Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
When I told my friends that I would be recording a podcast with Rick Rubin this weekend, the responses were rapturous, what wow, incredible? And can I come? It was the same in the River Cafe the other day when Rick was there. Grown men trembled, women found excuses to hover near his table. Chefs could barely grill the sea bass. Rick Rubin is a decades long creative force with a voice and influence that carries immeasurable weight. Co founder of
def Jam, winner of seven Grammys. As a friend in music told me, Rick is unique together with discovering, mentoring, creating beautiful music with artists such as Adele Eminin, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Run DMC and for me most movingly Johnny Cash. His values, princess and kindness guide everyone he comes close to. Rick is in London with his family for his brilliant radical book, The Creative Act. We are at home sitting
around a table. A cook with a passion for music and a music producer, writer and philosopher with a passion for food. Though in his achievements he is up there in the clouds, and I am firmly on earthed. We look at our work in a similar way. Keep it simple, keep it honest, admire, respect, and love the people you work with. That is exactly what I feel about Rick.
It's so beautiful.
Well, it's true. We just recently became friends, and it's so nice to be here together to talk about what we love. And so I think what we usually do is to ask you the gas to read a recipe from any one of our cookbooks, and there are quite a lot of them, and quite a lot of recipes span in the years. And you chose a dish that I love, which is also very easy, called chicken with nutmeg. Would you like to read the recipe.
Chicken with nutmeg? Preheat the oven to one hundred and ninety degrees. Wipe the chicken clean, Trim off all excess fat, cut lemon in half, grate the nutmeg. Rub the chicken with the lemon, squeezing the juice into the skin. Season the skin and inside the cavity with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Cut the prescudo slices into the cavity. Put the chicken on an oven tray, breastside down, Drizzle with olive oil, and roast for one and a half hours, basting from
time to time. Add wine after half an hour, turn the bird breastside up for the last twenty minutes. Serve the juices from the pan.
So why, of all the recipes did you choose this? Is there something that you particularly liked? Do you eat a lot of chicken?
The reason I picked the chicken dishes. It's particularly simple dish, and in general, the foods that I like tend to be the best version of a very simple thing. If the sauce is too complicated, if the chef is trying to impress me, I tend not to like it. What gets me is the quality of the produce, the quality of the food, the quality of the meat, and the perfection of the preparation. Not necessarily the innovation involved. It's more the craft of the best version of the regular thing.
It's my favorite.
I always worry when somebody says I have an idea for you know, cooking chicken or fish or meat or vegetable, because for me, it's not suddenly you have an idea to do something. It's the last time you made chicken. It might have been with tucking the pishutto under the skin, and then the next time we had make Do you feel that way?
Yes, it's an iterative process. We try different things and then something like hmm, that was good last time. Maybe we'll try it that way again, and then add something else and eventually get to a point where this is the way I'm going to do it now and it feels good.
Are you talking about music, cooking, everything?
No, I'm talking about everything everything. Yes, that's what the book's about. Really is how we do anything, is how we do everything, and it all is of a piece. All the choices we make are essentially are the way we live. Our life is an artistic choice.
The cooking and the ingredient and the music, I suppose, is also knowing that if you're going to cook things, simply the ingredient has to be superb.
Same. It's true in music that the individual if you're doing work that has many, many instruments, in a way, they almost the sound of them cancel each other out. Yes, they do make something new when they add up. That said, I like the personality of each of the individual ingredients music. If you have three ingredients, it's easier to understand them. It's also harder to get them right because there's only three. They're not being it's not being masked, it's not being hidden.
I remember a producer friend saying to me, you know, I don't know how you have the patience to make the records you make with so few things going on, because he'll put down one thing and then put something on top, and put something on top, put something on top, and he makes a great sounding, you know, very successful producer. But it's a different process, and mine is, Okay, let's
take everything away and what's left. Are each of these elements the most interesting version of themselves they can be, and are we presenting them in the best light that we that we can. That's that's how I like to do it.
For me, it was a revelation to go to Italy because I grew up in upstate New York, where everything considered Italian food was very rich. You had mozzarella, you had parmesan, you had breadcrumbs, You bake it, you boiled it,
you did a whole process. But then if you go to Italy and they put a piece of fish on the grill with a few fresh herbs and a drizzle of olive oil, and you know that the fish has to be really fresh, the olive oil has to be really recently pressed and very strong, and the herbs have to be of the season because you can't basket, as you say, So maybe there are real parallels, do you think?
I think so. I think it's all related. And I remember the first time I went to Florence and I remember asking and what's the best fish restaurant? And they're like, we don't have fish. It's like, what do you mean.
It's a city and by the way, like an hour and a half from the sea.
Well that's what they said. They said, if you want fish, the fissure is an hour and a half away. So that's how fresh it is. An hour and a half is too far to travel with the ingredient for it to be fresh in Italy. So Italy is my favorite place to eat, and I spend as much time there possible and eat quite a lot delicious.
I agree. So how was it actually growing up when you grew up in Long Island? I grew up in Long Island.
Yes, Long Beach was about an hour outside of Manhattan, small beach community, not so unlike Malibu, where I've lived for a long time.
Was it a multicultural undo? Yeah, it was.
The different parts of town were mixed in different ways. And it was tiny, little town, but there were these little subcultures. And we lived on the bay and we had a boat, and you could walk six blocks and be on the ocean side and you know, swim in the waves. It was a mixed community. In My high school was a multiracial high school.
And what was it like growing up there? What was it?
The food was not great and my mom was not a good cook. We ate out pretty much for every meal. We almost never ate home, almost never.
What year would that be, Brick.
I left home maybe in nineteen eighty one to go to college.
About the center of these yeah, yeah, I.
Ate the worst food, you know, I ate fast food on a regular basis. I would say it's pretty limited. There were a couple of Chinese restaurants. There was a couple of Italian restaurants, delicatessen, pastrami, sandwich type places, but all of the restaurants were more like mom and pop restaurants, tending to be heavier in the way they prepared the food, you know, like the Italian food would all be covered in bread crumbs and deep fried and lots of mozzarella and lots of sauces.
Do you think you had a healthy relationship with food or you know, you say your mother was overweight.
Yes, we ate lots of food and good tasting, low quality, high carbohydrate, high calorie food. Also lots of you know, seed oils and just terrible stuff. It was always an argument because I didn't like to sit for a long time in a restaurant. I still don't like to sit for a long time in a restaurant. I like to eat and go, and my parents would like to eat, sit, smoke, and drink. And as a little kid, and I'm an only child, so I had no one else to play with,
I did not want to be there. I didn't want to be.
There, especially when you see them lifting up the coffee cup and then they don't put it to their mouth and they put it down in the saucer. That's what used to kill me as a kid, Yeah, is that I'd sort of think we're just about to go, and then they'd sort of get it up and put it down, and they said, no, drink that coffee. I want to go home. So I feel really interested in women who don't cook, mothers who didn't cook, you know, and I
feel so respectful towards them as well. Was your mother did she work?
She did not. She raised me. That was her full time job, and food was not an important part of that. Although everybody in the house loved to eat and she loved to eat, and she was overweight. She was the youngest of four sisters, and I think she was always like the child in her family, so the idea that the child would be the cook didn't make sense in her family. But the one thing that my mom cooked well is turkey, and only made it maybe twice a year, but it is to this day maybe my favorite meal.
It had onions, it had lemon, salt and pepper. It was it was simple, but it was seasoned and it was cooked to where the skin was crispy and the meat was dry, but there was lots of ozu. So the combination of the dryer meat, which I prefer, with the wet aujou was the perfect combination. You could moisten it to taste. And I wonder if that there's.
So psychological home.
A simple roasted turkey that was incredible, incredible, and now we made it a habit at home to do Thanksgiving dinner once a month. Oh really, And we do Thanksgiving once a month and invite friends and it's great.
Yeah, it's great. It is the best American meal, isn't it? Once a year?
Absolutely? And why?
And so this is how you grew up and did the music start in high school?
My love of music started before that, from the time I was probably three years old, you know, listening to the Beatles as a kid. My parents played music in the house and somehow there was a lot of music around and I can't can't put my finger on it. Usually friends had older brothers or sisters who had record collections or extended family, and they were all really different. And one cousin, Mitchell, who liked Bruce Springsteen in more rock music, and I had another cousin, Marris, who liked
things like Kraftwork and more experimental music. And I would spend every weekend with my aunt Carol, who was like my second mom, and she would take me to the theater and take me to museums and play classical music for me. And it was a whole other world. Whereas my parents were it was different than that. My dad liked Latin jazz and Frank Sinatra, and my mom liked the pop music of the day, and maybe Barber Streisan, certain singers.
And do you think when we were just talking about music and food and about the simplicity and the layering and the ingredient, did you feel that growing up or did that come later?
I would say I probably liked simple food, and I probably never had great simple food when I was young, but I tended to like simpler food. So I think always a music I always had a clectic taste in music. I would hang out in record stores forever to learn, you know. I would befriend the people who work there, and I like the Stooges. What else would I like? And they're like, oh, you might like the MC five, and they would play it for me in the store. And just had an education in the things I was
interested in. And so I would get home from school and she and my mom would say, Okay, where are we going today? And she would be my driver, and well, let's go to the Magic Store. So she would drive me to the Magic Store and she would sit in the car and wait, and then I would come out and she'd be reading, you know, she would just read in the car, and I would be in the magic store for probably three hours, because from nine years old
until probably sixteen, I was really into magic. And I would spend a tremendous amount of time in bookstores as well. I love bookstores. I would just hang out out and read, and I spend a lot of time in the library also, I love the library.
You talk about going to the magic shop very endearingly, describing your mother sitting in the car for three hours, three hours in a magic shop. Do you think there is a link between the transformational process of magic, of music, and of food.
The thing with magic is you learn to be skeptical of everything. Once you understand how tricks work, you see that the same methods used by magicians are used by advertisers and by newscasters, and you start to be able to see the layer of what's really going on behind this facade. So I would say it affects everything going on, and you look at things in a deep way, and not necessarily in just a skeptical way, in a more
based in reality versus an narrative way. When I go to a show of any kind, I'm always paying attention to the mechanisms at play as much as the content. You know, My favorite trick was called metamorphosis. It was a trick made famous originally, I believe by Houdini. I never did it, but I liked seeing it, and I
like the idea of it. The magician gets bound, put in a sack and put in a steamer trunk, sealed in a trunk, and then the assistant would stand on top of the trunk and raise a curtain and drop the curtain, and it happens instantaneously. The curtain comes up, the curtain comes down, and when the assistant raises the curtain, the magician lowers the curtain, and the magician's now standing on top of the box, opens up the box and the assistant is inside. And love that. I love that.
I love this feeling of this instant transposition. The same is true in me in that a certain person plays a guitar piece and it's beautiful, and another person plays the same guitar piece and there's this other magical dimension to it that you can't put a finger on. You don't know why it's I don't even know if it
better's the right words. You don't know why it's different because technically it looks the same, but one of them you want to hear over and over and over again forever and you're filled with wonder, and the other one it's the same notes in the same order. It's the same speed, played with great dexterity, but it doesn't have this other life to it. And I would say the same with food.
It's the same with a recipe that you can say. I always say that a recipe is part poetry and part science, Yes, and that the science is the cord of a teaspoon of baking powder or three tablespoons of sugar. And yet, as you say, the way it stirred, in the way it sifted, the way it's put in the p So.
I have a question for you, how difficult is it to keep the consistency of the quality of the food with different people involved over time.
Yeah, that's a good question. I think that we have very few chefs, so it's not a big kitchen, and we don't have what you're doing in Los Angeles when I was in kitchens that you have one head chef and a lot of chefs on the line. So there is a kind of communication really of how you do it.
But that.
Is what I look for every time if you come to eat, my fears is that you know, I'm grilled sea bass coming to the table going to be the way it was the night before, and you know, and very often when you're on the past, the head chef, I don't know how it is in music, but the head chef is the last person to see the plate that goes out. And it's tricky because sometimes you just keep sending it back to the chef who didn't quite get it right, and you're taking away their confidence, you're
diminishing them, and you're destroying them. But on the other hand, you know that you don't want to sense something out, so it's constant, you know, judgment. How can you tell a musician who's just the one that didn't play the guitar the way? What do you do with someone who's played something that isn't It's how do you give that.
I'd do my best to cast the people that I that that can do the work, and if not, I'll do it again with someone else.
Tell me what happens when you go into the studio. You've eaten definitely, I've eaten before and now the way it used to work for the majority of my life.
I would wake up, do whatever I would do before going into the studio, but once I would go to the studio, that would be it for until I was time to go to bed. So I would spend the majority of my time, and which also means in those days working in New York, it'd be a small room with no windows, and I would be there for as long as you know, until the sun came up, and
then I would walk or take a taxi home. So the majority of my life, I would say, for at least twenty five years, was being in a small dark room. So I had very little life outside of a recording studio because I worked so much so long. Now I've found a way and just through doing it enough understanding what's important for me to be there for, what's not important for me to be there for. And now I tend to have lunch, go to the studio, work from maybe one till six.
And what do you do when you say you were.
Listen to music and then talk about what we can try next. Sometimes we do it right then, and sometimes we're making a list of things to try after I leave in the evening. It depends. I always have anxiety when a project starts because I never know what's going to happen. We don't go in with any script. I prefer to go in when we have songs, but then
there are a million ways to present a song. So there's always this sense of what's going to separate this body of work from the rest of the artist body of work and everyone else's work, And I don't know
what that is going in. So it's a real experiment and we come in and I'm nervous until something good happens, like ah, And then if that thing that's good, even if it's a even if it doesn't end up this way, if it's a clue of what the whole vision of the project can be, even if it's not what it is, I feel better because at least there's a solution, even if it doesn't end up being the solution, there's a possible solution.
And that feels good because I was reading about the way you work and you said that you start with an empty sheet. You know that you basically start with nothing, yes, and then you move from nothing to what you're going to record that day or work. In my own little way, in my own little restaurant, we come in with an
empty sheet of paper. Can we write the menu? Of course, there are things that we always know we'll have mons area, and we always know that we'll have four pastas, and we always know that we'll have two dishes on the grill, two dishes in the wood oven, then two dishes to roast. But it does start with an empty sheet, and do have a parallel in that.
Absolutely. I come and we usually start by listening to any ideas that the artists have. Whatever they are, they could be. It could be a song. They may play a whole song and then talk about how to do it, or they may play a demo of a whole worked out arrangement of a song with musicians and everything. They may come in and with a riff, you know, just a little snippet of a song, or a melodic idea or a lyrical idea, and then we talk about ways of fleshing it out and what are the next stages
and what can it be. Sometimes they'll come to me with a whole body of work, like an album's worth of things that are in various stages of completion, and then we listen and see is this something that we can Is this a starting point that we could build off of, or is this almost like a recipe that we could use to start from scratch. You never know
it really is, and then the experiments begin. We try different things, and I like the idea of in the case of where someone brings in something, I like the idea of stripping back the elements and listening to what's there, and even if it wasn't done in an intentional way for the way that it's going to be used, sometimes you find very interesting things that if you were trying to do it you might not do. It could be very interesting to listen to.
And that goes back to what we were saying before, is that neither you nor I've ever had an idea really that it is a progression of what you did before, always what you're doing now to what you do tomorrow. That is, you don't come in and say I have a great idea for this song.
Rarely rarely, And the times that I do, I still hold them lightly because it's until an idea is fleshed out in when it goes from the idea stage to the in the world stage, it might not be what the idea was. You know, you don't know it until you try it, or in the studio we demonstrate everything because if if if I tell an artist an idea or they tell me an idea, what I envision and what they envision are completely different. Like the two chefs
preparing the same, don't we don't language? Isn't we don't have a way of communicating to where we actually know what each other is saying or feeling.
It's also trust, Isn't it that they trust what you're saying to them, or they trust what your thoughts.
It's like if I gave you two dishes of food and I asked you to taste them and ask you which one you like better. The only right answer is the one that you like better. Do you know what I'm saying? There is no right answer. It's with taste. It's you taste this, You taste this, Tell me which one you like? There's no same tell me there's no there are no wrong answers in taste. It is I've been lucky that when I'm true to my taste, other
people have liked it. It's not the case for everybody, but that's the best chance we have is to make the thing that we love and hope that someone else loves it. If you do something that you don't like with the idea that someone else might like it, what are the odds that's going to be good? Then no one might like it, at least at least I like it, you know, and I can go to sleep knowing it's the best I could do. I love it. If no one else likes it, it's okay.
And when you just talk about musicians, we were talking about Johnny Cash before you showed me that film, which actually shows an enormous amount of food on the table. Yes, you know, it shows a kind of vision of someone who loves to sing. And how would the various musicians that you worked with, how their attitudes food.
Food is a big part of the process. And one of the something I learned early on is that if you're working in the studio and the music doesn't sound good, order pizza and.
Then stop there.
Yeah, you order pizza. And then if you when you're eating pizza, the music sounds better.
And is it because it is better or no, it's just a psychological thing.
And so it's like the world is better when you're eating.
Musicians eat before they start playing, or before.
Most musicians eat before they play. With the exception of some singers who find it hard to sing or maybe their voice isn't as clear after they've eaten.
Tell me about some of the musicians and their food. Is there a musician that you actually that.
One of the things that because the nature of the recording studio is this place you go to and sometimes you spend a long time knowing what you're doing, and sometimes you spend a long time trying to figure out what you're doing or waiting for thing to come that you're there to do, but you don't know what it is yet. So eating in the studio is a standard. And one of the things about Shangri Laud, the studio that I have in Malibu is most studios have one runner,
maybe two, and we have lots of runners. And when people come and order food, food comes very quickly, which historically in the studio you'll order lunch and it might not come for two hours. Whereas for whatever reason, at Changra Lad, it's very creature, comfort oriented and we get really good food really fast, and sometimes we even have a chef because there's a kitchen. If you ever saw the movie The Last Waltz, the band are in the kitchen.
At changra la. That's the You came into my house today and the first thing you said was that's eat. Yes, you did quite quickly. Is the habit? A friend of mine once said that his family had to rule that there should be no longer than forty five seconds when someone walks into your house that they have a drink in their hand. And actually, what I think that does is actually very nice because it means you're what you're doing, and you're giving somebody something when they come in the house,
you know. And I think that means something, and so are the artists that you do associate more with food than others. But that Johnny Cash did he eat?
Johnny Cash loved a restaurant in Los Angeles called the Ivy, and wherever he would come to town, we would always go together to the Ivy. That was his favorite place.
Because also the way someone eats, it tells you about the person, doesn't it. I think so. I think if you go to a restaurant, A lot of people say to me that they wouldn't never hire anybody unless they took them to a restaurant for interesting. Are they kind to the waiter? Are they impatient with the waiter? Do they share their food?
No?
Or Bloomberg told me that if he took somebody out to lunch for a job interview and they ordered a glass of wine, he wouldn't hire them. Interesting, friend sitting next to him said, if they didn't order a glass of wine, I wouldn't hire it.
I heard a story about orstin Wells that he would finish his plate of food and as soon as his plate was empty, he'd hold it out next to him and count to five, and if no one took the plate, you would drop it on the floor.
Really, I will say.
A pet peeve is I do not like to see an empty plate in front of me for any length of time. As soon as I finish eating, I really hope someone takes it away.
What if the person next to is still eating, that doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter, And I'll often move my plate in it and maybe you rude manner just away from me. Yeah, I don't know why it is. It's been a lifelong I don't know what it is a good discussion with a therapist.
Maybe yea.
What is it about the empty plate that you don't want to sit behind? Maybe no, Maybe it's interesting.
Now, what about the days of def Jam in the beginning, it is known that you created this incredible music recording company by nurturing artists, by being brave, by being radical, by seeking them out, by being kind to them. What was that like?
Well, I would say the recording studio that we worked in most I dubbed it chun King House of Metal, which is still what it's called, although the studio moved to a different location and it was in Chinatown, and we would eat a lot of Chinese food because we're Chintown New York. Food's great?
Was that when you became vegan?
No, I became vegan right when I moved to California in college. The first thing I gave up was soad. I used to drink a sixty four ounce Pepsi with every meal, insane, And then I gave that up and I switched to a picture of iced coffee, and without knowing, I was trying to replace the caffeine with the caffeine. I didn't know that, but I drank a lot of iced coffee. And then I gave up caffeine at that point in time, and then I was only drinking water.
Then I gave up red meat and I got to the point where I was basically eating chicken and vegetables. I never really liked fish, so I didn't eat fish. I never really liked eggs, so I didn't eat eggs. So it was chicken and vegetables. And I remember a friend of mine gave me a book called Diet for New America, which was an anti meat book, and they said, if you read this book, you're never going to want
to eat chicken again. And I decided before I read the book, I'm an experiment with not eating chicken, just to see how long I can go. And then I ended up never eading chicken for twenty something years.
So at that point, you were a vegan And what made you stop being vegan?
I weighed one hundred pounds more than I do now. I was terribly depressed, bad skin, I was sick for a long time. Yeah. I worked with a performance expert who really wanted me to eat animals, and I wouldn't because I was a vegan and that was not an option.
What is a performance expert.
It's a person He worked with Olympic athletes or heads of companies, different people. He was a doctor and I heard about him. I read a book This is when I was really big, and you know, could barely walk to the end of the block without being out of breath. And I read a book by a guy who ran a thousand miles in eleven days, and I just thought, it's like, I can't walk down the block, yet there's a human who can run a thousand miles and eleven days.
Some things I'm doing something wrong. I'm doing something wrong. And in his book he talked about meeting this guy named Phil maffatone who changed the way he trained. And I sent him a message saying I'd like to hire h miss my doctor. He was based in Florida at that time, and I was living in California, and he sent me back an email saying I've retired. I've stopped my medical practice and mentioned he didn't know who I was at all, and he said I gave up medicine
to write songs. And I wrote back, well, if you're interested, I can mentor you on the songwriting, if you can mentor me on the health stuff. And then I saw him several times. Then he ended up living in my house for two years and I did everything he said. He got me to eat eggs and fish, neither of which I ever liked purely is medicine. He said, just think of this as this is the medicine you need. I know you don't like it. You're not eating it
for pleasure. You're eating this because you need this animal protein. So I did that and I got much much healthier, but I didn't lose weight yet. And he said, I watch everything you eat. I'm with you every day. I see how you exercise. He said, ninety nine out of one hundred people, all the weight would fall off. For some reason, it's not falling off. And then I thought about, well, my mom was obese eventually in a wheelchair. Maybe it's
just a genetic thing. It is what it is. And then I went out to lunch one day with Mo Austin. Do you know Boston Okay, I passed away at ninety six years old. He was one of my mentors in music and maybe the most beautiful person in the music industry, really beautiful person. And if you knew his wife, Evelyn, she was incredible, a light being, really beautiful, beautiful people. And we went out to lunch one day and he said, you know, I'm really getting worried about you. You're really big.
I know you work, I know you walk, I know you care. You know you're diligent about what you eat. But you're really getting big, and I'm worried about your health. I'm going to get the name of a nutritionists. I want you to go to my guy, and I want you to do it. Every says, and I said, fine, I'll do it, knowing it wouldn't work because I've tried everything, but I'm I love mo, I'll do what ever he says.
And he sent me to a weight loss specialist at UCLA and he put me on a diet of seven protein shakes a day and it was just water and egg protein, and then one meal a day at the end of the day, a meal which was fish, soup, salad, very low calorie, low carb, high protein meal. And I did that and in fourteen months, I lost one hundred and thirty five pounds.
That's a lot.
That's a lot. That's like a whole per like a whole person.
Probably what Max.
So at that point in time, yeh, I was eating drinking eggshakes, still eating eggs, still eating fish, but not eating any other meats. And then I read a book called The Paleo solution, but he explained how all the different foods work in our body, and I believed every word of it. And it talked about how aultimately red meat is the single best thing that you can eat. And I was torn because in my mind, I'm still a vegan. I'm eating fish and eggs as medicine. I'm
drinking these eggshakes. Still his weight, Yeah, but I still don't eat flesh, you know, I don't eat animal flesh. And I believed in the book so much that I bought one hundred copies and I was giving people, but I wouldn't do it because I was a vegan, so I could, you know, I couldn't do it. And after about a year of giving this book away, it just felt like it's disingenuous to be sharing this information and not doing it myself. Doesn't seem right. And it was
on my birthday. Moodiella and I. Moodiel was a very I was a vegan, she was a vegetarian. We went out to dinner one of our favorite restaurants in Los Angeles called Capo. If you've been a Capo in Santa Monica, spectacular restaurant, maybe the best in LA and they grilled meat on an oak wood fire. Really, I think it's oak, might be pecan, it's oak. Incredible meat place. Although I always went there and ate fish, and they had great fish.
So we both ordered fish like normal, and we ordered a steak and we had it in the center of the table between us and we ate our fish, and then each of us had one bite of the meat. And it was a terrible experience because if you haven't eaten meat forero point twenty three years, it's like eating human flesh. It's an insane thing to get over the way our brains work. Even the smell of meat cooking was a hard thing to be around back then. But I believed it was what was healthiest, even though I
had been weaned off of it through this process. And we did that maybe every week or two we would go to Capo and have a bite or two of meat, and then after about six weeks we were able to just order steak.
We were just talking about your house in Italy. So you chose to live in Italy which has passes every two times a day. Do you eat carbs now?
We eat in Italy? All the rules change certain things. Yeah, there are certain rules at certain times. I have one called travel day, which is on a travel day where you're flying. I don't really like to fly, so one of the rules of travel days you could eat anything you want. Most of these things have more to do with what you do all the time. So on an all the time basis, we eat red meat and some vegetables.
That's our that's what we mean. And I'll say I'll eat meat, I'll eat chicken, but I think it seems like grass fed beef seems to be the best. Or wild game. Will eat a good amount of wild game, bison. That's pretty much.
What we eat, you feel. My last question to you, Rick Rubin, is what would be your comfort food?
Pizza? And I try to do it as infrequently as possible, but it is the one that's the default. Too much going on, tired, bad mood, nothing, you know, nothing feels like it's going to make it better.
Maybe pizza, okay, And I hope you don't need that's right off. I want you to have Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.
The River Cafe Lookbook 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 Lookbook recipes for cooks of all ages