Ruth Rogers – co-founder of the River Café and the most well-connected chef in Britain – is celebrating 20 years of serving cucina rustica to London’s politicos, authors and media moguls. But, she tells Nigel Farndale, she’s not power-hungry, just committed to the food revolution, as she demonstrates in the recipes she gives here
Blue carpets are being hoovered. A chrome-plated bar is being polished. Bookings are being taken. It is mid-morning, and the River Café, which this autumn celebrates its 20th anniversary as London’s most innovative and influential Italian restaurant, is humming into life. Sitting at a table alongside the flames of a wood-burning stove is a phlegmatic 59-year-old, one who somehow manages to look elegant in sauce-stained chef’s whites, checked trousers and clogs. She, Ruth Rogers – Ruthie, as she is known – is writing the lunch menu. She will write another tonight. The menus – always cucina rustica – change twice daily according to what fresh produce is available. For lunch today she is including taglierini alla piemontese con tartufi bianchi – fine pasta ribbons with the first of the season’s white truffles from Tuscany. The price seems not only fresh but eye-wateringly precise: £53.50.
‘I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think, “Did I order the parmesan?”’ she says. ‘This is an improvement. I used to have anxiety dreams in which I would come into the kitchen in my pyjamas and it was empty. I would call my husband and say, “There’s nobody here!”’
More often, she has pleasant dreams about food. ‘Last night I dreamt I was cooking corn followed by lobster and clams – I guess because I just came back from a visit to the North Shore.’
That is near where she was born and raised, in bohemian Woodstock, upstate New York. There she would hang out with artists and musicians in cafés. On one occasion she realised Bob Dylan was sipping coffee at the next table. She struck up a conversation with him – such is her social ease, her comfort in her own skin. Her father was a doctor, her mother a trade-union organiser; both filled her head with left-wing liberal values. She arrived in London in 1968, aged 19, to do a BA in design at the London College of Printing. It was the high summer of the counter-culture.
Rogers has large, pale blue eyes, a residual trace of upstate springiness in her voice and a polite but distracted manner. She is telling me why dining at the River Café is a theatrical experience. ‘Dining out used to be scary. You would have to dress up. The wine waiter would make you feel inferior. The restaurant would be hushed. All the drama would be going on behind closed doors in the kitchen. Then in the late 1980s, around the time we opened, there was a shift in attitude. You were allowed to relax. With our open kitchen we brought the drama of cooking into the same space as the diners. Now you can engage more with what you are eating. There is contact. I can see diners from where I’m working over there.’ She wafts a hand in the direction of the serving counter that runs the length of the restaurant. ‘I very often watch when a plate is placed in front of someone. Watch their reaction.’
Watch them thinking, ‘Oh my God, Ruth Rogers is staring at me. Better look as if I’m enjoying it’? ‘I hope not,’ she says with a languid, throaty laugh. ‘I would hate that. I’m careful not to. It is more like a peek behind the curtain… Then there is the drama between the waiter and the customer, and between the customers themselves. People get divorced in restaurants. They get fired. I once had someone order a cake. He was going to propose. By the end of the evening they had cancelled the cake.’ Another laugh. ‘I guess it wasn’t going that well.’
She takes a sip of water, holding the glass in two hands like a schoolgirl. No rings, I notice, but a glittery Rolex that hangs loose on her slim wrist. The River Café, she explains, began life as a glorified works canteen: her husband, the architect Lord (Richard) Rogers, had moved his headquarters into the Thames Wharf complex and realised he and his staff had nowhere to eat. Her co-founder, co-author and co-Michelin-star-winning chef is Rose Gray. The two became friends in the early 1970s: the same dinner parties, the same anti-Vietnam protest marches. Together they wrote those vibrant, million-selling River Café cookbooks that changed the way we eat: all that emphasis on fresh ingredients, and vegetables and fruits harvested in season. You probably have one on your shelves. Their handwriting, I notice from the ingredients order book on the table, is almost identical. ‘Rose and I work together so well,’ Rogers says. ‘She cooked lunch here yesterday. I’m last night and today.’ Although their protégés include Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver – both learnt to cook in the kitchen here – Rogers, like Gray, is not a trained chef herself. More an intuitive cook who learned by watching, that’s how she puts it.
Rogers is appallingly well connected, in part because the River Café quickly established itself as a salon for the left-wing cognoscenti, with leading lights of the literary, media and political worlds turning up in droves. On a typical night you could spot a Salman Rushdie here, an Alan Rusbridger there, and, over by the bar, a Peter Mandelson. Still can, for that matter. ‘I suppose my husband brought some of that. With his connections. It did help in the beginning, but if it was just about being fashionable they wouldn’t have kept coming back. It’s true, we did overlap with the rise of New Labour in the mid 1990s, but we also coincided with a change in national taste. Now sophistication is not just knowing about paintings and the arts, it means knowing about food. When you come back from New York or London the first question used to be, “What plays did you see? What exhibitions?” Now people ask, “Where did you eat?”’
Twenty years is a long time for a restaurant to be in pole position, I note. And so many restaurants fall by the wayside. Did she make a pact with the devil? ‘If there is a secret to the success of the River Café, it is that Rose and I are still so excited by Italy. We go there regularly and we find it inspiring. It’s so regional. Town to town is different. You can go on exploring it for a lifetime. We go over with our chefs. This week it’s the olive-oil trip. It used to be Tuscany, now we are going to Parma. When you take the chefs they are exposed to Italian food and that is so awakening. To see the soil and the weather – how it affects the taste. They come back excited. Someone once said the River Café is another region of Italy, and that’s how we like to think of it.’
When in Italy she goes to small, out-of-the-way restaurants looking for ideas. Is that homage or larceny? ‘It’s interesting about ideas, because sometimes I will come back from Italy and the chef will ask, “Did you get any ideas?” And I go, “You know, what I really learnt from this trip is how simple Italian cooking is, how important fresh ingredients are.” But when you eat something good it does inspire you to come home and try and cook it. Rose lived in Italy for years. My connection is through my husband’s family. His mother came from Trieste, a northern town, though she lived in Florence. She would come in to the River Café and sample things and offer advice, to begin with. I think of her a lot when I am cooking. I hear that little voice. “Don’t put too many herbs on your fish.”’
I ask what advice she now gives aspiring cooks. ‘Don’t go to the market with a shopping list in your head. See what is there, buy it and come back and cook it. That’s the Italian way. Seasonal cooking makes you appreciate food more. When you are saying goodbye to melons you are saying hello to raspberries. Then we say goodbye to raspberries. Can you imagine being a raspberry coming over from New Zealand in a plane for thousands of miles? I know how I feel after a long-haul flight. You would feel a jaded raspberry.’
Rogers learnt to cook as a student. ‘Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was my bible. She will say an eighth of a tablespoon and then tell you the dimension of the spoon. Very precise. Like a science. It gave you confidence because you never had a failure with Julia Child. Discipline gives you freedom.’ Blimey. Sounds like a slogan the Nazis would have used. But compared with Ruthie?’n’?Rose, Julia Child is a hippy. The River Café cookbooks are so uncompromising, so… Germanic in their insistence on expensive, hard-to-obtain ingredients. ‘You must use salted anchovies from Greek, Spanish and Italian delicatessens. Small tins of anchovies soaked in oil are not suitable.’ Rogers doesn’t see it that way. ‘I think a cookbook should be a manual. It should be aspirational. We want to make people want to go out looking for the right ingredients. But, actually, we have done the River Café Cookbook Easy as well, which is less exacting.’
Their most famous recipe is the chocolate ‘nemesis’, which is notorious for refusing to turn out like the one in the picture. ‘You should always have a practice run before a dinner party,’ Rogers says in mitigation. ‘Dinner parties are nerve-racking. I’ve been to those horrible ones where you feel so sorry for the host, who is nervous before and exhausted after.’
Especially if she is one of the guests. ‘I get that line a lot. People say, “Oh, it’s too scary.” But I love to be cooked for. It is such a nice change, so actually I am a fairly generous guest. It is more scary for me to cook, because people come with expectations. I hardly ever do dinner parties any more. It is much scarier cooking a dinner party for eight on your own than for 120 with a team of chefs.’
She and Rose Gray did a television series a few years ago, but weren’t impressed with the medium. Indeed, she is now dismissive of the trivialising effect of televised cooking. ‘On one level, cooking on television has reached the public and got them interested in food. And if a chef becomes a celebrity, that is fine. But cooking as mere entertainment I think is detrimental. It makes for slap-dash or unethical use of out-of-season ingredients. And if you portray chefs as people who are bullying and loud, that doesn’t elevate our profession.’ Is she talking about Gordon Ramsay? ‘I like and respect Gordon, but it might be that he is straying from his passion, being sidetracked by television. Everyone has a different idea of what they want to do.’
Ouch. Her kitchen is known for its calmness. ‘We’ve never gone in for the Gordon Ramsay approach. It’s not our style. Rose and I are quite old-fashioned. I think the way you treat your staff affects the quality of their work. We believe you get the best work out of people by respecting them. Hope is our watchword rather than fear. I don’t think any employer should be abusive. Just because it is stressful, it doesn’t mean you should be rude. Our open kitchen dictates the manners of this restaurant.’
Richard Rogers arrives carrying his cycling helmet. He is just popping into his office, he says, then he will be back for lunch. His office is next door. He comes here for lunch most days. They met at a party when she was 21. He was 15 years her senior, and already married. It is not a subject she likes to dwell upon. ‘Breaking up marriages is a horrible thing,’ she has said in the past. ‘No Julie Andrews movie.’ He has three sons from his first marriage and they have two sons together. ‘It is a family business here,’ she says. ‘It just happens to be Rose’s family, not mine. That’s her son over there, our general manager. My children worked here at times, but they have chosen other careers. My kids eat here a lot.’
Ruth and Richard Rogers pop in and out of each other’s workplaces all day. ‘Often he will call over and say, “Can you come and look at this model?” Or I will ring him and say, “Come down and test this soup.” There is a contact, which is something we both like. We always try in our family to listen to the children, but our work is a constant conversation at home; we never stop talking about work.’ The Millennium Dome: that must have been weird to live through, all that flak? ‘Funnily enough, no, the Dome was just one project, like the Lloyd’s Building or the Pompidou Centre. A one-off. Richard has a big office. Lots of projects.’
She gives me a tour of her (surprisingly small) kitchen. On the way out we pass a waiter prepping the parsley, another doing the spinach. ‘They grill peppers but they don’t make the sauces,’ she says out of the corner of her mouth. ‘So if they are serving salsa verde and they have washed the capers and so on, and a customer asks what is in the sauce, they know. They have to be people who like food. It is more democratic that way, not us and them.’ There is a flash of steeliness – freedom through discipline – as she sees a jumper on the counter-top. ‘Whose is this?’ A waiter stops peeling garlic and says, ‘Sorry, that’s mine.’
I am joined by a friend for lunch. I order the capesante in padella – scallops seared with chicory, polenta, butter and parmesan – and the costoletta di vitello al forno, which, according to the menu, is a grilled-then-roasted veal chop (thick-cut) with salsa verde, dried porcini and sage al forno. Boy is it thick-cut. I must do a double-take because Ruth Rogers comes over laughing and says she was watching my expression from the other side of the restaurant when the plate was placed in front of me. Theatre indeed. A comedy of manners.