down.
And both helicopters were everybody, All.
Three, the two pilots and my father were both killed and there was an extraordinary There were two young soldiers watching from a canteen and they saw these I saw the helicopters come down. I was reading about it recently, and they ran. They jumped through the windows of the canteen and ran and tried to pull the bodies out of the helicopters, and they both got very badly burned, and they both got decorations for doing it, but sadly it was too late.
It was too late, and you were fifteen. And that did you then leave the military?
Well, yes, the army are the army a wonderful family to be part of. It's rather like the theater. Actually is a very close community. But they're also very very practical, and if you lose the commanding officer of a base, of a big base, then you have to replace him quite quickly. So within a couple of weeks of his death, we were dispatched as it were, and picked up and my mother had to find somewhere else to live. They
didn't range alternative accommodation. We end up living in a little cottage on a friend's farm nearby.
And also did you go to boarding school?
I did. I went to boarding school from a quite a young age, and it was traditional to send boys away at eight. But then I had a wonderful break and that we were shipped to Australia. This is obviously while he was still alive, and they gave me the choice of staying in English boarding school or going to Australia. Not our choice to make everything. So I had a wonderful time.
In Australia to explore. Were you allowed?
Oh yeah, I was at a weekly boarding place where you could either go home at weekends or stay. But if you stayed, the boys that stayed and I chose to would go on these incredible expeditions up into the mountains and camping in the bush and learning to surf and things like that. It was everything you would expect the Australian outdoor life for a young person to be.
I wonder if the Australian boarding schools was any different from British.
It was very neat, as you can imagine. We've made a lot of friends there and one of our closest friends was a sheep farmer. So my mother insisted on rescuing a lamb that had lost its mother that they were going to kill, and she said, no, you can't do that. Let me take it home. And we lived in the middle of a little town called Queenscliffe. And the farmer said you can't, you can't die actually if I'm with you. But she did, and we reared it in our garden and it would and it behaved like
a dog. My mother would take it shopping with her on the end of a lead and you could hear the local star. Here she comes, here's Mary. He's marry with a little lamb, even though he name is Shirley. So no, no, that was a very joyful, very joyful part of my life.
Did you were you fussy about food?
I wasn't. Later in life, after my father died, unfortunately, both my sisters contracted anorexianaboza, which was an illness in nineteen sixty nine that nobody.
Understood in nineteen ninety nine.
But then two girls, twelve and nine, they both they boasted. They never they didn't know people that young who had had it, and they didn't know any two people in the same family. So that was really the only time in my life where food became a threat. Yeah, meal times were a challenge, and I can't imagine it because I'm very greedy and I love food. But my trying to get my sisters to explain, they said, if you imagine putting a bucket of slugs in front of you,
that's what it's like. It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's sweet or savory. And of course they've become incredibly cunning and they hide things and they drink lots of water. And I mean how my mother coped. I don't know.
That is a food trauma in our life with your father's death, and then reacting with further, well.
She dealt with it. She eventually she was told we eventually we find somebody who who had an idea about how to cure it, because we tried everything from faith healers to things called the box, and eventually she found a man in Westminster who said, look, I think I know how to do this, but you cannot have them together. So one child was in one hospital and one was in another, and my mother sort of drove between the two.
And her response to try and get me out of that rather toxic atmosphere was basically to send me away back to Australia, which is what I did by yourself. Yeah wow, Oh I was seventeen, you know, I was old enough. I just was just leaving school. I was going on a gap here, but I'd never been away on my own. And the lovely thing about Australia then, and this is sixty nine seventy seventy one, they were
getting this sort of hippie genre. Two or three years after the England so I was too young to really book a hippie in the UK, but I was perfectly so I hit the hippie trail Ruthie and I lived well. I lived, I traveled all over, I went to I was there at the creation of this extraordinary center in Australia which is still there. It was a festival that's supposed to start last a week and it's still there forty years later. It's called Nimbin and it's the center
of Australia counterculture. It's quite near Barren Bay, which is much more famous. And it was a beautiful, beautiful experience. They painted the whole town in rainbow colors and the locals integrated, and an invasion of Australian hippies, and in fact people from all over the world came.
And was music.
There was some music, people like Donovan turned up and Dollar Brand, but it was more kind of gathering together of faith. And I joined the Radha Krishna temple for a while. Did you well, only because if you chanted for them, they'd feed you at the end of the day.
What did they feed you back of food?
No, exactly. It was beautiful sort of sweet rice with coconuts and sweet vegetables, all serving a banana leaf. Then I temporarily joined the Divine Light Mission, which gets for the food, No, not for the food that one, mainly for the girls who were very very girls. But so I tried those different things, and very sadly eventually moved on. You know, I could have stayed there probably and remained the rest of my life.
Yeah, so that was what was.
That was by now I sort of seventy one. But then for a year I lived almost exclusively on brown rice and vegetables because I was hitchhiking all over the country and through the desert in particular. You had to eat what you could carry because they weren't shops and cafes along the way. And a hippie doctor told me that brown rice was a cure all for everything.
Yeah, I remember the macrobiotics. Mac there was a place in London when I came.
Yes, that's right, there's something in it. Because I cut my foot on a coral reef, and coral, as you know, is organic and it's very very toxic, and my foot sold up like a balloon and it started to climb up my leg and again we were miles.
From a proper doctor that's very dangerous.
Yeah, and he said, look live on brown rice for a couple of weeks, which I mean didn't cure me, but it seemed to stop spreading anyway. I then found a doctor who gave me a large shot of penicillin the regular food. But now I didn't really eat regularly into a regular food as we would know it until I came back, until I came back to England and went to university.
And so you never did you become a vegetarian?
Well, I was vegetarian, not out of a choice, certainess, and it didn't really bother me. Again, I wasn't really focused on food, and it wasn't until I dropped out of university with a loud report I shouldn't I shouldn't have gone there in the first place. I went to Exeter left after well, I left after it. I like to say my letter to them resigning cross for theirs in the post, saying I think you're better off elsewhere.
I think mine hopefully got there a beat before. But they had a theatre on the campus there called the North Theater, and we did a lot of very good work there. I just knocked on the door. No, I never did I acted a lot at school. I went to Charterhouse in English standard public school, and I had a very very inspirational teacher who I remember to this day called David Summerscale, who loved the theater and he directed plays. And I stopped doing anything else. I stopped
doing sport, I stopped playing musical instruments. I just wanted to thirteen to eighteen to say. And when I was leaving, and to this day I can picture the conversation, he said to me. Look, just before you go, I'm going to ask you something. He said, you want to act, don't you? And I said, yes, I do, and he said, forgive me, but you're not good enough. Oh wow, bang arrow to the heart. But he said, look, you're quite bright,
you get on with people. There are many other jobs in the theater that you could probably do quite well, and why don't you give it a go? And it was the best piece of advice probably I've ever had. I've got lots and lots and lots of actor friends. And of course, no matter how good you are, it's an insecure profession. And I've been very lucky in the almost fifty years I've worked in the theater, never had a day out of work and worked with the most
extraordinary people, had the most wonderful time. So it was good. It was good and sound advice.
How do you see the parallel of restaurants in the theater.
First and foremost, I love restaurants because it's an extraordinary convivial experience. It's about being in large groups of people. I would be hopeless on my own on a desert island. I love being in crowds I get at Glastonbury. I love football, I love sitting in a theater more than anything, and I love being in a big, crowded restaurant. There's something chilling about going into a restaurant finding you're the only person there. And it's the same in the theater.
You know, if you have anything less than the full house,
you feel that you haven't really succeeded. And the other I would say the big similarity is that by and large, with small variations, you're serving the same thing every night, and we are doing the same thing in terms of presenting a play or a musical, but the audience react in different ways, and you'll get a night when it's absolutely buzzing and jumping, and then for some reason you'll get another night were you think they're not getting this,
they're not. And it may be the same with the crowd of people where you've got someone who's tired or picky or didn't like this, or you know, was dragged out to a restaurant by their other half who they didn't really want to go, and you can sense the vibe, which is why you know the difference between what you do and what I do is you're there nearly every night and you're working in the room. I mean, you know,
we are our great mutual friend Jeremy King. You know, watching him work in his restaurants is an art, and watching you, as you say, you can't spend too long at each table, but you spend just enough time to sprinkle a little bit of fairy dust. Whereas we can't actually do that. I can't walk through my audience going come on, cheer up, this is a really good bit coming up. But what you can do is you can go backstage at the mental and go, hey, guys, you
know you need some kick some butt here. You've got to raise your game a little bit.
And you can and you do that.
All you have to do because I mean the very very big difference between now and when I start in the theater is the length of run for successful shows. I mean I came into London. That's really when my career properly started. I'd run small regional theaters in the seventies in Liverpool and Northampton and places, but I happened luckily enough to come to London in nineteen eighty one when Kat started, and that was the beginning of the
extraordinary eighties decade where so much change was enacted. It was, you know, love or hate Margaret Thatcher. There was massive change that came out of that, and culturally it was a really exciting time, you.
Know it was. And for restaurants, yeah, yeah, no, exact same time exactly. This is going on. Jereby started the IVY and.
My first real experience of being a regular anywhere was when Jeremy was matred at Joe Allen.
Actually he said that to me this morning, that he met you at Joel What year was that that?
There was nineteen eighty one.
And did you when you say regularly were.
Well, we would go. Well, the thing is, you know, you're working in the theater. Your social life doesn't really start until the end of the curtain. So at about ten thirty, every single life a trot down to Joe Allen's.
I asked that the actors. I asked that a very You know, the actors, when do they before the theater, during the theater, after the theater? And of course some people Emily blunt ate the whole time. Yeah, she was really adorable. She would say that she'd have a hamburger before, then something in the intermission, and something at the end. Judy Dench, everybody had a different way. She'd have a snack. But most of the people that I know in theater
are friends of mine who in a place. They meet me after the play and we'll go out and need Is that right? Why is that?
It's? I think really because they are then suddenly off duty, they can relax. You can't help but keep your performance in the back of your head beforehand. You know what's going to happen to night. Am I going to be all right? Looking after yourself? You know, you need to really look after yourself. I always remember Jonathan Price is
a very good friend. When he stopped temporarily being a great classical actor and became a musical actor when he did Miss Sagon for US, and he did Desert Island discs and he talked to Sue Lawley and she said, tell me, what's the difference between being a classical actor and a musical actor. And he said, rashly, being a musical actor is a doddle compared to being a classical actor.
And the following week he lost his voice, and he lost his voice for quite a long time, and he said it was the most incredible lesson to learn that as a singer, you really have to look after yourself. And I watched him because he's done a lot of shows for us and talking to people like Martine McCutcheon and things like that, and he said, look, you have to learn that your voice is you know, it's responsible for everything as far as the audience is concerned. And
therefore you don't talk. You know, you wake up in the morning, you do not talk to anyone until lunchtime.
And so that goes back to eating and about food, about how you take care of your body. Is that what you're saying an actor.
So well, the thing is acting, by and large, is a very physical thing. I mean, we've talked about singers looking after their voices, dancers looking out for their bodies. I mean I noticed through the year that I was the theater manager at the New London where Cats was on, be in there every night watching And there were three artists in that one year who worked out for an
hour before every single performance an hour. One was Wayne Sleep, the other was Bonnie Langford, and the third was a very very beautiful girl who went to America and became a big star call for Nola Hughes. And they were the only three who rigorously worked out. They were the only three who did not miss a performance. It's a real, real responsibility. But going back to Joe Allenson afterwards, of course, Jeremy then went on and you know, as we all started to do a bit better, you.
Would go there, what would be your day?
I would well, until I really settled into London, because I in the Provinces, you tend to do everything and you're responsible for everything. I would never do less than a twelve or fourteen hour day in the Provinces. So I started to do this in London until people said, look, this is crazy. You need to actually start coming in a bit later. So I had a nice little flat in Kensington and I'd walk in and my day would be talking to the theater staff, getting to know, you know,
looking at the theater bookings. This was the early days of theater bookings where everything was manual. You know, we didn't take credit cards, we didn't do phone bookings. It was all checks or cash, and you know, you talk to the box office. Cues for these big hits would go to snake around the block for hours. People would would queue. It was an extraordinary time and we were
all learning on our feet then. And then, of course there was a lot of corruption in ticket selling because ticket tabs would buy tickets and resell them at huge prices and double cell so you'd have the very difficult task every night of actually facing up to people and going, look, I'm terribly sorry, but your tickets are either forgeries or they've been double booked, you know, and this is for a show that they may have waited a year to see.
But I mean, that time was incredible because you know, I was a boyfriend the Provinces, nearly in the army, and every single person I'd ever wanted to meet my life was coming through Cats, whether it be the entire orld family. I mean, I watched Charles and Diana dancing around my office just after they were married, you know, and watching her drop into this perfect split. He said, you know, how do these dancers do that? She'd let me share you, darling, literally dropped into a perfect split.
But the thing about the restaurants and the theater food there is that they're both extreme. Think it's extremely collaborative jobs. So if you don't chop the par so, you can't make the sauce, And if you don't probably paint the set, you can't you know, put on the play. If you don't remember your lines, your fellow actors, you know, have a problem. Do you think there is a collaboration.
I think there's a very, very relarity. It's absolutely right. I mean, theater is an enormously collaborative venture. And the great thing is, you know, you go and see a
big musical at say the theater Aldery Lane. When we did Miss Saigon, there were two hundred people involved in getting that show on, whether it be the lady selling the ice creams, the backstage us share, the person pulling the ropes, the actors, the lighting technicians are SIGND technicians, and then you know, going all the way back to the creators of the show be the authors. And in musicals it's even more so because you have an added
layer of responsibility. You have orchestrators, you have members of the band, you have choreographers, you have assistant choreographers, armies and people who look after it, all of whom are working to that specific moment, which is curtain up at seven thirty.
Yeah, curtain up at seven thirty. That's we have a curtain up at seventh. Theory and the flooras and you know Hoover and the as I said, the chef's aprins and.
You get into a huddle beforehand, get into the huddle.
Then we go through and then and then the same and then nobody eats before you know, you just don't really want to eat. If you're about to cook, you have a drink. But then, did you do work in restaurants, would it always be kind of at the end of the meal you'd just go and relax, or would you with Cameron or your other colleagues.
And it was very well, you were always you were sort of always on the job. As you know, I mean, theater is the theater is full of gossip when exchanging information and stuff, and you know, in the days before social media, happy days before social media. That's how you
got your information. And you walk into someone like Joe Allen's and there'd be you know, Wayne Sleep on a table over there, and there'd be Trevor Nunn with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and there would be someone from the National Theater, and there would be as always Princess Margaret in the corner, and so you'd move from the table hopping that went on. It was sort of became rather
a joke. And Jeremy had that wonderful pianist. He'd sit there and you know, you would suddenly notice seamlessly as you walked in, you walked in down those steps into that famous seller and he'd see you coming and very sudden he realized he's playing someone from Cats or The Miss or one of those teens that that you did. So yes, I mean restaurants were always the good button.
What what about another cities? When you were on Broadway? Would you go to Sardis? I grew up thinking that the theater district, wass wasn't it was?
And that's where you traditionally had your first night parties. So our first that I opened over there was Cats and we had a massive first night party in I can't remember the hotel, but I always remember they had police forces in the foyer of the theater and they had trucks outside with ice full of champagne, and everyone
who came out. It was the most extraordinary thing. We then did Oliver on a slightly smaller scale and went to Sardi's and had a traditional Broadway opening at Sardi's, and I took the director across the room to meet our producer and wonderful uncle James Niedlando recently died, and I said, come on, we should go and chat to Jimmy, our producer. And as we got there, an aid of Jimmy's came over, leaned over and said, the New York Times is out. It's a load of shit.
Yeah, And that's.
Like everyone got up and left. Apart from the Brits. We were all sitting there going what just happened? What just happened? And indeed The New York Times was out and it was a terrible review.
It's about to say, you must have known it's going to be a hit.
Well, the audiences were, but at that time the New York Times had that they could close the show, close the show, and they did. We battled on, we spent money on television. Four weeks later we were gone.
Somebody else told me that story about that if you were at a party, the after party of a play, waiting for the review, then everybody would just go. It was it was just they would just you just leap.
It was very very strong. Yeah, because the papers would hit the streets about halpus leven midnight, you might might might get a tip off if the critic was friends with the publicist. So occasionally, you know, led whispering Cameron's ear, Lemmy's is going to be okay nowadays that you don't have that kind of romantic The first night is more about social media and TV and stuff, and the critics
have all been in the week before. They don't come on the first night anymore, And I think, to be honest, that's the reflection of the fact their role is not as important as it once. Yeah, you know, I fear for theater criticism just like I fear for food criticism. You see, the great restaurant critics are sort of slipping.
Away talking about a restaurant critic talking about a restaurant, talk about the restaurant critic when we had the dinner at the River Cafe to celebrate Adrian girl to launch the bursary.
It was the Sunday Times Prize for an aspiring food writer and they could write about food or a restaurant they've had, and it was for someone who never been published before.
I in my opening little speech, I read the review that he wrote about the River Cafe, which was pretty damn very combating first, but then he focused on the Nemesis. Do you remember that? And how difficult it was to make? It was so Adrian and we just, you know, we loved mister and when he came into the restaurant with Nikola, it was just he was one of a kind and he was your closest friend.
He was, I think generally was my closest male friend. We had a pretty difficult beginn because I met him at a very very smart party and the girl I was with at the time, who remains a very dear friend, had misread the invitation and I turned up in full Venetian puff trousers, puff sleeves, great comedian at lastin.
Mile costume party.
It was for Viennese, not Venetians. Everyone else was entails and I was on the same table as Adrian, and I hadn't met him before I knew who he was. He was going through that rather affected stage of wearing a monocle, and he looked at me and said, one of us has got a strange idea of geography, dear, and I don't think it's meat anyway. I rang him the next day and said, you're a bastard for making
me feel so uncomfortable. Said let me take it out to lunch, and we did, and we became very very good friends, and I loved going out to eat with him.
Like with a food critic, quite daunting.
In the case of Aid. Well, first of all, there was that thing, of course, he could never go as a girl. The bookings were always in the name of mister Ox, mister Cambridge. Yeah, so you'd arrive and you say table for for mister Cambridge, and you see the colored rain from the matre d's cheeks. We'd sit down and look. He knew enormous. He was, as you know, a very good cook himself. I mean I used to read his cookery column in Tatler and it was hysterical.
He'd go for ham and peace suit, get some ham, get some peace, cook it, you know, that sort of thing. But he was a very good He was a very good cook, and he had enormous respect for restaurants, restauranteurs, and for particularly for front of house staff. He was very He admired waiters a lot, but they had to know their stuff. And why it was daunting was he would challenge you just to see how much you knew
if you had been charged a lot of money. So he'd go, so, tell me about the venison and they'd go, well, it's from a deer, sir, yes, yes, I knew that what part of the deer? And he'd go either way. It would either go, well, you know, it's a haunch or bank whatever it is, or they'd go I'll just go and find out then come back and say, okay, so tell me where's the deer from and they go, well, Highlands, new forest. And he was testing them.
I mean, he's really testing testing the restaurant because that's the job of the exactly. That's one of the things we do with the River Cafe, the ideas that everyone participates in the prepping of the food and so if you are serving not everything, but if you're serving a sal severity you know, because you chopped the parson, and you wash the capers and you clean the anchovies. There's a kind of involvement and then the importance of knowing how something has cooked. So he tested the restaurant.
He tested them, and then, as you know, he could be absolutely excoriating if he didn't like the food. And I've met a number of restauranteurs since who knew. I knew him and said, did you know your friend? You know, bankrupted me. And because I think he was one of the very very few critics who could still had that power. He was rather like the New York Times, and it's fair, Yeah, I think so. If you're going to be paying a lot of money, then you know your standards should be exacting.
But when he loved you as he loved you, and he loved Jeremy, and he loved Andrea at Reva, you know, he had his favorites, the places he would always go back to.
Did he tell you what to order?
He would try and make sure we all had something different. He'd go, well, that's a bit boring if we do that, And then if we did, he then eat off each of our places. Yeah, yeah, And what was interesting he would take notes. No, he didn't. He'd never take notes because, as you knew, he was chronically dyslexic and he couldn't spell anything anyway. He would always at the end of the evening ask for a copy of the menu to take away, and that was his aide memoir. But we
went to incredible places. I mean, you know, at the time of the great gastronomic explosion we had, we went to Heston Rumentals for the first time together and he and Heston became very good friends. And we went to Favigan in Sweden, and we went to all bullies, oh we did, and Noma pop ups and things, and when it was a real it was exciting going to the theater internationally, sorry, into a restaurants the same thing, to
the Oh yeah. He was my regular first night date, and in fact, quite more often than not he would either bring Flora, his wonderful daughter, and I'd bring one of my sons and they too sit together an aide and I sit together. No, he was exactly he was asked.
In fact, I don't know if anyone knows this. He was asked to be the Sunday Times theater critic, and he said no, I can't possibly because I've got far too many good friends in the theater, and I wouldn't have any if because I did read a couple a couple of his theater reviews in The Boy they were singers. No, I miss him. I miss him every day. He was
literally someone I spoke to every day. And what was extraordinary about him, and you probably know this again, is is it was only after he died that I realized how many people he spoke to and where did he get the time to do, you know, to do that He never ever hung up on me. I've had, let's just say, I've had a lot of drama in my life over the years, in terms of losing close friends and losing members of my family and various problems and things like that. And I find it really difficult to cry.
But the only thing that I cry like a drain is music. Music is my kind of go to emotional release. It's a wonderfully cathartic thing and it can be a beautiful piece of classical music or it can be a great bit of rock and roll. And I told Bono, who's a regular clan of yours, I know that for
one reason or another, I don't know why. When my first son Tom was born thirty five years ago, I came back at four o'clock in the morning from the hospital, dizzy and confused, and I pulled myself a large class of Scotch and danced to his song bad. So after that that became a tradition. So I got four sons and I danced so bad for every one of them.
When do you go to Glastonbury? Do you eat?
Yeah, but you don't eat well. It's very hard to eat well. I mean interestingly, there's a lovely local restaurant close to us because I live in the West Country most of the time in Bruton, called Out the Chapel, and Bruton has become a sort of new color in the West. Sip At the Chapel was the first and they had it's just changed hands and they have a pop up restaurant Glastonbury now and they came close to
getting the sort of chapel experience. But when you're catering for many hundreds of people, so no, it's not really about the food.
What about cooking at home?
Cooking at home? I love doing it, Yeah, because.
You described to me about cooking for your family and taking a lot of Asian food.
Well, yes, I love I mean both the very very important partners in my life. Neither of them could cook. So I sort of cooked to survive and I taught myself and then rather wonderfully, all four of my children have loved cooking. And in fact, my elder son Tom has just opened his first restaurant. Yeah, it's called Outcrops Social. It's a pop up restaurant in one eighty the strand, is it and it's Thai food, and they're giving him
three months to see if it goes. And I can say totally objectively, he'said the most incredible reviews and it's delicious.
Let's go. What's it called?
Then, out Crop Social? Yeah, I'll take you down in September do.
That, And so what do you cook it? Out?
So at home? Well, if we're there and it's Sunday and it's a great sort of traditional Sunday lunch, and then we will all do our bits and we all love quite spicy food. I love cooking Asian food. I love cooking Indian food in particular. I love grinding spices and preparing things like that. But it is a lot of work. But that's why it's good to have all your family around you so you can say to someone that you do.
This the collaboration. Yeah, and do you go out to restaurants?
Now I don't go out nearly as well. I tend to go out probably mill down in the West Country. And also because as I've sort of moved away from actively being involved in the West End on a daily basis, I'm not there as much. In the evening, still go and see the theater quite a lot. So I'll go out to places and.
You still go after yes, yeah, yeah.
I can't bring myself to really have a big, big nursery teas we call it at five or stays. But you know, again I've got the go to places like you know, the Ivy Club and things and that will stay open and again are very convivial. But I worked for many, many years with Camera Macintosh, who was an absolute food and a brilliant cook as well. He was someone else who really inspired me to cook, because we all would shut the office down in the early days.
You know, cats can run itself and they can run itself. And we go off to his place in Scotland and where you have the most incredible produce of seafood and things, and we'd all be given a job. And as far as he's say, it wasn't cooking unless or at least twenty people around their lunch table. So people come out of the hills and so that was fun learned. I learned a lot at his knee, as it were. So we'll always go together. But I mean, no, I mean the days of the high the high high high end
dining with Adrian, and it'd been fun. I think probably behind and.
Working in restaurant. Will you meet people from meetings?
Yeah, the business lunch is sort of past. Yeah, I mean in the early days, you know, I'd go off and meet our advertising agents and it would be you know, and he'd sit down and he goes this a two bottle lunch or one bottle lunch. And now it's I'll have a glass lunch, which is a shame in a way,
but probably we get we get more done. I honestly think it was more fun in the eighties and nineties for us than it is now because it's much more pressure, the challenges are much more, the margins are much lower. The good thing is the way we look after people has changed a lot, and you have to do that now, and as you should, and as we know, the actor strikes on at the moment about getting proper regging and that's going right through society. So the way we behave
has changed. But in terms of that feeling of real excitement of you know, I can't tell you what it was like opening they met it on Broadway, or Phantom on Broadway, and you know Psychone, which was a massively controversial production because of the casting.
And so I have a letter from you, but I don't remember where the correspondence, but it says I'll read it. I'm going to read your letter that you wrote me, Ah Darling. I had an emotional evening last night, the first night of Carousel. Adrian was one of my few friends who really enjoyed musicals, and even though we used to warble if I loved you from it, he never
actually seen the show. They announced a revival just as he got sick, and I made him promise to stay well enough to come to the first night with me. Of course that didn't happen, so I kept an empty seat next to me. I miss him badly, and we'll definitely know when I'm next seeing you. Much loved Nick, so I was wondering because I thought, you do have one of the most beautiful speaking voices that I know, and I was wondering if you might sing if I
Loved You, And here's the lyrics. I'll he should we have a go and I'll sing it with you a little bit. You know. I grew up on musical so fa. I lived in upstate New York. We'd go in the car and we'd drive down the throughway to New York and we would see the big ships, and then we'd see the SS France, and we'd see in the United States. Then we would go and have lunch, and then we would go to musical We'd go to by Fair Lady,
West Side Story. This is I guess I was, you know, sort of twelve, and so it was late early sixties, a late yea early sixties. And then we would go to Sam Goodie, a record storage, you know, Sam City, and we would buy the record and then we would drive up back to the country and we'd play the record over and over and over again. So I know the words basically every musical of that era, and so I know this song if I Loved You, So shall we try? It?
Is one of my favorites. I know the first two lines to more songs until then, so I'm going to cheat and read yeah, absolutely, I love you time and again.
I will try to say, oh, Ruthie, well, I'm gone wow to Adrian, to.
Bet, to carousel you and to love. So the singing gives you. Singing can give you comfort, and food can give you comfort. So my very very last question of talking and listening and singing is to ask you, if you have a food that you need not to eat when you're hungry, but to eat when you need comfort. What would that be in the gallat?
If I tell you, you'll be so appalled. No I won't, because it was the most delicious thing I've everything. I'm going to be down or depressed or hungry or wanna And it was actually a concocted recipe by a friend of mine who wrote it in a play and I read it I thought, I can't believe he's actually done this, but I'm going to try and put it together. And it's basically toast with peanut butter, very crispy bacon and cheese melted on top.
I'm that disgusted, I'm interested. It was I think food because the food that comforts has a story. Well, the next time you have one, call me.
Okay, well there when we go to my son's restaurant, was sneak home. Thank you very much, Thank you, Ruthie, thank you so much.
Thank you.
The River Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops and online. It has a for 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 Lookbook Recipes for Cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production
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