You are listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair. An open kitchen in the River Cafe means we as chefs are able to talk to our guests dining in the restaurant, sharing how we cook their food, where the ingredients come from, as well as hints and advice for cooking the recipes in the books. And now we're bringing that same ethos to our podcast, a question and answer episode with me and our two executive chefs, Sean Winnowen and Joseph Travelli. All we need is to hear from
you about what you would like to know. Send a voice note with your question to Questions at Rivercafe dot co dot uk and you might just be our next great guest on Ruthie's Table four. David Chipperfield and I have been friends for so long that this morning I had to ask him when we met. He reminded me it was in Paris, Richard was building the Pompadou and David was a student. The light has shone bright since then for this Pritzker and Sterling Prize winner, the Noise
Museum in Berlin, Hepworth Wakefield and many others. A few months ago, David asked me to see the work his foundation is doing on the food Marcus in Galicia, their crucial world sustainability, the economy and culture. And so here I am in northwest Spain about to talk to him in front of an audience for a special live event. David's introduction to Calicia was thirty three years ago on a visit to Corbado, a small seaside village where he and his wife Evelyn created a home. Now they have
a small bar in the middle of the village. David is as passionate about Alicia's farm to table culture as he is about its people. For him, it's all part of the same conversation, conversation that I am so excited and grateful to be having here with him in Casarea. David and Evelyn think that I went to have my hair done today, but really what I was doing is looking for an apartment to live here, because in the last forty eight hours, having never been here before, I've
been in bars in eleven o'clock at night. I've eaten a pig's nose and a pig's tail and a pig's ear. I've met ambassadors and artists and fashion designers. And I've seen, really, what I've seen here in the last forty eight hours is the connection here in casarea. It could be in the market, it could be meeting someone who is going to tell us their fish. It's just a constant, constant flow of connection and engagement and empathy and fun and interest in the people who live here. And I'm in
awe of what they do. I feel so lucky and happy, and the only emotion I feel right now is that I don't want to go home.
Thank you, Ruthie, and thank you everybody for coming. It's a really impressive group of people tonight, So thank you for coming. Ruthie has been instrumental in changing the food culture of London, your interest in where food comes from and sourcing food, because you talk a lot about that. When I hear you talking a lot about where you get your tomatoes from. Galicia has this food culture, it has this food production culture, it has this small scale production.
We've got many here and we at the same time, we've seen the enormous migration of young people from the rural because it's a hard life. The parents want them to go away and go to university. Doesn't matter what they study, and there isn't enough development of those agricultural industries into the modern world. So we've got no new model. We've only got the old model, the antique model of
small scale farming. And that is tough. And this is a topic that we're interested in the way how do you keep young people interested and how does the administration in a way put confidence in that.
I'm encouraged by a lot of really good you know, thinking about food, about small farms, about farmers, about young people. I think the exciting thing is also that I was talking to We buy our tomato and jars for the winter cook tomato sauce in Pulia, and he was telling me today that a lot of the people from Pulia young people, because how do you keep young people wanting to stay in the communities where they grew up And of course you want them to go explore the world,
but you also know how important the culture is. And he was saying that people in ployee have gone young people have gone to Milan to become bankers or you know, work in industry or work in tech, and at starting to come back because what draws them back is the quality, you know, the quality of food that they can do. It's exciting. They can make you know, jar tomatoes and beautiful jars with beautiful graphics and make them you know, interesting,
and then they can experiment. In Mexico, you know, we have so many friends who are making you know, their parents with traditional made mescal or tequila, and they're doing it in a different way. The wine producers that we work with in Italy, their parents their you know, Renzo's generation.
They were farmers who made wine. And now these young you know, they're now in their forties or fifties, decided when they inherited, they go to La you know, California and France and Bordeaux and see how to make wine in a different way. Came back and changed the production of you know, great into great wines. And so I think if we can encourage people to work because food and farming, agriculture and production is so exciting.
One might say, very superficially here that the margins get very small now and therefore the condition hospitality is very tough because bars and restaurants can't afford to pay their stuff that much. Yeah, yeah, and I think they pay them very fairly and reasonably, you know, in the general, but it's a very long day. It's a very hard business. You know, it's tough.
We glamorize being a chef, you know, we think, oh, it's you know, passion to be a chef and work in a restaurant. But for a lot of people, it was either going in the army or going to be a chef. And then and then if you became a chef, it was so hard because you had to be there at four in the morning, you had to soak the fire, you had to be bullied by somebody who told you what to do. And then everybody woke up and said, wait a minute, we don't have to be like this.
You can come into work at nine, you can work five days a week. You can be fed, you can use good ingredients, you can be taught. You're not allowed to be you know, if somebody bullies you, go to the police. You know, there was a whole way of making actually working in food in a restaurant something that people wanted to do. And I think it could be the same with farming. It can be with.
Its easily because do they want to work and I hope they do.
Yeah, you know, it's been you know, we have had people do you have about one hundred and twenty. But we have a shop, we have a cafe, cafe, and we do off site, you know, we do you know, we do events and that. But I think whether you have twelve or whether you have one hundred, it's the way your culture. Getting back to the culture, what makes somebody want to be an architect, you know, what makes somebody want to be a fashion designer? You know what draws you? And I think far is a real struggle.
You know, it can rain when you need sun, and it can have sun when you need rain, and it can be nobody buys corn anymore. It's very hard. You're working in the wine is wine is like farming. They have a bad rain and then a hail and then you know, we know that. So how do you make it though part of something that you want to do.
A few people say, we're just not willing to pay enough for our food, and that's one of the problems. A lot of the restaurants here. They are very fixed in prices, you know, and it's a much flatter society here. It's much more difficult to leave ridge money out of food. The margins are quite tight. But at the same time, I would say the qualities are very yeah, really hard.
I've eaten so well here, you know, really from the lunch we had, I can name all the meals we've had, you know, and I've only been here a short time.
We've had a piece lunch, and you've had about.
The fish we had the first you getting off the plane and having that fish and then sitting in nearby that night. And the pig, yes, the pig. But the breakfast and the tortilla, and what David and Evelyn and so Leicester you're doing here. I mean, the kitchen here is.
Amazing Anincdotally it's often said that we're buying more cookbooks but doing less cooking. Clearly, the idea that people still cook is pretty fundamental part of the whole food ecology. I mean, do you have the feeling that people are still cooking?
I think they are. I think, you know, young people who can't I mean, you know, maybe afford to go out, or they have children at home and don't go out. I think that cookbooks are kind of aspirational, you know. Nor Efron rote a very famous essay for Gourmet, saying I get Gourmet magazine every month and I'm looking at it from cover to cover, and I've never made a recipe,
you know. And I think there is that thing of looking at a cook book and thinking I will make this, I will do it, I'll be a better person if I do, or whatever, and then you put it away and you go back to making what you do. But I do think people like to read. I think the internet has changed a lot of people look at recipes online, which is great, you know, or on YouTube, which is great, you know. I think that anything that makes people want
to cook. Do people cook for you? Do your friends cook for you?
Yes, there's certainly a sort of London dinner party cooking, but I suppose I'm talking about you know, every day yeah, for your kids.
Yeah. I don't think it's hard. I mean it is really hard because now we're all working with the idea of one of the woman who stayed home and shocked and prepared and cooked and food was on the table when you came home. It has changed. It's just a lot of pressure because very often those women are going to do the night shift at Amazon or you know, they'd rather do homework with their kids and cook a meal for them. I'd like to take the value j
out of it. I would like people to think, instead of ordering on delivery, I can put a bag of pasta in the boiling water and serve it with broccoli and you're done. But I think the reality is it's hard. It's hard to do everything.
As things become more and more expensive even to buy, then the reliability of process food that you can buy becomes simpler. Again, slightly anecdotal, but I heard a mother talking on BBC Radio for saying that she tried, and you know, she felt morally undistressed to cook every night for her children and sit down. She said, but I can cook reasonably well and I can do it, but so many of my friends don't know how to cook.
And also that it's a risk because if you can buy things and you don't cook your supper well for your kids, you might have blown your budget and secondly they might not want to eat it, whereas if you give them process, you know, a Hamburg or something guaranteed. And your friend Jamie Oliver, so those of you that know the chef Jamie Oliver, who had a very has had really big influence in England, came from your kitchen. He was one of your kids.
Yeah, he was, he is still and.
He's been incredibly a good advocate for sort of normal food. I think Blair pointed him as a sort of ambassador for school food, so they tried to improve school food. But how do you see the larger food culture.
Well, your first point about people not cooking at home and not knowing how to cook, you know, I go back to Blair and would say education, education, education, because I think if you judge, how do you judge a culture,
how did you judge a society? You know, it could take Paris where if you walk, you know, I have a photograph of a cole mat Turnell which is a state school for young children, and they put their menus on the outside of the of the school and you see, you know, they start with Celaria ramalogue and then they have a soup, and then they have a fish or a meat. Then they have a cheese course for four
year olds, and then they had a dessert. And I have this photograph and I thought that tells you something. I think that tells you something about a culture that prioritizes feeding little children, well you know, for free. This is not a private school. And I think that the way a society feeds their children the way they feed sick children. You know, I could go on and on. I don't want to get too political, but I really do think that the way and I can see it here.
You can see in the market, you can see the way somebody offered me. One thing I thought I would do is buy a piece of cheese today because I hadn't been able to do that, and she wouldn't take you know, she gave it to me. And that culture of sharing, and.
It's not always true. Sometimes they take money.
Well, they didn't take it for me. For their food, they didn't take it, but they were just it was just I don't know, it's a way somebody cuts a piece of bread. I think it really goes deep into a culture. How we can fix it, I think it's not sure, but I do think if we invest in people then now.
I mean, Japan had had an anxiety because they shifted diet a bit. They're eating more Western foods, and they panicked about child obesity and that they were getting a large percentage of child to see, so they introduced regulations into the school. All school food now has to be produced on the school. It all has to be fresh food. It has to be cooked in it, and they've got child to b C down to four percent or something. So it's as simple as that, surely, isn't it.
In our schools they have candy machines, don't they The machine that sells suits, you know, so it's a complex issue. I think cooking is joyous, you know. I think that it is fun. It brings people together. I think that there are so many ways to do it. And I think that you know, there are ways to communicate that and to give that to people, you know, definitely, and you know, as you say, you need a food culture.
Yeah, and presumably at certain point these things have to be stimulated or promoted or encouraged by simple regulations or not. I mean, we saw something in England which I was quite surprised at. They the last government, conservative government put the tax on sugar in drinks.
Now it's happened in New Mexico. A huge, huge difference. You must have noticed it, you know that. You know, they text Coca Cola and the gcase. People are buying huge bottles and that has really helped. Yeah, I agree. Imagine a state bottled olive oil chosen and bottled for the river Cafe arriving at your door every month. Our subscription is available for six or twelve months, with each oil chosen personally by our head chefs and varying with
each delivery. It's a perfect way to bring some River Cafe flavor into your home or to show someone you really care for them with the gift. Visit our website shop the Rivercafe dot co UK to place your order.
Now, your whole food thing began in the office. It was the canteen of Richard Rogers Architects. Why did you do that? Tell us how it started with Rose Gray and how did the Oh.
Sorry because it's a long story, but Richard and I were living in Paris designing a building and we came back to London having lived in Paris for five years, and he really it was Richard really thought that he didn't want to move into a building in the city or building, you know, in an office. He wanted to create a community. And I think living in Paris made us very aware of being you know, outsiders and sticking together quite closely with people we worked with with our family,
and so we came back. He really looked for a place where there could be a community and we found these warehouses on the Thames, which quite in the western part of London, Harrismith, and they were originally Duckham's Oil, you know, And so there was noisy, it was dirty, it was quite industrial. And he and his partners bought the site and tore down one of the warehouses so you could see the river. They took a large part of the space, but they also there was somebody who
framed payings. There was graphic designers, there was another architect. The idea was how to create a community. And the most important thing for Richard being Italian, having lived in Frads loving food a mother was a great cook, was gathering together over food, you know, how could you do that? And so there was a very small space and we talked about it. I'd worked in publishing and I worked in the office doing books, and I was trained as
a graphic designer. And so the idea was we would interview various restaurants or small cafes that would want to come into this very small space. And I can actually remember the night that we were skiing and I turned to Richard and said, the only thing worse than not having a place to eat would be to have a mediocre one and these are mediocre. I think I'll do it.
I honestly said, I think I'll do it. And so from that idea we went back to London and Rose Gray, a magnificent woman who was a friend, a great friend of Zad's family as well, had come back from New York. She'd worked with Keith McNally on setting up Nells, and she was back in London. She was cooking and I said, let's go, you know, can we meet for a coffee. Neither of us really knew very much about doing a restaurant but.
The reason you wanted to do it was because you wanted this to be a sort of social center of.
The place where people could come and have lunch. And we weren't even allowed to open. We wanted to open to the public. We wanted to be the best Italian restaurant in London. The idea that we wanted to start a canteen for the office wasn't really our idea, but we had the restriction of not being allowed to open to the public, and we could only be open for lunch.
And why Italian, that's.
A good yeah. Richard. Richard's family were in Florence. His connection. His mother was Italian from Trieste. We spent a lot of time in Italy and Rose had actually lived in Luca for two years with her children.
I had the sense that you were also It wasn't just Italian food, it was the idea that you were also interested in where the food came from, and you did all your trips, research trips about where the recipes came from.
We really wanted to cook the kind of Italian food that we had eaten in Italy. And if you went to restaurants, the Italian restaurants in London were mostly run and started by managers or waiters, and they brought the kind of food that they thought people would want to eat in London. Quite heavy, you know, parmeganni was delicious, plus spaghetti with meatballs, cheap coianty, and we wanted to bring the kind of food that we had cooked and
eaten in Italy. Bread, soups, pasta, sauces that were simple.
That all seems fairly obvious now, but thirty five years ago that must have been.
It was very challenging. We used to bring back We used to go to Italy and bring back parmesan cheese we used to go and bring back a proshuto. I remember carrying a proshuoto. And famously Rose once brought back a huge pumpkin and she gave the pumpkin a seating business class and she's at an economy. You know. But it changed, It did change.
And have you seen that change over these years?
I mean, yeah, radically, yeah, yeah, I mean I think that as I sometimes say, when cheap lights started happening, that you could fly to Florence or fly to Naples for fifteen pounds. More and more people went there, went to Italy and thought, wow, I can eat this in Italy. I'd like to eat in England. In the beginning, people would we'd serve a Papa pomodoro, which was made of bread and tomatoes and basil, and people would say, well, at the time, why should I pay five pounds for this?
People became much more involved, I think in the kind of food you could.
Eat and what are the changes have you seen over this period?
I mean, what else is Well, it's been thirty seven years, so there has been I think people, you know, eating out more. I think that people go to restaurants, do want to know about sourcing and then I think for us, a big radical step was when we became involved with the people who produced our wine. And so, you know, we were very tusk and based in the beginning, but then we went to Piedmonte to meet the wine producers,
or Sicily to meet the wine producers, or Pulia. It took us into the world of people who were creating something and then also people who were then starting to really think about bringing food from Italy to England. We brought back seeds, We brought back the seeds for cavalon narrow. I have to give rosa credit for that, and found a farmer near Southampton who grew it for us, you know, And so we were able to have cavalonero in nineteen eighty nine, you know, when nobody even could get it
at all, so we could make rebelita. You know, you can't make rebelita really without cavalonaro. And then became very involved in olive oil well as well, because the people who make the wine also make the olive oil. So we bottled our own olive oil. You know, we'd go and do that.
I use your cookbooks, you know, thirty years or whatever, and I think the cookbooks were also a way of explaining the idea of River Cafe. No, I mean, do you have that feeling that they were sort of fundamental to the idea of the River Cafe, not just as a place, but as another way of looking at food.
Now, when we were asked to write our first cookbook, the River Cafe Cookbook, and we said, we're not cookbook writers, were you know, chefs? So no, and then we started thinking, well, how can we In a way, it almost became a handbook for the people who work. So they'd come up, a chef would be working, say how do I make rotolo? Or how do I make a tomato sauce? And you know, we have to explain. And then we thought, well if we write them down, and I think it's a long
story again. So well, but the cookbooks, the first cookbook that we did, we've wrote the recipe down. We took a photograph of the food right away, no styling, we just took and so if you follow these directions, you will be able to make something that we make. You know, it's simple, it's easy, it's accessible. This is the way we cook in the River Cafe. This is the way you can cook at home. It was kind of bringing
restaurant food to the domestic kitchen. The River Cafe wind you said lunch is now running from Monday to Thursday. Reserve a booking at www. River cafet co uk or give us a call.
I wonder if we should open it up to some questions to give you the opportunity.
Thank you so much for being here and question for me. I know that you have a very particular culture at the River Cafe, the way that you train the staff to care about the food, the trips that you do to Italy source, even hiring people that have trained up bally Malo in Ireland. Could you talk a little bit more about how you install that into like every single day.
Yeah, well, the Italy trips are really you know, something that Rose and I did when we were just starting out and we thought, you know, I really like David and even and to have a personal relationship. So we started out with the people that we bought our wine from, and then we realized that for a lot of the young people working in the River Cafe cooking making the thinnest violi you can see your hand through, or doing a slow cook field sauce, or making a polentic cake.
They were cooking greatful, but a lot of them. I think life is about exposure, and I just say the way my children have been exposed, or my friend's children, and so they hadn't been exposed to actually Italian life for Italy, and so we started taking chefs and managers and waiters and it became really important. We still we'll do it, you know. Now we take because we're bigger.
We take about fifteen sixteen people to Tuscany. We do it around the olive oil and we take them to see how olive oil is made, the pressing the olives, and then the producers give us. It's quite hard work. You get up in the morning, I know, and then you go to a winery, you taste the wine, you see the olive oil. Then you have lunch. They always in the house of the producer. Again it's a home cooked Italian meal, Tuscan meal. And then you do it
again and you go to it. So it's but they come back so excited and so knowledgeable, so that when they pour that bit of olive oil over somebody's brisquetta, they really respect it and they understand it. And so that's that's the Italy trip. Then I suppose we have we change the menu every meal, so the chef comes in and writes a menu depending like you do at home. But we have in the fridge. What if we ordered what's left over? How do I feel? What would I like to eat if I was eating in the River
Cafe tonight? So I think that gives a lot of interest. And they and also the chefs come in and they don't know what they're gonna cook, so that gives a kind of interest. And then I suppose we have again the open kitchen. We work in a kitchen where it's so open that nobody can shout, you know, which is you know, you have a kind of order, which is I once said to a friend of mine, as a director,
look at the kitchen, isn't it like a play? And he said, no, actually, Ruthy, it's like a ballet, you know, because everybody's moving the whole time, you know, and you go over to the grill and say is it ready yet? Or you go, you know, to the pasta and say, oh, you're done? Can I put the lamb on now? You know? So I think making and we don't. Yeah, and they and a team and also we don't really encourage people to do more than five shifts and sometimes a six.
They can't do more than one double, and they have to have two days off, usually in a row, and that again gives you a sense of a genuine place. Everybody has a view out to the river. If you're on the bar, you can look out. If you're you know, washing up, you can move outside. It's so we try and create an environment like that. But we're not alone. I think a lot of people are doing that. Yeah, that's not to say I just want to say that it sounds like we're a family, happy cozy, you know,
hugging restaurant. We're actually if that, you know, curtain goes up at twelve thirty and you haven't done your sauce, so you haven't raided the cheese, or you haven't squeezed your lemons, you're in trouble, you know, because our role is to make a happy kitchen. But it's really rigorous. You have to We have people coming in to eat, and the whole attention is on is a carpet cleaned, is the are the menus out? You know? It's it's it's very professional too.
Yes, any other questions, so I may lower the level of a discussion here with this silly question. But I dared to ask you that because perhaps of my I'm an anglophile, because I love York Side pudding, Yorkshire, and I was wondering what it would be like, Like I said, what would be like? How would you imagine what would be the difficulties, the challenges, or even have the success of opening a British restaurant in Rome?
Yeah, I think that I can't take Rome, but I know that hawksmore. And there's another restaurant opening in New York, you know, and bringing very much kind of Yorkshire putting in roast beef to New York. Rome. Not sure.
But after Yorkshire putting, what what do you do? What's the next Thingish thing?
Fergus it's done for you know, Fergus has done lots of you know, we were talking about that today that it would just be great if when you went to dinner at Buckingham Palace, you know, you have had steak and kidney pudding or roast beef instead of a kind of faux French meal. You know that you would actually celebrate British cooking. And I think sometimes when you talk to people about you know, growing up in Lancashire or
Yorkshire or Cornwall. They will talk, oh, my mother used to make this dish, you know, and they will wax lyrical about their grandmother's cooking. So I'm sure it's there. I don't think it does translate very easily to restaurants. The best British cooking I've had has been in people's houses, you know, really great food Sad's mom. You know, It's just it's eating in people's houses. I think I'm not sure how it translates to restaurants. Rome, I'm not sure.
We'll leave it to you for me to open the British restaurant in Barcelona.
Yeah. People ask me if I wanted to open a river cafe Milad and I thought, no way. You know, I don't think they'd really want, you know, an American and a British woman doing Italian food that I'm not sure.
If I can say. As a complete foreigner to Galicia, one of the things that I find quite interesting is there's a tendency for Galicians to like their own food above others, which is quite unique because if you, yeah, if you're in London, you say, what out of food do you like? That no one will say English food, oh I like Thai. Oh yeah, I mean but here, given a choice between a Galician product and another product,
is it from here or not? It's okay they And I think that's an incredible place to begin too, because if, as we are now concerned that local and seasonal is an issue, then you do need to want to be restricted by those things, as opposed to thinking that their penalties. You know, why can't I have something? There's very few things now in a London context, you know that people would understand that you you can't give them this time of the year. I mean, your restaurant is one of
the few. I would say that you sort of positively gravitate towards things which are seasonal, and then your cookbooks have done that. But I would say one of the struggles in terms of sustainability is to persuade people that you can't have any product at any time, from anywhere, at any season. And I think if you're trying to talk about sustainability, I would have to say, and this
is my you know, it's right. The Foundation talks about a lot is I think actually the food culture here is in a very healthy state because in a sense the culture is already sort of on board. They're very unadventurous in a way. When I first came here, I was surprised that you look at a menu and it just has the same things that every restaurant you go to, twelve twelve things. Now I think it's fantastic. Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair