Welcome to River Cafe, Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamis Studios.
Okay, all right, let's go today. Okay, Today, as we sit here in the River Cafe on a busy Monday lunch, I'm joined by someone I know rather well, my son Rue Rogers.
You were born in.
Paris, and so would you say your earliest memories are of living in Paris?
I think my earliest memories are eating food in Paris, and my earliest memories are of walking into restaurants, and I remember going into Benoir and sort of having stories about how the Pompadou Center was designed there. From the earliest stages, I think I learned quite quickly only a passion and love for food, but that you booked the restaurant first, and you found the restaurant first, and then you figured out who you were going to invite and what you were going to talk about.
And so I always felt so growing.
Up that like it really was an exploration, not a convenience or a necessity, but an exploration.
And so do you think more of your memories at Paris are beating out rather than home cooking.
I think I still think to this day that like
really great French markets, you know. And I actually probably remember better walking through the French market, you know, on Boulevard a Spy with you and Dad, And I remember riching dad buying a chicken, a roast chicken, and they put it in those sort of silver foil bags and there were no knives and forks, and he would just literally kept his hand in there and we were just the three of us were we were just eating chunks of chicken as you pulled it off, and it was
the most delicious thing. And then when we needed dessert, you bought some raspberries and we just took the raspberries out of the cotton.
That was love back then, and it was beautiful and I remember it very well.
Do you still go to markets and shop and eat that way?
Everyone asked me how I know how to cook? And I don't think I know how to cook. I know how to shop, and I think it's two totally different things. If you love food, you have to love the ingredients and you never go out shopping for what you want to make. You let the shopping define what you're going to make. And that was the biggest lesson I ever got growing up about food was It's all about the
quality of the ingredient. I think having a plate of amazingly right tomatoes is as hard to cook as a real shit, because you have to know whether those tomatoes are going to be good, and you have to know how to let those flavors come out. And so it's not about the complexity of the recipe. It's about understanding ingredients.
Yeah, well, so that is very to do with seasonal food. You say hello to a vegetable that has just arrived, and at the same time you're saying goodbye. You know too, I remember in Paris you might too. Ellen's came in. We always knew that they were going to come, and then you know, Fennel would go.
Do you remember.
I remember living in London and how you would come back from Paris if I hadn't been able to join you on your visit with tons of food from the market. I mean asparagus. I remember white asparagus coming to London. I don't think we'd ever seen it in the UK, Like you couldn't get white expers. You'd come back with white spagus or chev that was just seasonal and just being completed.
But I just have this image of.
You coming back on a plane back then, right, No, no trains, no boats, like you would fly back with bags fold but you'd brought back just from the market.
It's not very popular on the plane with smelly cheese Rose. And you know, the story about Rose Gray was that she once reserved a seat for you know, pumpkin and put it in club and she sat in the economy.
You know.
Actually, as I'm just mentioning Rose, do you have memories of Rose cooking with Rose?
Yeah?
Well, I worked at the River Cafe when I was I think seven teen and eighteen, and so working for your mother and her partner and her best friend is an interesting experience for your first job, somewhat terrifying and fast learning. And what's interesting was, you know, Rose was very exacting and very demanding in what we had to do and how we made it and how we delivered it, but very very charming as well, and someone wanted you to live up to being the best best eater you
could be. She was curious about food.
And if Rose was an influence, going back to Richard taking the chicken out of the bag with his fingers in the market, do you think Richard was an influence in your food life, your father.
Yeah, I mean I think in a way we all love food because Richard was a great eater. And I do really think that being a great eater is a really fundamental skill. It can be very frustrating great because everything is being analyzed all the time, but it is a very beautiful thing because you're constantly searching for that new taste and that new experience and anything else is
not exciting for that. I mean, I remember the Michelin Guide with yellow post it notes and written notes, and I mean like obsession and then like going into bookstores and saying, we found this restaurant, but we haven't been do you recommend it? Like the amount of diligence we did just to have lunch because Dad wanted a great meal and you wanted to make that possible.
But you you know, and we did it.
And so I think a lot of that of you know, curiosity and food cooking and food quality comes to Dad's real keenness and passion for eating.
Actually, it's interested to say that, because I do remember that we used to He had this theory. I don't know where it came from, that if you wanted to find a good restaurant. You always asked a bookstore that there was a people who loved books would probably know where to eat.
Do you remember when Richard went skiing with Bo, my brother, and they bought asparagus and they had to figure out how to cook it right? And Dad looked at it from an engineering architectural point of view, and he decided at the top of the sparagus were narrower and the bottom of the asparagus were wider, So he cut them up into pieces because the bottom, the wider pieces would need more time in the water than the top pieces. And sort of right, you know, what's the sparagus standing up?
That's right? So that was that.
Dad took a very sort of like you know, pragmatic point of view on cooking.
This is probably a question like I only can ask you on the series, but tell me about cooking with your brothers.
Cooking with them?
Are you trying to preserve our relationship.
About Ben?
Zad and Ape are all amazing cooks and very very different. Ben is very precise and very responsible in terms of the planet and what he's cooking and how much of it he's cooking.
But it always tastes perfect.
My only like my standing image probably of like not just this person, but my entire lifetime of food was going to stay at Zad's house and him hanging over a duck with a hair dryer and drying duck for Christmas. An Abe is an explorer and you never quite know what he's going to eat. I do not like surf and turf and meat and fish together seem wrong to me. But when I go to Abe's house, not only am I going to have scallops with blood sausage, but it's going to be delicious. So he is always the king
of surprise. And so my brothers are all very different in the way.
That they cook. For all a wonderful experience as well.
What about American influence, because you know, I'm American and every summer, I think your first flight to the United States was when you were four, So you know what were those summers, like, what did you eat? What? What was the American influence as a child, and then we can talk about later about as an adult.
Well, I think that in general, there were four things that I can remember that we really loved eating in America. It went hot pastriami, sandwich, corn in a cob steak, and lobster, and I think there were muscles that we used to pick off the beach, but unfortunately, with global warming,
those muscles have gone smaller and that's not possible. But we used to love those things again because there's such strong taste, Like the lovester would come out of the sea and you would just boil it and you would eat it.
And the steak, I mean, it was just you didn't have anything like it.
And then you know, going to the Carnegie Deli and having a hot pastriarami sandwich with strong mustard was delicious. I think that, you know, the real American influence was not in food though. I think the real influence was in you, mum, and bringing over the idea that food could be used in a sort of to make you feel at home, right that like, if food comes to the table, you will instinctly want to serve it to other people, even if it's not your house, Ruthy, you
will want to help and serve others. And this notion that food could come with such incredible generosity and warmth was something that definitely came from your business and what I think makes the River Cafe and what you do so extraory is that you only say yes and yes. It's such a nice word. It's a beautiful word, even when you might not be able to carry through it. Yes, it's still a nice place to start.
It's a beautiful answer.
So, Rue, you went to university in New York, you went to Columbia. What was it like being a student in terms of food?
Well, I think the most important thing I learned as a student at university was the value of a slice of pizza, because we lived on pizza, and it's delicious. New York pizza is delicious. It's a very different thing. It can be a snack, can me. Meal has to be eaten the right way. The first time I ate slice of pizza, I didn't fold it and I kept it angled down and it dripped grease all over my clothes.
So I remember very much culturally having to get used to the notion of fast food but also good food. And I would cook for people all the time, and I love that. And again I learned about New York ingredients and I learned about where to buy what, and it was, you know, it was really exciting.
Do you remember what you would cook for those genners with your friends?
So the thing that I.
The way I made friends as a child was that we would have parties and then when everybody got a little bit too drunk, I would make pussa with tomato sauce, right, And so that was a very useful thing that I learned very early on was that it was very good to have something that you could make quickly and easily and would probably help soak up some of the alcohol and everybody's system. That has continued to with me ever since. Now I seve it to my kids. It is always
something that you can get going very very quickly. But I would cook when I was in in college, whatever was fresh. My favorite meal was muscles and spicy tomato sauce. So I'd buy muscles and I'd combine that with a tomato sauce. And the other thing I really love about New York, which I experienced a lot of when I went to college, is you never self conscious of eating on your own right. People are always stopping and eating and eating by themselves. And that's something very very nice.
You know, you see people with a book in a diner reading. That's that's a really beautiful thing.
Today. Do you take your children to restaurants do you work in restaurants? How do you feel about going into a restaurant? What do you look for? That's a multiple question to ask a multiple question. Ever since Jeff Goldblum told you I could ask a multiple.
Questions, I have always used restaurants as public space, and I like to move. I need to be around other people when I think, and there's nowhere better to be
around other people and surprise by people then restaurants. It's about a certain level of discomfort because what you're really doing is you're putting yourself in somebody else's hands in a restaurant that you don't know whether they're going to cook something the way you want it cooked, or whether it should be good, with people that you've never met before, seen before, and not knowing what conversations you might have, and you're taking a risk, right, and in that risk
comes really beautiful things when it really pays off, when you've really had a meal that surprises you. Right, that's sort of like unexpected serendipity, right, which you could never get from delivery.
You're never going to get.
Serendipity when something is delivered to your hop. Right.
You get serendipity when you take a walk down an alley and you find a restaurant and you just walk in, and one time out of ten it will just turn out to be amazing.
And when you discover.
That, in that risk, you found something that's truly creative and truly rewarding.
And that's what I'm always looking for.
Do you have a memory of food in terms of relationship or impressing someone?
I fell in love with my wife ever a dover Soul. We were at Sha George restaurant and we had only just met properly, and I ordered a dover Sole and as it came fully on the bone, she and I were talking and without taking a.
Break, I fillaid the fish and.
Ate it, and little to my knowledge that somehow really impressed her. And she found that sort of creative skill with my knife and fork and devowing that she George dover Sol extremely sexy and allurin and a year later we were married.
You've actually lived in many places and right now you're living in Africa. How does that influence your food?
Yeah? Travels, I mean every where I travel, I obsessively look out for the most local restaurant.
So we don't have mechlin guides anymore.
But we have the web, and we also have friends and ways to make friends, and I look for the most authentic food there is. When I went to Ethiopia a couple of years ago, you know, my add taxi driver who picked me up in the airport, stayed with me for three days, and the best meals I had were in his family home, and they were extraordinary.
I'll them forget what were they like.
My favorite actually was when he took me to the market and it's the meat market in Addie Adaba, and there are just enormous carcasses of meat hanging from the top and people shooting flies away from them, and you walk in and he says, we're going to eat here. So I said, okay, just choose your meat. And so I choose a couple of cuts of meat. I even choose some sweetbreads to be adventurous, and I go terrific and they cut it off and they take it away.
We go sit down on the back and it comes back in literally ninety seconds later, and they go, God, they cook it quick here and it was raw. And they serve all those meats raw with a spicy chili sauce or nut sauce and a really amazing Ethiopian coffee and I was there with everyone.
And we ate it and it was amazing.
You're working in South Africa, what is the food like in Johannesburg.
The food that I've had in South Africa is the truly South African food is delicious. They have extraordinary meat in South Africa. The steak is exceptional. A lot of stews and so a lot of meats cooked in tomato sauce which is amazing, and some basic grains like the equivalent of polento as well.
So you talk about being very dventurous with your food, eating raw sweetbreads and Ethiopia and traveling to you know, all over the world in Nepal and eating this food, But do cook that at home?
I don't know the ingredients well enough and I don't know where to go shopping for them, and therefore I would rather eat out and have somebody who does know them and knows how to cook them. So at home we eat pretty western soule food. My wife, Bernie, though, who is Chinese American, makes the most amazing Chinese and Asian food as well as Indian food as well.
What does she make She.
Makes incredible dumplings and wantons, which we all love and cherish. I mean, what's interesting is that there is very few things in Western food that is completely original, right, and so we all get influenced by everyone else. So an amazing wanton is actually like an amazing ravioli, or she would correct me and say, an amazing ravioli is like
an amazing wanton. Since China has existed and been cooking this food for quite a long a lot longer, which is to say, it's really based about the quality of the pasta or the wrapper, as they say, and how light that is and how thin that is, and how light can you get it, and keeping the fitting as simple as possible, and if the chibes are good, it makes the one time. And so again you're very dependent on fresh quality ingredients.
You've worked in NGOs, You've written a book, What's Mine Is Yours, about sustainability and sharing and consumers society. You've traveled to Afghanistan and Nepal, working with people of different cultures. Do you feel that the politics of food is something that interests you.
I'm less interested in the politics of food at the micro level, which is not to say I don't think it's important, but like the idea of the organic movement and such, is less important to me. At the macro level, which is around food security.
I'm very interested in it.
We talk a lot about overpopulation, but what we, in my opinion, should really be talking about is food security. There is more than enough resources in the world to feed more people on this planet, but we choose politically not to feed those people. We choose to not send grain to places that it's needed. We choose to have cows and dairy where we don't need more milk.
Right.
We choose not to provide loans to small holder farmers in Africa and India, And so we make choices every day around food security and providing food security to billions of people, right that have nothing to do with whether we actually have the ability as a planet to sustain those resources we could And I passionately believe this feed everybody in a healthy, equitable way that is good for the planet.
Should we choose to it's a choice.
Is we the worst as we developed nations? Who is when you say we could feed the planet? Who is the we?
I mean? Food security is really an issue that's defined by Western powers and Western governments, and if we wanted to again and remove subsidies and read this stribute food, we could solve food security forever.
Right.
I think looking at innovation to solve this problem is a really interesting question. And I think if you look at things like impossible meats, it's very exciting. I mean, the transformation to our ecosystem by removing hamburger meat or beef from McDonald's would be huge, right, I mean, that
would just just change the world. But again, while as much as I like the idea of innovation and I believe in it, it is people, not technology that need to make changes, and those people are leaders and governments, and it starts at you know, as much as I believe in, you know, becoming a vegetarian, you know, talk to talk, walk to walk, I really believe that if political leaders came together and made hard choices and decisions in a collective way, we could solve most of problems
as well as innovation.
So rue, you've talked about comfort and food, the comfort of food at home, the discomfort of experienced food often in the restaurant, the comfort of food of cooking for your children. You use that word very often in describing what you love about food and what you look for in food. And I was wondering, as I've asked everyone, if you needed comfort from food, not the taste or the excitement or the adventure, what would be your comfort food.
Well, I am very, very privileged because it's not a question of what do I eat, it's a question of where do I go. And I go home to see my mom and anything she cooks.
You're so happy.
It's really nice.
You remember remember the mission of book.
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River Cafe Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.