December 12, 2022 • 28 mins
Some years ago Gwyneth Paltrow worked for a day in the River Cafe Kitchen. She arrived early. in professional chef’s whites, ready to cook. Gwyneth volunteered to clean and then fry fresh anchovies. And for 3 hours, she did. This memory speaks to how professional Gwyneth is. An Oscar winning actor she built Goop from a simple newsletter into an inspirational business. She is an entrepreneur, an activist for with social values. Like Ruthie Rogers food and family is the focus of her life.
Listen to two friends discuss all this and more on season two of Ruthie's Table 4.
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home.
On Ruthie’s Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers.
Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks.
Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation.
For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/ruthiestable4
Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to River Cafe Table four, a production of iHeartRadio
and Adamized Studios.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Gwyneth Paltrow worked for a day in the River Cafe kitchen.
She arrived early, dressed in professional chef whites, ready to cook.
Gwyneth is the only chef ever to have ast clean
and cook fresh anchovies, and for three hours she did.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I learned a lot that day. I mean, you know,
just when you're a home cook, you don't think about
precision and like repetitively turning out something that's perfect and
exactly the same over a course of many hours.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Didn't Jamie Oliver come in when you were there? You know,
what is Gwyneth? Quite a few people say, what is
Gwyneth Paltrow doing in your kitchen? We said, she's frying anchovies,
you know, So that's as it was. This memory speaks
to how professional Gwyneth is. An Oscar winning actor. She
built Coop from a simple newsletter into an influential and
(01:03):
uplifting business with energy, elegance, and strong values. Another memory
ten years ago, just after the death of our son BeO,
I asked Gwyneth if she might surprise the River Cafe
team and sing one song for them at our Christmas
party to thank them for their care and concern for me.
(01:23):
Gwyneth not only said yes, she sang four songs, danced
with everyone, and stayed to the very end. In the
River Cafe history, we still talk about the time Gwyneth
Paltrow came to sing. I admire Gwyneth for being a brave,
smart entrepreneur. I respect Gwyneth as a writer of recipes.
(01:44):
Most of all, I love Gwyneth for being there with
me that night and here with me today.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Oh boy, I wasn't expecting that that was so beautiful.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Thank you, Gwyneth. Which wuld you like to read the recipe?
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I would love to one of my favorites from the
River Cafe. Zucchini free tea five hundred gram zucchini, one
liter sunflower oil for the batter, one hundred and fifty
grams of plain flour, three tablespoons extra virgin olive oil,
three tablespoons warm water, three egg whites organic. Cut the
(02:26):
zucchini into five millimeter thick ovals, then cut them into
thick matchsticks. For the batter. See the flour into a bowl,
make a well in the center. Pour in the olive oil,
and stirt to combine lucinetting enough warm water to make
a batter the consistency of double cream. Heat the oil
in a high sided pan to one hundred and ninety
(02:48):
degrees celsius. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold
into the batter. Dip the zucchini in the batter. Fry
in batches in the hot oil until golden and crisp.
Serve immediately.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
So when you make do you make zucchini do fry?
Do you do zucchini free tea.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
All the time? Yeah, it's Apple's. One of Apple's favorite
foods is zucchini free tea. And they're so good, especially
when the one thing also you can do with zucchini.
They're slightly larger, I think because the way we do
it of cutting it into rounds and then cutting into
strips may make it easier.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Do you grow them here?
Speaker 3 (03:22):
No, you're getting back east on Long Island in the summer,
we have tomatoes and zucchini for days and days and
days and flowers. They're so delicious. Except I have to say,
and I'm probably this is probably really unpopular, but I
like mozzarella in them more than ricotta in them.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
I don't put any cheese in them. No, I'm never have.
I just love having them absolutely, just the flower and
the kids fry them and then you hold them by
the stem and you just eat them. So, if we
were going to start at the beginning, what is the beginning?
Where were you born? Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
I was born here in Los Angeles and Hollyoo. We
kind of went back and forth between New York City
and Santa Monica a lot. I did a lot of
preschool in New York City, and I did first and
third grades in New York City while my mother was
on Broadway, and then the bulk of the rest of
elementary school here, and then moved permanently to New York
(04:18):
City when I was eleven.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Can you remember the kitchens? Could described the kitchens, but
they're very different. The LA house and the kitchens were
very different. So our kitchen and in Los Angeles here
had a brick floor, red brick floor and a tile counter,
sort of like very country kitchen. Lots of windows and
you could see the backyard in the pool, and we
(04:40):
were in there a lot. I mean, I think with
every house you're in the kitchen more than anywhere. Our
New York kitchen was on the ground floor. We grew
up in a townhouse, almost no windows, but we had
a big fireplace in the kitchen, which is really nice,
and it was more of a modern kitchen. It had
been done by a Swedish architects. It was kind of
minimal and who cooked.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Well. When I was little, I remember, I mean my
mom cooked. My dad started cooking a lot, but that
was later. He got very into cooking kind of when
we were older teenagers. But we had we had a
no pair that would cook. My mom would cook. It
was kind of like a group effort in the kitchen.
(05:23):
But my mom was always like, she loves food, but
she would get sort of stressed cooking, you know, whereas
my dad was like thought it was really fun. My mom,
I don't think she found it so relaxing.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
And also you just mentioned that she was in theater nice,
so what was that luck?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
So she would come home late after the theater, which
when I was older was really nice. I remember when
I was in high school and she would finish a
plane come home and I would still be awake and
we would kind of have a chat, which was some
of my favorite memories of growing up. In New York,
and or she was doing Shakespeare in the Park and
(06:01):
I would walk down Central Park to go visit her
and watch her. So it was really a wonderful thing
having a mother so steeped in the arts in New
York and with all of the friends and you know,
the artists singing around the piano, and you know, it
was really a great way to check it.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Would she have eaten? Do you think? I often ask
actors who are acting in a play. Do they eat
before the play? Do they eat after the play? Do they?
And everyone varies.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, I think she would generally eat before unless she
had friends coming. It's sort of an occupational hazard to
eat after. I did a play in London, I think
in maybe two thousand and two, and I ate every
night after the play, and I gained about fifteen.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
There is also that thing when you go to see
somebody in a play and then they go, you know,
Ray fines doesn't. It's always dinner afterwards, and you do
see the kind of fatigue and then letting go and
probably eating too much a night, I know, but then
eating before you might go on. Did you feel stuffed
when you went on to the.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't eat before. I was too
nervous to eat before, So I would always end up
eating after and go to Jay Chiky and he, you know,
have a bottle of wine and French fries and some
kind of oyster. And back to New York and back
to growing up with a mother who was acting. And
what was your father doing? He was making TV shows,
So he was making shows here and in New York and
(07:27):
doing a lot of traveling back and forth, and then
and then kind of settled in New York. And that
was great when he was with us all the time.
And but I don't remember him really being in the
kitchen until he had kind of slowed down how prolifically
he was making TV shows. And when he kind of
slowed turned everything down a notch is when he really
(07:50):
got into cooking.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
And would you have meals around the table together with
you and Jake? Oh, my parents sit down? What were
they like?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
They were really nice? I mean it was I think
we felt special being included at the dinner table, even
though it was a nightly event. It felt, you know,
like if they had friends over. We sat with them
at the table and had long conversations It's something that
I've carried on with my kids as well. You know,
we always have dinner all together as a family, no
(08:19):
phones allowed at the table, and you get into great
discourse with them and hear what they think about things.
And I think my father made me feel that I
was valuable during those dinners because he really elicited our opinion.
He asked questions, and my brother and I were very
much a part of the conversation.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
It was his background.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Well, it's interesting, you know because touching on what you
were saying, before he grew up without money. He grew
up on Long Island, and they were you know, they
were kind of a working class moving trying moving up
into middle class Jewish family, but they didn't have a
lot of disposable income, and they didn't they didn't go
out to eat. So when my father finally made it,
(09:03):
you know, like his and he loved food and all
the beautiful things in life. You know, he loved beautiful
fabrics and paintings, and you know, he would take me
to every museum in the world and we would walk
for hours. And I think food for him was really
an expression of life's beauty and our blessings and good
(09:24):
fortune to be able to eat something that was fresh
and delicious and really well conceived and thought about. And
he was so proud that, you know, we ate oysters
and you know, things that he hadn't come across until
really later in his life. And I always remember, and
I wrote about this in my first book, that when
(09:46):
we would get into the car to go out to dinner, like,
no matter how many times we had gone, like, he
was so excited. It was like the greatest thing of
all time that we were going out to dinner.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I think that it's interesting because people that I've told to,
many of them measure their success in the ability to
eat well. It's fascinating that people, you know, when they
were able to go to restaurants and choose something that
they weren't worried about how much it cost, or you
know Paul McCartney saying that he always thought wine was
terrible because he only had really really cheap wine. And
(10:19):
then when he was able to go to a restaurants
somebody bought him a fabulous bottle of wine, he kind
of understood what it had meant to work hard and
what he could do and even just going to restaurants
so that what going back to your dad, what were
his parents like?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
They were New Yorkers. They had so my grandfather's grandfather
had come from Poland. They were from a long line
of rabbis, and they were all Ashkenazi Jews from Poland
and Russia kind of Belarusian, and they were, you know,
(10:55):
had grown up. My grandfather had grown up in a
tenement on the Lower East Side and fought his way
into military school so he could, you know, have three
square meals a day and learn. He craved discipline and order,
and so he was very proud of himself that he
had put himself, you know, had gotten himself in that position.
And they were great. And my grandmother, my dad's mom,
(11:18):
was a great I mean I loved eating at her house.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Grandmother's are really important.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Yeah. Food, I mean she made brisket and that it
was like the best brisket in the world. And then
she also let us have junk food, which we were
not allowed from my mother. So you know, we would
go to stay with them and there would be fruit
loops and I would be out of my mind, you know,
Jake and I would be eating wonderbread with frenches, mustard
(11:44):
and a slice of tomato and lettuce, and we thought
it was the most delicious thing of all time.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
So we have a recipe for brisket I do. And
what about your mother's mother.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
My mother's mother was a fantastic cook and entertainer. She
was a really scary person, but she made the best food.
I'll never forget the things that, you know, really sort
of like fifties food that she made all throughout the eighties,
you know. So her the best deviled eggs in the
(12:18):
whole world, the best Christmas dinners with her stuffing in
her and her spreads would be this whole table full
of the most delicious food. And it was only her,
you know, on her own, chopping and cooking, and her
food was amazing. She was a great, a really great cook.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
You grew up in this house where your father loved
to take you to restaurants and to eat, and your
mother cared for you and came home after theater stories,
and then you left home. And did you cook after
you left home for yourself or did you go home
to eat?
Speaker 3 (13:06):
That's when I really started to learn how to cook.
I went I graduated from school in New York City,
and I went to UC Santa Barbara all the way
across the country, and my father was in Santa Monica
a lot, and I would come home for weekends or
you know, for some good food, and we would cook
together a lot. And that's when we both really started cooking.
(13:27):
And that's when the Food Network was just amazing and
really instructional and tactical, and we would watch you know,
the food the Food Network and learn things and try
them out. Or we would go out to there was
a restaurant in Venice that was kind of legendary called
seventy two Market Street and we would go there, and
or Sheen Wah on Maine, which is a Wolfgang Puck
(13:50):
French fusion Chinese russaurant that I still love to this day.
So there's like a couple places that he would that
he loved that we would go to. But we also
cooked a lot.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
And so do you do that with your children? Do
you cook with them?
Speaker 3 (14:03):
I do?
Speaker 2 (14:04):
I love both of them.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
I cook for both. I cook. You know, Apple's really
interesting because now she's kind of very independent and she
likes to cook for herself a lot, so and she's
vegetarian and she has like really specific food ideas which
is so great and I love I would say what
she asked me to make still for her the most
is lemon pasta. She went through a real like fetichini,
(14:28):
alfredo face and breakfast potatoes. She asked, that's probably what
she asked me to make the most these days. And
then Moses, you know, during the week, I don't. I
don't have time to cook very much. But I cook
kind of all weekend long, and I really love it,
especially Friday nights. It's like how I transition from my
week to being like a woman in a body.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
And did they cook with you or do you think you?
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, they do?
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Do they cook for them?
Speaker 3 (14:56):
I mean, Apple will definitely cook with me. Moses will help, yeah,
but I mostly cook for them. I mean I think
they liked being especially because when we were living in
London and I was before I started Goop, I cooked
all the meals, and so they really they have nostalgia
around me cooking them all the meals, and so I
(15:18):
think there's I think especially Moses sometimes he's like, why
are you making me more food?
Speaker 2 (15:23):
You just love? Do you think that you're interested in
cooking for them? Does come from your own childhood?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Or I do? Because It was such an unabashed expression
of my father's love for us, like there was no
denying it. And when someone is so excited about like
the seer on their baby back ribs, you know, and
like look at this, Look what I did. You know,
it's so imbued with love that you can't It's undeniable,
and so you learn it as a love language. I
(15:52):
just had this beegind I at a house full of
people at our house in Santa Barbara, and I was
making all these different breakfasts, and you know, my friends
are like, oh my god, we feel so terrible, and
I was like, no, you don't understand, Like this is
my love language. Like I'm so happy doing this.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Did you travel with your parents? Did you go to
Italy or Spain or.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
We never went to Italy until you know, the first
time I ever went to Italy with my father, he
was when he died. He died in Florence, he died
in he died in Rome, and we were doing our
first kind of road trip after my thirtieth birthday. And yeah,
(16:32):
he kind of died on me, which complicated the trip.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Is a complicate Italy for you?
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Yeah, it did complicate Italy for me for a long time.
I didn't go back for ten years. And when we
were on our road trip and I found out that
he was sick and he had been coughing up blood,
and I said, we have to go to the hospital.
You know, he'd been hiding it for me because he
didn't want He really wanted to finish our trip. And
I was like, this is so, we're going to the hospital.
(17:01):
And he was like, no, we got to get to
the Splendido. He really was trying, and I was like,
we're not going to the like, we're going to the hospital.
And he ended up dying. And then I had a
real aversion to Italy for a long time. And then,
very sweetly Chris Martin, my first husband, on my fortieth
birthday ten years later. And I was having a lot
(17:22):
of anxiety about it anyway, because I think turning forty,
I mean, I'm about to turn fifty and I kind
of don't give a but forty, I was like, really
had so much anxiety about it. And he by that point,
I had the two kids, and we got on a
plane and I didn't know where we were going, and
we all of a sudden, I realized we were landing
(17:43):
in Genoa and that we were going to the Splendido,
which was so sweet. It was such a nice surprise.
So it was like a completion, but it was. But
Jake was with me and my two best friends Mary
and Julie, who've been my best friend since one since
I was four and one since I was eleven. They
(18:04):
were with me, and they my father was like a
father to them too, so it was it ended up
being a really beautiful experience that we all got to
be there and and kind of come full circle. And
now I'm you know, we we bought a little farmhouse
in Umbria, so just south of the Tuscan border.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Great food in Umbria, Yeah, truffles in the fall, you
have lentils, you know. Bar It's great.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I know, it's really it's a really special place. So
I'm excited to spend more time there and to learn
some Italian.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
But what about Spain of France?
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Spain so France. Well I kind of told this like
now now it's kind of food. A famous story about
my dad taking me. My mom was doing a filming
something in London when I was ten, we still lived
in Los Angeles and we all made the trip over
to visit her, and then my dad took me to
Paris for the weekend and just he and I and
(19:02):
we stayed at the Ritz and we went to the
Pompey Dew, we went to the Louver, we went to
all museums and my main thing was that I wanted
to eat French fries, like actual French fries free. So
that was the first thing we did when we checked
into the hotel, is that I ordered French fries and
(19:22):
he took me all around, you know, we were eating
all kinds of things. And on the way back to London,
he said, do you know why I took you to Paris,
just you and I? And I said no, and he said,
because I wanted you to see Paris for the first
time with a man who will always love you no
matter what.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So sweet, I mean, what you've been talking about is
memories of a man who loved food, loved you, wanted
to take you and indulge in new experiences to do
with eating and cooking and spending time with you. And
I think that you know, that is about what we do.
Food is memory and food is love, you know, it's
(20:08):
really and that's what you're doing with your children and
what we keep doing and your grandmother. So many people
I've talked to really talk about their grandmothers. You know, yeah,
because I think again, I do it with my grandchildren.
I know that. You know, if you're a working mother,
you're trying to get through the day or it's like
a struggle, and the cand mother is a place you
want them to remember your food. You want them to
(20:29):
want to spoil them and give them loops, fruit loops
and also a recipe that they'll cook they're gone.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
It's true. I often think about that and think about
the food legacy of a family and what dishes go
from generation to generation. And there's also seems to be
such a specific flavor profile. You know. It's like if
if I cook something, you know, my kids like the
way I cook something as opposed to anybody else, even
if it's you know, like there we're all following the
(20:58):
same recipe.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Of course, should we just talk about the food that
you're cooking with? Goog that you want a sole because
you have had such an influence on the way we eat,
the way we live, the way we buy, the way
(21:21):
we collect, the way we treat ourselves.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Yeah, I mean it's been probably the steepest learning curve
of my life. And it's also a marathon. You know,
it's been years of building a business and not having
any idea what I was doing, not knowing how to
monetize the business, and you know, been through so many
highs and lows and learnings and incredibly painful mistakes and
(21:48):
real triumphs that you know are little but meaningful to us.
And so but I do think that the cultural impact
is it's an important thing to contribute, right if you
feel whatever you're trying to do in the world that
you authentically are trying to, you know, connect somebody to
(22:09):
something good or that will be beautiful or uplifting, it's
a very fulfilling job in a lot of ways to have.
And so it's really fun right now because we kind
of in this last year launched something called Goop Kitchen,
which is only still here in Los Angeles, but I
think we're going to expand quickly, which is not a restaurant.
It's just being able to deliver on those brand values
(22:32):
of getting really high quality, organic, local, seasonal food to
people's plates, because the quickest road to feeling better is
just watching the quality of the food that you're eating, like,
is it nutrient dense? Is it minimally processed? I mean,
you know, that's why you're such a big inspiration to me.
(22:52):
Is everything you make is so ingredient driven and so delicious.
I remember when I first started coming to the restaurant
so many years ago, gosh, twenty five years ago, I
mean so long ago, and just thinking, oh my gosh,
there's you can see everything like the beauty of you
know that dish, I forget the name of it, but
(23:13):
you have the sort of fava beans and art of
chokes and it's like female bring yeah, Roman yeah, and
it's like, oh my gosh, it's all so visible, and
you just you see it in your mind coming straight
from the garden right onto the plate and just enhancing
all of the beautiful aspects of nature and great olive
oil and there you go. You know. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I always think that if you cook with few ingredients
that we do, and I think in Italy you do.
I love I love going to Paris and having a
burb block over a piece of turbot with spinach and
morale mushrooms. But there's something about going to Italy and
having a grilled piece of fish with three herbs and
a bit of olive oil, or as you say, the
vegetables which just depend on themselves. You can't mask it,
(23:57):
you know.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
I mean, what was it like for you to open
the River Cafe in London at that time where you
know it wasn't like that. I mean, there wasn't an
ingredient forward food culture.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And when Rose and I started, she had lived in
Luca for five years. And Richard's mother was a cook
from Trieste who then went to Florence and then came
to London, probably thirty nine. And we always say that
she used to wander around London coming from Florence looking
for a view. She was always trying to find the piazza.
Mikaelangel was somewhere in London. She's a woman who said
(24:31):
to me once on her deathbed, she said, Ruthie, I
want you to put She had amazing skin, and she said,
I want you to put more cream on your face
and less herbs on your fish.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
You know, that was her her last year.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
And every time I put herbs on my fish, I
was like, not too many. Every night I put more cream.
But the I think that that Rose and I thought,
why can't we have the kind of food that we
cooked and ate in Italy, but in London and it
was challenging. You know if we served a pop up
homadoro and it had tomatoes and bread and basil and
that was it. And somebody would say in those days
(25:07):
and by paying four pounds fifty for a bit of
bread and tomato. But now I always put you know,
the travel people traveled more and more to Europe, and
you know, Freddy Laker with his planes where you could
go cheaply or whatever, they were opened up Europe. Unfortunately
right now because if you want me to be political,
Brexit is closing the doors. But in those days we're
all going and opening the doors and seeing what food
(25:30):
was like. And so I think that really changed things.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
So was it quite iconoclastic, that kind of simplicity.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Of yeah, I think, well I think other people were
doing it. You know, Rollie Lee at Kensington Place did
a more French version of it, and as to Little
and people also changed restaurants. I think everywhere. I think
give credit to Wolfgang Puck. You know, going from Mammy's
on to making pieces at Spargo. It's like you could
either dress up and go to a restaurant and be terrified,
(25:59):
or you could but eat very well, or you could
go to the local Greek or treachery and not eat
very well but have a great time. We thought, why
can't you come and have a great time and eat well?
You know, I think a lot of people were doing that.
So we learned what we started knowing nothing. So you know,
we learned as we grew. There's a lot to do
with food. It's love, it's history, it's memories, it's politics,
(26:21):
but it's also comfort. Yeah, and so if I were
to ask you for our last question in this beautiful room,
on this beautiful day, with what Gwyneth would be your
comfort food?
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Pasta? Ah, I love pasta and I love that it
can be the most laborious, you know, hand rolling out
and stuffing something that you are pureing like most intense
all day episode. Or it can literally be a sauce
(26:54):
that you make in the time it takes for the
water to boil and cook the pasta, which are my
favorite with some garlic, anchovy, you know, chili, oils oil.
But it always has the same result, which is just
taste delicious and it makes you feel so good. It
makes you feel full, but also I don't know. There's
also an elegance to pasta, and I find it really
(27:19):
just the perfect meal, pasta and a glass of red wine.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Well, I'm waiting for you in London. Okay, you don't
have to fry on chewes, it's postage.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
I want to get back behind that friar.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Aren't you back in the kitchen? Come back in the kitchen.
We miss you there. Thank you. To visit the online
shop of the River Cafe, go to shop Therivercafe dot
co dot uk.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
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
Welcome to River Cafe Table four, a production of iHeartRadio
and Adamized Studios.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Gwyneth Paltrow worked for a day in the River Cafe kitchen.
She arrived early, dressed in professional chef whites, ready to cook.
Gwyneth is the only chef ever to have ast clean
and cook fresh anchovies, and for three hours she did.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
I learned a lot that day. I mean, you know,
just when you're a home cook, you don't think about
precision and like repetitively turning out something that's perfect and
exactly the same over a course of many hours.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Didn't Jamie Oliver come in when you were there? You know,
what is Gwyneth? Quite a few people say, what is
Gwyneth Paltrow doing in your kitchen? We said, she's frying anchovies,
you know, So that's as it was. This memory speaks
to how professional Gwyneth is. An Oscar winning actor. She
built Coop from a simple newsletter into an influential and
(01:03):
uplifting business with energy, elegance, and strong values. Another memory
ten years ago, just after the death of our son BeO,
I asked Gwyneth if she might surprise the River Cafe
team and sing one song for them at our Christmas
party to thank them for their care and concern for me.
(01:23):
Gwyneth not only said yes, she sang four songs, danced
with everyone, and stayed to the very end. In the
River Cafe history, we still talk about the time Gwyneth
Paltrow came to sing. I admire Gwyneth for being a brave,
smart entrepreneur. I respect Gwyneth as a writer of recipes.
(01:44):
Most of all, I love Gwyneth for being there with
me that night and here with me today.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Oh boy, I wasn't expecting that that was so beautiful.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Thank you, Gwyneth. Which wuld you like to read the recipe?
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I would love to one of my favorites from the
River Cafe. Zucchini free tea five hundred gram zucchini, one
liter sunflower oil for the batter, one hundred and fifty
grams of plain flour, three tablespoons extra virgin olive oil,
three tablespoons warm water, three egg whites organic. Cut the
(02:26):
zucchini into five millimeter thick ovals, then cut them into
thick matchsticks. For the batter. See the flour into a bowl,
make a well in the center. Pour in the olive oil,
and stirt to combine lucinetting enough warm water to make
a batter the consistency of double cream. Heat the oil
in a high sided pan to one hundred and ninety
(02:48):
degrees celsius. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold
into the batter. Dip the zucchini in the batter. Fry
in batches in the hot oil until golden and crisp.
Serve immediately.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
So when you make do you make zucchini do fry?
Do you do zucchini free tea.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
All the time? Yeah, it's Apple's. One of Apple's favorite
foods is zucchini free tea. And they're so good, especially
when the one thing also you can do with zucchini.
They're slightly larger, I think because the way we do
it of cutting it into rounds and then cutting into
strips may make it easier.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Do you grow them here?
Speaker 3 (03:22):
No, you're getting back east on Long Island in the summer,
we have tomatoes and zucchini for days and days and
days and flowers. They're so delicious. Except I have to say,
and I'm probably this is probably really unpopular, but I
like mozzarella in them more than ricotta in them.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
I don't put any cheese in them. No, I'm never have.
I just love having them absolutely, just the flower and
the kids fry them and then you hold them by
the stem and you just eat them. So, if we
were going to start at the beginning, what is the beginning?
Where were you born? Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
I was born here in Los Angeles and Hollyoo. We
kind of went back and forth between New York City
and Santa Monica a lot. I did a lot of
preschool in New York City, and I did first and
third grades in New York City while my mother was
on Broadway, and then the bulk of the rest of
elementary school here, and then moved permanently to New York
(04:18):
City when I was eleven.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Can you remember the kitchens? Could described the kitchens, but
they're very different. The LA house and the kitchens were
very different. So our kitchen and in Los Angeles here
had a brick floor, red brick floor and a tile counter,
sort of like very country kitchen. Lots of windows and
you could see the backyard in the pool, and we
(04:40):
were in there a lot. I mean, I think with
every house you're in the kitchen more than anywhere. Our
New York kitchen was on the ground floor. We grew
up in a townhouse, almost no windows, but we had
a big fireplace in the kitchen, which is really nice,
and it was more of a modern kitchen. It had
been done by a Swedish architects. It was kind of
minimal and who cooked.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Well. When I was little, I remember, I mean my
mom cooked. My dad started cooking a lot, but that
was later. He got very into cooking kind of when
we were older teenagers. But we had we had a
no pair that would cook. My mom would cook. It
was kind of like a group effort in the kitchen.
(05:23):
But my mom was always like, she loves food, but
she would get sort of stressed cooking, you know, whereas
my dad was like thought it was really fun. My mom,
I don't think she found it so relaxing.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
And also you just mentioned that she was in theater nice,
so what was that luck?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
So she would come home late after the theater, which
when I was older was really nice. I remember when
I was in high school and she would finish a
plane come home and I would still be awake and
we would kind of have a chat, which was some
of my favorite memories of growing up. In New York,
and or she was doing Shakespeare in the Park and
(06:01):
I would walk down Central Park to go visit her
and watch her. So it was really a wonderful thing
having a mother so steeped in the arts in New
York and with all of the friends and you know,
the artists singing around the piano, and you know, it
was really a great way to check it.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Would she have eaten? Do you think? I often ask
actors who are acting in a play. Do they eat
before the play? Do they eat after the play? Do they?
And everyone varies.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, I think she would generally eat before unless she
had friends coming. It's sort of an occupational hazard to
eat after. I did a play in London, I think
in maybe two thousand and two, and I ate every
night after the play, and I gained about fifteen.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
There is also that thing when you go to see
somebody in a play and then they go, you know,
Ray fines doesn't. It's always dinner afterwards, and you do
see the kind of fatigue and then letting go and
probably eating too much a night, I know, but then
eating before you might go on. Did you feel stuffed
when you went on to the.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't eat before. I was too
nervous to eat before, So I would always end up
eating after and go to Jay Chiky and he, you know,
have a bottle of wine and French fries and some
kind of oyster. And back to New York and back
to growing up with a mother who was acting. And
what was your father doing? He was making TV shows,
So he was making shows here and in New York and
(07:27):
doing a lot of traveling back and forth, and then
and then kind of settled in New York. And that
was great when he was with us all the time.
And but I don't remember him really being in the
kitchen until he had kind of slowed down how prolifically
he was making TV shows. And when he kind of
slowed turned everything down a notch is when he really
(07:50):
got into cooking.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
And would you have meals around the table together with
you and Jake? Oh, my parents sit down? What were
they like?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
They were really nice? I mean it was I think
we felt special being included at the dinner table, even
though it was a nightly event. It felt, you know,
like if they had friends over. We sat with them
at the table and had long conversations It's something that
I've carried on with my kids as well. You know,
we always have dinner all together as a family, no
(08:19):
phones allowed at the table, and you get into great
discourse with them and hear what they think about things.
And I think my father made me feel that I
was valuable during those dinners because he really elicited our opinion.
He asked questions, and my brother and I were very
much a part of the conversation.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
It was his background.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Well, it's interesting, you know because touching on what you
were saying, before he grew up without money. He grew
up on Long Island, and they were you know, they
were kind of a working class moving trying moving up
into middle class Jewish family, but they didn't have a
lot of disposable income, and they didn't they didn't go
out to eat. So when my father finally made it,
(09:03):
you know, like his and he loved food and all
the beautiful things in life. You know, he loved beautiful
fabrics and paintings, and you know, he would take me
to every museum in the world and we would walk
for hours. And I think food for him was really
an expression of life's beauty and our blessings and good
(09:24):
fortune to be able to eat something that was fresh
and delicious and really well conceived and thought about. And
he was so proud that, you know, we ate oysters
and you know, things that he hadn't come across until
really later in his life. And I always remember, and
I wrote about this in my first book, that when
(09:46):
we would get into the car to go out to dinner, like,
no matter how many times we had gone, like, he
was so excited. It was like the greatest thing of
all time that we were going out to dinner.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I think that it's interesting because people that I've told to,
many of them measure their success in the ability to
eat well. It's fascinating that people, you know, when they
were able to go to restaurants and choose something that
they weren't worried about how much it cost, or you
know Paul McCartney saying that he always thought wine was
terrible because he only had really really cheap wine. And
(10:19):
then when he was able to go to a restaurants
somebody bought him a fabulous bottle of wine, he kind
of understood what it had meant to work hard and
what he could do and even just going to restaurants
so that what going back to your dad, what were
his parents like?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
They were New Yorkers. They had so my grandfather's grandfather
had come from Poland. They were from a long line
of rabbis, and they were all Ashkenazi Jews from Poland
and Russia kind of Belarusian, and they were, you know,
(10:55):
had grown up. My grandfather had grown up in a
tenement on the Lower East Side and fought his way
into military school so he could, you know, have three
square meals a day and learn. He craved discipline and order,
and so he was very proud of himself that he
had put himself, you know, had gotten himself in that position.
And they were great. And my grandmother, my dad's mom,
(11:18):
was a great I mean I loved eating at her house.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Grandmother's are really important.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Yeah. Food, I mean she made brisket and that it
was like the best brisket in the world. And then
she also let us have junk food, which we were
not allowed from my mother. So you know, we would
go to stay with them and there would be fruit
loops and I would be out of my mind, you know,
Jake and I would be eating wonderbread with frenches, mustard
(11:44):
and a slice of tomato and lettuce, and we thought
it was the most delicious thing of all time.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
So we have a recipe for brisket I do. And
what about your mother's mother.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
My mother's mother was a fantastic cook and entertainer. She
was a really scary person, but she made the best food.
I'll never forget the things that, you know, really sort
of like fifties food that she made all throughout the eighties,
you know. So her the best deviled eggs in the
(12:18):
whole world, the best Christmas dinners with her stuffing in
her and her spreads would be this whole table full
of the most delicious food. And it was only her,
you know, on her own, chopping and cooking, and her
food was amazing. She was a great, a really great cook.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
You grew up in this house where your father loved
to take you to restaurants and to eat, and your
mother cared for you and came home after theater stories,
and then you left home. And did you cook after
you left home for yourself or did you go home
to eat?
Speaker 3 (13:06):
That's when I really started to learn how to cook.
I went I graduated from school in New York City,
and I went to UC Santa Barbara all the way
across the country, and my father was in Santa Monica
a lot, and I would come home for weekends or
you know, for some good food, and we would cook
together a lot. And that's when we both really started cooking.
(13:27):
And that's when the Food Network was just amazing and
really instructional and tactical, and we would watch you know,
the food the Food Network and learn things and try
them out. Or we would go out to there was
a restaurant in Venice that was kind of legendary called
seventy two Market Street and we would go there, and
or Sheen Wah on Maine, which is a Wolfgang Puck
(13:50):
French fusion Chinese russaurant that I still love to this day.
So there's like a couple places that he would that
he loved that we would go to. But we also
cooked a lot.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
And so do you do that with your children? Do
you cook with them?
Speaker 3 (14:03):
I do?
Speaker 2 (14:04):
I love both of them.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
I cook for both. I cook. You know, Apple's really
interesting because now she's kind of very independent and she
likes to cook for herself a lot, so and she's
vegetarian and she has like really specific food ideas which
is so great and I love I would say what
she asked me to make still for her the most
is lemon pasta. She went through a real like fetichini,
(14:28):
alfredo face and breakfast potatoes. She asked, that's probably what
she asked me to make the most these days. And
then Moses, you know, during the week, I don't. I
don't have time to cook very much. But I cook
kind of all weekend long, and I really love it,
especially Friday nights. It's like how I transition from my
week to being like a woman in a body.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
And did they cook with you or do you think you?
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, they do?
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Do they cook for them?
Speaker 3 (14:56):
I mean, Apple will definitely cook with me. Moses will help, yeah,
but I mostly cook for them. I mean I think
they liked being especially because when we were living in
London and I was before I started Goop, I cooked
all the meals, and so they really they have nostalgia
around me cooking them all the meals, and so I
(15:18):
think there's I think especially Moses sometimes he's like, why
are you making me more food?
Speaker 2 (15:23):
You just love? Do you think that you're interested in
cooking for them? Does come from your own childhood?
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Or I do? Because It was such an unabashed expression
of my father's love for us, like there was no
denying it. And when someone is so excited about like
the seer on their baby back ribs, you know, and
like look at this, Look what I did. You know,
it's so imbued with love that you can't It's undeniable,
and so you learn it as a love language. I
(15:52):
just had this beegind I at a house full of
people at our house in Santa Barbara, and I was
making all these different breakfasts, and you know, my friends
are like, oh my god, we feel so terrible, and
I was like, no, you don't understand, Like this is
my love language. Like I'm so happy doing this.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Did you travel with your parents? Did you go to
Italy or Spain or.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
We never went to Italy until you know, the first
time I ever went to Italy with my father, he
was when he died. He died in Florence, he died
in he died in Rome, and we were doing our
first kind of road trip after my thirtieth birthday. And yeah,
(16:32):
he kind of died on me, which complicated the trip.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Is a complicate Italy for you?
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Yeah, it did complicate Italy for me for a long time.
I didn't go back for ten years. And when we
were on our road trip and I found out that
he was sick and he had been coughing up blood,
and I said, we have to go to the hospital.
You know, he'd been hiding it for me because he
didn't want He really wanted to finish our trip. And
I was like, this is so, we're going to the hospital.
(17:01):
And he was like, no, we got to get to
the Splendido. He really was trying, and I was like,
we're not going to the like, we're going to the hospital.
And he ended up dying. And then I had a
real aversion to Italy for a long time. And then,
very sweetly Chris Martin, my first husband, on my fortieth
birthday ten years later. And I was having a lot
(17:22):
of anxiety about it anyway, because I think turning forty,
I mean, I'm about to turn fifty and I kind
of don't give a but forty, I was like, really
had so much anxiety about it. And he by that point,
I had the two kids, and we got on a
plane and I didn't know where we were going, and
we all of a sudden, I realized we were landing
(17:43):
in Genoa and that we were going to the Splendido,
which was so sweet. It was such a nice surprise.
So it was like a completion, but it was. But
Jake was with me and my two best friends Mary
and Julie, who've been my best friend since one since
I was four and one since I was eleven. They
(18:04):
were with me, and they my father was like a
father to them too, so it was it ended up
being a really beautiful experience that we all got to
be there and and kind of come full circle. And
now I'm you know, we we bought a little farmhouse
in Umbria, so just south of the Tuscan border.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Great food in Umbria, Yeah, truffles in the fall, you
have lentils, you know. Bar It's great.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I know, it's really it's a really special place. So
I'm excited to spend more time there and to learn
some Italian.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
But what about Spain of France?
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Spain so France. Well I kind of told this like
now now it's kind of food. A famous story about
my dad taking me. My mom was doing a filming
something in London when I was ten, we still lived
in Los Angeles and we all made the trip over
to visit her, and then my dad took me to
Paris for the weekend and just he and I and
(19:02):
we stayed at the Ritz and we went to the
Pompey Dew, we went to the Louver, we went to
all museums and my main thing was that I wanted
to eat French fries, like actual French fries free. So
that was the first thing we did when we checked
into the hotel, is that I ordered French fries and
(19:22):
he took me all around, you know, we were eating
all kinds of things. And on the way back to London,
he said, do you know why I took you to Paris,
just you and I? And I said no, and he said,
because I wanted you to see Paris for the first
time with a man who will always love you no
matter what.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So sweet, I mean, what you've been talking about is
memories of a man who loved food, loved you, wanted
to take you and indulge in new experiences to do
with eating and cooking and spending time with you. And
I think that you know, that is about what we do.
Food is memory and food is love, you know, it's
(20:08):
really and that's what you're doing with your children and
what we keep doing and your grandmother. So many people
I've talked to really talk about their grandmothers. You know, yeah,
because I think again, I do it with my grandchildren.
I know that. You know, if you're a working mother,
you're trying to get through the day or it's like
a struggle, and the cand mother is a place you
want them to remember your food. You want them to
(20:29):
want to spoil them and give them loops, fruit loops
and also a recipe that they'll cook they're gone.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
It's true. I often think about that and think about
the food legacy of a family and what dishes go
from generation to generation. And there's also seems to be
such a specific flavor profile. You know. It's like if
if I cook something, you know, my kids like the
way I cook something as opposed to anybody else, even
if it's you know, like there we're all following the
(20:58):
same recipe.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Of course, should we just talk about the food that
you're cooking with? Goog that you want a sole because
you have had such an influence on the way we eat,
the way we live, the way we buy, the way
(21:21):
we collect, the way we treat ourselves.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
Yeah, I mean it's been probably the steepest learning curve
of my life. And it's also a marathon. You know,
it's been years of building a business and not having
any idea what I was doing, not knowing how to
monetize the business, and you know, been through so many
highs and lows and learnings and incredibly painful mistakes and
(21:48):
real triumphs that you know are little but meaningful to us.
And so but I do think that the cultural impact
is it's an important thing to contribute, right if you
feel whatever you're trying to do in the world that
you authentically are trying to, you know, connect somebody to
(22:09):
something good or that will be beautiful or uplifting, it's
a very fulfilling job in a lot of ways to have.
And so it's really fun right now because we kind
of in this last year launched something called Goop Kitchen,
which is only still here in Los Angeles, but I
think we're going to expand quickly, which is not a restaurant.
It's just being able to deliver on those brand values
(22:32):
of getting really high quality, organic, local, seasonal food to
people's plates, because the quickest road to feeling better is
just watching the quality of the food that you're eating, like,
is it nutrient dense? Is it minimally processed? I mean,
you know, that's why you're such a big inspiration to me.
(22:52):
Is everything you make is so ingredient driven and so delicious.
I remember when I first started coming to the restaurant
so many years ago, gosh, twenty five years ago, I
mean so long ago, and just thinking, oh my gosh,
there's you can see everything like the beauty of you
know that dish, I forget the name of it, but
(23:13):
you have the sort of fava beans and art of
chokes and it's like female bring yeah, Roman yeah, and
it's like, oh my gosh, it's all so visible, and
you just you see it in your mind coming straight
from the garden right onto the plate and just enhancing
all of the beautiful aspects of nature and great olive
oil and there you go. You know. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I always think that if you cook with few ingredients
that we do, and I think in Italy you do.
I love I love going to Paris and having a
burb block over a piece of turbot with spinach and
morale mushrooms. But there's something about going to Italy and
having a grilled piece of fish with three herbs and
a bit of olive oil, or as you say, the
vegetables which just depend on themselves. You can't mask it,
(23:57):
you know.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
I mean, what was it like for you to open
the River Cafe in London at that time where you
know it wasn't like that. I mean, there wasn't an
ingredient forward food culture.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And when Rose and I started, she had lived in
Luca for five years. And Richard's mother was a cook
from Trieste who then went to Florence and then came
to London, probably thirty nine. And we always say that
she used to wander around London coming from Florence looking
for a view. She was always trying to find the piazza.
Mikaelangel was somewhere in London. She's a woman who said
(24:31):
to me once on her deathbed, she said, Ruthie, I
want you to put She had amazing skin, and she said,
I want you to put more cream on your face
and less herbs on your fish.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
You know, that was her her last year.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
And every time I put herbs on my fish, I
was like, not too many. Every night I put more cream.
But the I think that that Rose and I thought,
why can't we have the kind of food that we
cooked and ate in Italy, but in London and it
was challenging. You know if we served a pop up
homadoro and it had tomatoes and bread and basil and
that was it. And somebody would say in those days
(25:07):
and by paying four pounds fifty for a bit of
bread and tomato. But now I always put you know,
the travel people traveled more and more to Europe, and
you know, Freddy Laker with his planes where you could
go cheaply or whatever, they were opened up Europe. Unfortunately
right now because if you want me to be political,
Brexit is closing the doors. But in those days we're
all going and opening the doors and seeing what food
(25:30):
was like. And so I think that really changed things.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
So was it quite iconoclastic, that kind of simplicity.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Of yeah, I think, well I think other people were
doing it. You know, Rollie Lee at Kensington Place did
a more French version of it, and as to Little
and people also changed restaurants. I think everywhere. I think
give credit to Wolfgang Puck. You know, going from Mammy's
on to making pieces at Spargo. It's like you could
either dress up and go to a restaurant and be terrified,
(25:59):
or you could but eat very well, or you could
go to the local Greek or treachery and not eat
very well but have a great time. We thought, why
can't you come and have a great time and eat well?
You know, I think a lot of people were doing that.
So we learned what we started knowing nothing. So you know,
we learned as we grew. There's a lot to do
with food. It's love, it's history, it's memories, it's politics,
(26:21):
but it's also comfort. Yeah, and so if I were
to ask you for our last question in this beautiful room,
on this beautiful day, with what Gwyneth would be your
comfort food?
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Pasta? Ah, I love pasta and I love that it
can be the most laborious, you know, hand rolling out
and stuffing something that you are pureing like most intense
all day episode. Or it can literally be a sauce
(26:54):
that you make in the time it takes for the
water to boil and cook the pasta, which are my
favorite with some garlic, anchovy, you know, chili, oils oil.
But it always has the same result, which is just
taste delicious and it makes you feel so good. It
makes you feel full, but also I don't know. There's
also an elegance to pasta, and I find it really
(27:19):
just the perfect meal, pasta and a glass of red wine.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Well, I'm waiting for you in London. Okay, you don't
have to fry on chewes, it's postage.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
I want to get back behind that friar.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Aren't you back in the kitchen? Come back in the kitchen.
We miss you there. Thank you. To visit the online
shop of the River Cafe, go to shop Therivercafe dot
co dot uk.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
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
Host
Ruth Rogers
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