November 2, 2021 • 19 mins
Michael Caine is a man Ruthie admires and adores. Listen to him on Ruthies Table 4 describing the food of wartime Britain, insisting that every movie he made began over a lunch, and reading our recipe for pannacotta - his favourite desert.
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/therivercafelondon/
Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to River Cafe Table for a production of I
Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. Hi, I'm Michael Caine
and I'm here with a very good friend of michelled,
Ruthie Rodgers. I often say that the real reason I
have a restaurant is that once a week I get
to walk Michael Caine from Table four through the crowded
(00:24):
restaurant to his car and say good night to a
man I admire and I adore. Is that me? Oh? Yeah, well,
I love the restaurant. I always say, what do we
always say? Now? We both said the only reason she
has a restaurant. In each episode, my guest reads a
(00:47):
recipe they have chosen from one of our cookbooks. I
talked about food, the food they cook, the food they eat,
and most of all, the food of their memories. The
River Cafe have a dessert which is my favorite, and
it's called pana cotta with grapper. So what I'm gonna
(01:10):
do is I'm going to give you the recipe in
case you want to make it for yourself. Okay, pour
nine hundred milligrams of cream into a pan, add the
vanilla pods and the lemon rick bring to the boil, simmer,
and reduce by a third pass through a sieve. Then
(01:31):
scrape the seeds from inside the vanilla pods back into
the cream and discard the outer pods. Remove the gelatine
from the milk. Heat the milk until hot, then return
the gelatine to the milk and stir until dissolved. Pour
through a sieve into a hot cream and leave to cool,
stirring occasionally. Lightly whip the remaining cream with the icing sugar,
(01:56):
fold into the cold cream mixture and then add grapper.
It is now ready to be poured into six small
balls and put into the fridge for at least three
hours or if you like, overnight. So, Michael, here we
are a cafe. But let's go back to the beginning.
(02:18):
You were born in London. Yeah, I was born in Burmasey,
which is South London. But I'm a company because I
was born in a part of Burmsey which is opposite
bow Bells. And if you're born within the sound of
bow bells, you're a company. What about food? Do you
have memories of food? Yeah? My memory of food is this.
My father was a Billy's Gate fish market porter and
(02:40):
he was a big gambler, and so he never bought
steak or anything. It was too dear. But he used
to nick a lot of fish. So for fifteen years
I ate fish, every kind of fish you can imagine.
And I realized that's a very healthy thing. And also
another accidental healthy thing for me was the Second World War.
You couldn't get any sugar. You couldn't get anything things
(03:00):
those drinks that you have now with all this sugar
in it. Then I was evacuated into the country away
from the smug which in Bermondsey then was terrible because
of everyone had cold fires. But I was evacuated to
the country and I lived on a farm for six years.
Remember the food there. The food was wonderful. I mean
some of the food I caught myself because I could
(03:21):
outrun a rabbit and I used to catch a rabbit
with a stick and give it to my mother to
cook for dinner. Pheasant partridge, remember all those things, and
so thinking back on it, healthwise, I was very lucky.
And not on top of all that, my mother insisted
I had porridge for breakfast for fifteen years. You had fish,
you had pheasants, you had rabb sorradge rabbit and everything
(03:44):
had fresh vegetables. We lived on a farm. We used
to go and nick the cabbage. And eventually we came
back to London and the council gave us a prefabricated
house which has made of asbestos, and they put them
up like in two weeks, and people were sort of
sympathizing with people like me who were having to live
(04:05):
in these prefabricated houses. And what they didn't know was
what life was like before because in the flat we
lived in when I was a little boy, there was
no toilet. For a start. You had to go down
to the garden, so I had very strong legs, or
you bought a pot, you know. But when we walked
into the prefab the first time, my brother Stanley and I,
(04:29):
we were stunned. We were in a place which for
the first time we had electric light, an indoor toilet,
and it had a little garden. It was unbelievable in
the middle of London and the Elephant Castle. Do you
remember the kitchen. The kitchen was lovely. It was the
electric stove and the refrigerator, you know, it was a refrigerator.
(04:49):
We've never seen a refrigerator, and we had a bathroom.
I mean when we used to have a bath in
the kitchen. In the bathroom, my mother is poor hot
watering in the kettle. So you imagine your mother and
father moving with their children to this pre fabricated house
which had had a bathroom and had a kitchen, It
had a view, it had a garden. So how do
(05:10):
you think that changed her way of being with you
and looking for you. It was fabulous for her because
it cut out masses of work to do things, you know,
And she was so happy. And the food got even better.
Why do you like the pan cootta? Well, the panicotta
(05:32):
has little bits of fruit in it, and I can
eat that without conscience because I thought I'm eating fruit,
you know, And I said, oh, look, there's a BlackBerry
that just happened to have a little bit of extra
panicotta with it because it was quite old. And I
can't stuff down sugar as much as i'd like to,
and there's quite a lot of sugar in it. It's
(05:53):
quite a bit. But just read the resipe. Have you
ever made it? Oh? No, I never make desserts. I
only do main courses and vetch because I'm afraid of
eating them. Oh okay, and what do you make when
you make a main course? What do you like to cook? Well,
I'm the one who responsible in the house for Sunday lunch,
so I do roast beef, roast lam Christmas, I do
(06:13):
the roast turkey. I do the best, allegedly the best
roast potatoes anybody who ever came ever eating. Yeah, I'm
very good at that. The trick is, when they're cooked,
is to mash them just a little bit, just crack
them open, put oil on them, and then bake them again,
so they always got baked inside. Oh yeah, alright, But
(06:34):
I've never eaten panicotta in any other restaurant but yours. Okay, Well,
I always eat it every time I come. You do?
You come usually on a Wednesday or Thursday. You always
sit on table four, and you always sit at the
same seat. And I was just wondering how you feel
about restaurants and food. Well, I love restaurants. I've owned
a couple. I don't use restaurants for occasions. Restaurants are
(06:57):
part of my life. Because your mom worked in the
Lions Corner House. Yeah, my mother was a cook in
the Lions Corner House. That was the first sort of
brasserie in England that I ever saw. There were no
braisseries in England, but Lions Corner House wasn't brasbery. I
realized later when I went to France and loved braisseries
(07:19):
in France, and I came back to England and I
met Peter Langin and we both said, there isn't a
brasserie in London and we opened Langer's Brasrie together. What
was it like being involved in a restaurant fabulous? What
did you like about it? Well? I loved the idea
right from the start of designing the restaurant and then
(07:40):
getting drunk for nothing. What how did you design it?
What would your design be? Of the design there? As?
I said, how we got to design? Peter Langer my partner,
he said, We've got masses of wolves. It was an
enormous restaurant. He said, we covered them with pictures paintings.
I said, paintings, I said, on the money I used
to know? He said, we'll get wonderful paintings for very
(08:02):
little money. Because I had the perfect partner, who's going
to help me? Choose him? I said, what's his name?
He said, David Huckney, David even did the menu forever.
So I had a great time when you sort of
(08:25):
started out acting and being an actor on your own.
Was food important to you then? Would you grab something
or did you go back to you know? I used
to go to the cheapest possible restaurant I could find.
I mean, I had no money. I found an Italian
restaurant in Soho that served three course meal for half
a crown. I interviewed Paul McCartney the other day and
(08:48):
he was telling me that the first really good meal
that he remembers was going with George Martin to Latoie,
and that was an awakening for him of what food
could be. Do you remember an experience going from an
expensive chief restaurants to actually having your first My first
thing was when my dad died. He left me a
(09:09):
bit of money, about a hundred pounds, and I was
so sad. I thought, I'm going to get on the
train and go to Paris. And I got on a
train on my own and went to Paris. And I
stayed there for about seven months. And I adored the
food in Paris. I loved it, but I adore English.
I remember how old you were when you went to Paris.
I was seventeen seventeen, so he took the hundred pounds.
(09:32):
Did the hundred pounds last or seven months? Now? I worked.
I used to sell on the street free free for
a franc used free for a franc I used to
sell that. And I had a French mate who had
a cafe there. And then I had an American friend,
another sort of stroke like me, and he worked in
the air terminal, so I used to go in there
(09:56):
and I could get free food from him. And I
also to have an empty suitcase and I sleep on
the sofa as I was waiting for a plane if
I didn't have enough money. But I love Paris, and
I learned speak French. I speak very good French. Good.
Do you remember like the first grand meal that you
had when you had money, which were you taken to
a restaurant and had something amazingly sophisticated to eat and
(10:17):
that made you interested in food and even what food
could Yeah, the restaurant was the White Elephant that was
encouraged and street. Yes, and we went there. I'm trying
to think what the hell it was we had. It
was to do with caviare, and there was caviare all
over the place, and I never got over that. I'd
never eat the caveat obviously couldn't afford it. But then
(10:40):
this whole dish was cavia. It was wonderful. I know
who it was too. Harry Saltzmand had given me the
part in in Christ File and he took me to
the White Elephant, and of course I was under contract.
You know, I could have anything I liked, and I
suddenly realized that's what my life was going to be.
(11:01):
Having great food could be possible, having enough money to
have great food, because I think food is in aspiration,
isn't it Having great food or something that you can
it opens you up to a world. That's why I
come here. What about when you went to make the
Italian Job in Italy? What was that like? I had
a wonderful time. It was a great restaurant every evening.
Did they cook on set? You eat? No? No, we
(11:22):
didn't buy the actually lunch because a movie is a
hard thing to make, you know, especially one with all
those cars and crowds like the Italian Job, So we
concentrated on that all day. I mean, you wind up
having a sandwich or a boll of spaghetti, But then
you'd have a great meal in the evening. And if
you are in a film, do you really try and
avoid food or do you find it's good to sit down?
And I avoid food. Yeah, I don't want to go
(11:43):
to sleep in the afternoon when I was supposed to
be doing ten pages of dialogue. Food makes you go
to sleep. When you make movies in l A. Is
there a restaurant that you go to? Chasen's. We ate
the Chasons tell us about Chason's. Jason's was almost like
a club. I used to go there every Friday and
(12:04):
you look around the room and Alfred Hitchcock was always
sitting there. Carry Grant was over there, you know, and
it was one of those incredible places, you know. But
everybody only ever went to the same restaurant on the
same day. If you went to Chasing's on a Tuesday,
would have been crowded, but there'd been no stars there.
(12:25):
The stars were there Friday night, and Spargo was another
one Thursday. Everyone was in Spargo. And a great thing
about that is that there was great food and great atmosphere,
but there were stars everywhere, just all the movie stars
have been seeing in movies all my life. My grandfather
knew Alfred. Alfred Hitchcock was born in South London. His
(12:48):
father had a grocery store next to all my great
grandfather with Alfred Hitchcock. When I went to Universal making
a picture Gambit with Sherleian McClean, I was given the
dressing room bungalow next door to his. His was a
permanent one, he was always in. Mine was a temporary one.
And I've got to name very well. I've lived in
both of South London. And I said him one day,
(13:10):
I said, I said, I said, I saw strangers on
a train, and there wasn't one shot of a train
in the entire movie, going along a track to somewhere.
He said, whose viewpoint on the train would that have been?
And there in one line he summed up directing movies.
(13:31):
And I remember that we never did a movie with
his cock, did you. I bet people who did movies
and they loved him. I never did. I never got
that luck. If you sit near the wood of and
you've got a great view of what we're cooking, whether
it's doversoles, turbots, pigeons, or pieces of beef. Today we're
making potatoes. Eleven OREGONO Parsley and black olive alforna potatoes
(13:56):
are in here now with all the herbs, good olive
all season, weelve. I don't have incorporate all your mouthy
lemons chopped and chopped garlic a little bit later, the
garlic will probably go too quickly, as with the lemon.
Now the potatoes have had a bit of a head start.
Then we'll get all the lemon and the garlic in
that and they will all come together. The other thing
(14:23):
I think about restaurants, having worked in one and having
an open kitchen really seeing the people who come in,
is that people do very private things in a public space.
So they'll use a restaurant to fire someone, or they'll
use a restaurant an affair, or they'll use a restaurant
to get divorce. You see a lot of tears. If
you talk to my waiters, they will tell you about
(14:45):
the amazing amount of people who cry on my table.
Have cried, but with laughter, jokes and stuff. You know.
I consider myself a tough commit. When you've been asked
to be in a movie where you've had meetings with
you know, serious and director. In Hollywood, you're always with
executives and it's quite serious but it's never dinner, it's
(15:06):
always lunch. I would never discuss business at dinner. You've
got to come to lunch for that, because I'm not
wasting the dinner doing. You know. Do you think that's
just you or is it it's most people. You go
into Hollywood restaurants at lunchtime and it's all business. It's
all business lunches. When Richard and I went to New York,
the thing that I was really interested was we were
(15:28):
often taken out to lunch by his clients, to the
Four Seasons in the Secret Building. And the thing I
still notice is that nobody drinks. You know, Richard ask
for a class of white wine, and I think they
thought he was an alcoholic having and if you go around,
they're having fantastic food, but with iced tea. With New York,
I find a restaurant and live in it. Yeah. My
(15:50):
restaurant in New York was the Lanes. Lane was a
lady who owned this named after her, and she was
one of my closest friends. And she was everyone's close,
just mine, and you always met people there. Yeah, I
mean it was a very showbies area. Yeah, very showbies.
I know for myself that people will return to a
(16:10):
restaurant where they're welcomed with warmth, with kindness, and the
food might not be the top priority, but people will
come back to a restaurant if their chicken was overcooked
or their lemon tar was a bit you know, curdly.
But I certainly will not go back to restaurant where
I've been treated badly, or I've been people have been arrogant,
(16:30):
or you know, you go. You want people to feel
safe when they go. And restaurant where I got treated badly.
I never did because I'm so fussy about restaurants, and yeah,
I read about them, you know, before I go the
first time. And I've always been in restaurants all over
the world, but the River Cafe in particular. Someone took
me there the first time, and I was stunned by
(16:52):
the restaurant. I had never seen a restaurant like that.
It was the highest restaurant I've been in, the widest
and being well known and people coming asking for autographs,
you sit so far apart from each other that no
one recognizes you, especially if like me, you've got a
baseball capitet dark glasses that helps, and you can see
all the staff cooking and there was a big boiler
(17:16):
doing pizzas with great big flames coming out. You would
be meaning the wood oven. Yeah, and I had never
seen a restaurant like that. I mean of the sixties,
the big popular restaurants for small Italian brasseries, which took
over from the English restaurant, you know, where you had
to leave a sort of nine o'clock about half past state.
You see the headway. They're looking at his watch, going
(17:38):
when are the bloody people leaving? But what there was
also sees the timing. You can stay as long as
you like. You leave when you finished at dinner, not
when the waiters have got fed up. I think that
when Rose and I started the River Cafe, we were
at a point in restaurant world. And it wasn't just us,
it was Alice Waters in San Francisco and Sally Clark
(17:58):
in London and rowleyle in London as well. And I
think we were at a point where you could either
go to a very very established, well cooked meal formal.
It was an occasion you would go out, you dress
up and you'd be humiliated by the wine waiter, you know,
but you would have a good meal and then there
were the kind of like you said, the cheap Italians
(18:19):
or the Greek or the places where you could go
and have a great time but maybe not eat so well.
And we thought, well, why can't you combine the two.
Why can't you do a place that has elegance and
it has drama, all the things we look for, but
also you could have fun. From my point of view
as an actor, I realized that I love writing. I'm
(18:42):
writing a book now another one, and I love to garden,
and I love to cook. And if you think that
there are three things, you do them on your own.
My life is spent with a hundred and fifty people
all day, and when I go home, I write, cook,
garden or on my own. And that's why I chose
those things. I didn't know i'd chosen them for that.
(19:07):
One of the questions that I ask everybody at the
end of the conversation is we have food when we're hungry,
and we have food when we're celebrating, but sometimes we
just want food for comfort. What would that be your
comfort food? Well, and years ago I was sausage and mesh. Yes,
now it's ca okay to visit the online shop of
(19:30):
the River cafe. Go to shop the River Cafe dot
co dot UK. River Cafe Table four is a production
of I heart Radio and Adamize Studios. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to River Cafe Table for a production of I
Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. Hi, I'm Michael Caine
and I'm here with a very good friend of michelled,
Ruthie Rodgers. I often say that the real reason I
have a restaurant is that once a week I get
to walk Michael Caine from Table four through the crowded
(00:24):
restaurant to his car and say good night to a
man I admire and I adore. Is that me? Oh? Yeah, well,
I love the restaurant. I always say, what do we
always say? Now? We both said the only reason she
has a restaurant. In each episode, my guest reads a
(00:47):
recipe they have chosen from one of our cookbooks. I
talked about food, the food they cook, the food they eat,
and most of all, the food of their memories. The
River Cafe have a dessert which is my favorite, and
it's called pana cotta with grapper. So what I'm gonna
(01:10):
do is I'm going to give you the recipe in
case you want to make it for yourself. Okay, pour
nine hundred milligrams of cream into a pan, add the
vanilla pods and the lemon rick bring to the boil, simmer,
and reduce by a third pass through a sieve. Then
(01:31):
scrape the seeds from inside the vanilla pods back into
the cream and discard the outer pods. Remove the gelatine
from the milk. Heat the milk until hot, then return
the gelatine to the milk and stir until dissolved. Pour
through a sieve into a hot cream and leave to cool,
stirring occasionally. Lightly whip the remaining cream with the icing sugar,
(01:56):
fold into the cold cream mixture and then add grapper.
It is now ready to be poured into six small
balls and put into the fridge for at least three
hours or if you like, overnight. So, Michael, here we
are a cafe. But let's go back to the beginning.
(02:18):
You were born in London. Yeah, I was born in Burmasey,
which is South London. But I'm a company because I
was born in a part of Burmsey which is opposite
bow Bells. And if you're born within the sound of
bow bells, you're a company. What about food? Do you
have memories of food? Yeah? My memory of food is this.
My father was a Billy's Gate fish market porter and
(02:40):
he was a big gambler, and so he never bought
steak or anything. It was too dear. But he used
to nick a lot of fish. So for fifteen years
I ate fish, every kind of fish you can imagine.
And I realized that's a very healthy thing. And also
another accidental healthy thing for me was the Second World War.
You couldn't get any sugar. You couldn't get anything things
(03:00):
those drinks that you have now with all this sugar
in it. Then I was evacuated into the country away
from the smug which in Bermondsey then was terrible because
of everyone had cold fires. But I was evacuated to
the country and I lived on a farm for six years.
Remember the food there. The food was wonderful. I mean
some of the food I caught myself because I could
(03:21):
outrun a rabbit and I used to catch a rabbit
with a stick and give it to my mother to
cook for dinner. Pheasant partridge, remember all those things, and
so thinking back on it, healthwise, I was very lucky.
And not on top of all that, my mother insisted
I had porridge for breakfast for fifteen years. You had fish,
you had pheasants, you had rabb sorradge rabbit and everything
(03:44):
had fresh vegetables. We lived on a farm. We used
to go and nick the cabbage. And eventually we came
back to London and the council gave us a prefabricated
house which has made of asbestos, and they put them
up like in two weeks, and people were sort of
sympathizing with people like me who were having to live
(04:05):
in these prefabricated houses. And what they didn't know was
what life was like before because in the flat we
lived in when I was a little boy, there was
no toilet. For a start. You had to go down
to the garden, so I had very strong legs, or
you bought a pot, you know. But when we walked
into the prefab the first time, my brother Stanley and I,
(04:29):
we were stunned. We were in a place which for
the first time we had electric light, an indoor toilet,
and it had a little garden. It was unbelievable in
the middle of London and the Elephant Castle. Do you
remember the kitchen. The kitchen was lovely. It was the
electric stove and the refrigerator, you know, it was a refrigerator.
(04:49):
We've never seen a refrigerator, and we had a bathroom.
I mean when we used to have a bath in
the kitchen. In the bathroom, my mother is poor hot
watering in the kettle. So you imagine your mother and
father moving with their children to this pre fabricated house
which had had a bathroom and had a kitchen, It
had a view, it had a garden. So how do
(05:10):
you think that changed her way of being with you
and looking for you. It was fabulous for her because
it cut out masses of work to do things, you know,
And she was so happy. And the food got even better.
Why do you like the pan cootta? Well, the panicotta
(05:32):
has little bits of fruit in it, and I can
eat that without conscience because I thought I'm eating fruit,
you know, And I said, oh, look, there's a BlackBerry
that just happened to have a little bit of extra
panicotta with it because it was quite old. And I
can't stuff down sugar as much as i'd like to,
and there's quite a lot of sugar in it. It's
(05:53):
quite a bit. But just read the resipe. Have you
ever made it? Oh? No, I never make desserts. I
only do main courses and vetch because I'm afraid of
eating them. Oh okay, and what do you make when
you make a main course? What do you like to cook? Well,
I'm the one who responsible in the house for Sunday lunch,
so I do roast beef, roast lam Christmas, I do
(06:13):
the roast turkey. I do the best, allegedly the best
roast potatoes anybody who ever came ever eating. Yeah, I'm
very good at that. The trick is, when they're cooked,
is to mash them just a little bit, just crack
them open, put oil on them, and then bake them again,
so they always got baked inside. Oh yeah, alright, But
(06:34):
I've never eaten panicotta in any other restaurant but yours. Okay, Well,
I always eat it every time I come. You do?
You come usually on a Wednesday or Thursday. You always
sit on table four, and you always sit at the
same seat. And I was just wondering how you feel
about restaurants and food. Well, I love restaurants. I've owned
a couple. I don't use restaurants for occasions. Restaurants are
(06:57):
part of my life. Because your mom worked in the
Lions Corner House. Yeah, my mother was a cook in
the Lions Corner House. That was the first sort of
brasserie in England that I ever saw. There were no
braisseries in England, but Lions Corner House wasn't brasbery. I
realized later when I went to France and loved braisseries
(07:19):
in France, and I came back to England and I
met Peter Langin and we both said, there isn't a
brasserie in London and we opened Langer's Brasrie together. What
was it like being involved in a restaurant fabulous? What
did you like about it? Well? I loved the idea
right from the start of designing the restaurant and then
(07:40):
getting drunk for nothing. What how did you design it?
What would your design be? Of the design there? As?
I said, how we got to design? Peter Langer my partner,
he said, We've got masses of wolves. It was an
enormous restaurant. He said, we covered them with pictures paintings.
I said, paintings, I said, on the money I used
to know? He said, we'll get wonderful paintings for very
(08:02):
little money. Because I had the perfect partner, who's going
to help me? Choose him? I said, what's his name?
He said, David Huckney, David even did the menu forever.
So I had a great time when you sort of
(08:25):
started out acting and being an actor on your own.
Was food important to you then? Would you grab something
or did you go back to you know? I used
to go to the cheapest possible restaurant I could find.
I mean, I had no money. I found an Italian
restaurant in Soho that served three course meal for half
a crown. I interviewed Paul McCartney the other day and
(08:48):
he was telling me that the first really good meal
that he remembers was going with George Martin to Latoie,
and that was an awakening for him of what food
could be. Do you remember an experience going from an
expensive chief restaurants to actually having your first My first
thing was when my dad died. He left me a
(09:09):
bit of money, about a hundred pounds, and I was
so sad. I thought, I'm going to get on the
train and go to Paris. And I got on a
train on my own and went to Paris. And I
stayed there for about seven months. And I adored the
food in Paris. I loved it, but I adore English.
I remember how old you were when you went to Paris.
I was seventeen seventeen, so he took the hundred pounds.
(09:32):
Did the hundred pounds last or seven months? Now? I worked.
I used to sell on the street free free for
a franc used free for a franc I used to
sell that. And I had a French mate who had
a cafe there. And then I had an American friend,
another sort of stroke like me, and he worked in
the air terminal, so I used to go in there
(09:56):
and I could get free food from him. And I
also to have an empty suitcase and I sleep on
the sofa as I was waiting for a plane if
I didn't have enough money. But I love Paris, and
I learned speak French. I speak very good French. Good.
Do you remember like the first grand meal that you
had when you had money, which were you taken to
a restaurant and had something amazingly sophisticated to eat and
(10:17):
that made you interested in food and even what food
could Yeah, the restaurant was the White Elephant that was
encouraged and street. Yes, and we went there. I'm trying
to think what the hell it was we had. It
was to do with caviare, and there was caviare all
over the place, and I never got over that. I'd
never eat the caveat obviously couldn't afford it. But then
(10:40):
this whole dish was cavia. It was wonderful. I know
who it was too. Harry Saltzmand had given me the
part in in Christ File and he took me to
the White Elephant, and of course I was under contract.
You know, I could have anything I liked, and I
suddenly realized that's what my life was going to be.
(11:01):
Having great food could be possible, having enough money to
have great food, because I think food is in aspiration,
isn't it Having great food or something that you can
it opens you up to a world. That's why I
come here. What about when you went to make the
Italian Job in Italy? What was that like? I had
a wonderful time. It was a great restaurant every evening.
Did they cook on set? You eat? No? No, we
(11:22):
didn't buy the actually lunch because a movie is a
hard thing to make, you know, especially one with all
those cars and crowds like the Italian Job, So we
concentrated on that all day. I mean, you wind up
having a sandwich or a boll of spaghetti, But then
you'd have a great meal in the evening. And if
you are in a film, do you really try and
avoid food or do you find it's good to sit down?
And I avoid food. Yeah, I don't want to go
(11:43):
to sleep in the afternoon when I was supposed to
be doing ten pages of dialogue. Food makes you go
to sleep. When you make movies in l A. Is
there a restaurant that you go to? Chasen's. We ate
the Chasons tell us about Chason's. Jason's was almost like
a club. I used to go there every Friday and
(12:04):
you look around the room and Alfred Hitchcock was always
sitting there. Carry Grant was over there, you know, and
it was one of those incredible places, you know. But
everybody only ever went to the same restaurant on the
same day. If you went to Chasing's on a Tuesday,
would have been crowded, but there'd been no stars there.
(12:25):
The stars were there Friday night, and Spargo was another
one Thursday. Everyone was in Spargo. And a great thing
about that is that there was great food and great atmosphere,
but there were stars everywhere, just all the movie stars
have been seeing in movies all my life. My grandfather
knew Alfred. Alfred Hitchcock was born in South London. His
(12:48):
father had a grocery store next to all my great
grandfather with Alfred Hitchcock. When I went to Universal making
a picture Gambit with Sherleian McClean, I was given the
dressing room bungalow next door to his. His was a
permanent one, he was always in. Mine was a temporary one.
And I've got to name very well. I've lived in
both of South London. And I said him one day,
(13:10):
I said, I said, I said, I saw strangers on
a train, and there wasn't one shot of a train
in the entire movie, going along a track to somewhere.
He said, whose viewpoint on the train would that have been?
And there in one line he summed up directing movies.
(13:31):
And I remember that we never did a movie with
his cock, did you. I bet people who did movies
and they loved him. I never did. I never got
that luck. If you sit near the wood of and
you've got a great view of what we're cooking, whether
it's doversoles, turbots, pigeons, or pieces of beef. Today we're
making potatoes. Eleven OREGONO Parsley and black olive alforna potatoes
(13:56):
are in here now with all the herbs, good olive
all season, weelve. I don't have incorporate all your mouthy
lemons chopped and chopped garlic a little bit later, the
garlic will probably go too quickly, as with the lemon.
Now the potatoes have had a bit of a head start.
Then we'll get all the lemon and the garlic in
that and they will all come together. The other thing
(14:23):
I think about restaurants, having worked in one and having
an open kitchen really seeing the people who come in,
is that people do very private things in a public space.
So they'll use a restaurant to fire someone, or they'll
use a restaurant an affair, or they'll use a restaurant
to get divorce. You see a lot of tears. If
you talk to my waiters, they will tell you about
(14:45):
the amazing amount of people who cry on my table.
Have cried, but with laughter, jokes and stuff. You know.
I consider myself a tough commit. When you've been asked
to be in a movie where you've had meetings with
you know, serious and director. In Hollywood, you're always with
executives and it's quite serious but it's never dinner, it's
(15:06):
always lunch. I would never discuss business at dinner. You've
got to come to lunch for that, because I'm not
wasting the dinner doing. You know. Do you think that's
just you or is it it's most people. You go
into Hollywood restaurants at lunchtime and it's all business. It's
all business lunches. When Richard and I went to New York,
the thing that I was really interested was we were
(15:28):
often taken out to lunch by his clients, to the
Four Seasons in the Secret Building. And the thing I
still notice is that nobody drinks. You know, Richard ask
for a class of white wine, and I think they
thought he was an alcoholic having and if you go around,
they're having fantastic food, but with iced tea. With New York,
I find a restaurant and live in it. Yeah. My
(15:50):
restaurant in New York was the Lanes. Lane was a
lady who owned this named after her, and she was
one of my closest friends. And she was everyone's close,
just mine, and you always met people there. Yeah, I
mean it was a very showbies area. Yeah, very showbies.
I know for myself that people will return to a
(16:10):
restaurant where they're welcomed with warmth, with kindness, and the
food might not be the top priority, but people will
come back to a restaurant if their chicken was overcooked
or their lemon tar was a bit you know, curdly.
But I certainly will not go back to restaurant where
I've been treated badly, or I've been people have been arrogant,
(16:30):
or you know, you go. You want people to feel
safe when they go. And restaurant where I got treated badly.
I never did because I'm so fussy about restaurants, and yeah,
I read about them, you know, before I go the
first time. And I've always been in restaurants all over
the world, but the River Cafe in particular. Someone took
me there the first time, and I was stunned by
(16:52):
the restaurant. I had never seen a restaurant like that.
It was the highest restaurant I've been in, the widest
and being well known and people coming asking for autographs,
you sit so far apart from each other that no
one recognizes you, especially if like me, you've got a
baseball capitet dark glasses that helps, and you can see
all the staff cooking and there was a big boiler
(17:16):
doing pizzas with great big flames coming out. You would
be meaning the wood oven. Yeah, and I had never
seen a restaurant like that. I mean of the sixties,
the big popular restaurants for small Italian brasseries, which took
over from the English restaurant, you know, where you had
to leave a sort of nine o'clock about half past state.
You see the headway. They're looking at his watch, going
(17:38):
when are the bloody people leaving? But what there was
also sees the timing. You can stay as long as
you like. You leave when you finished at dinner, not
when the waiters have got fed up. I think that
when Rose and I started the River Cafe, we were
at a point in restaurant world. And it wasn't just us,
it was Alice Waters in San Francisco and Sally Clark
(17:58):
in London and rowleyle in London as well. And I
think we were at a point where you could either
go to a very very established, well cooked meal formal.
It was an occasion you would go out, you dress
up and you'd be humiliated by the wine waiter, you know,
but you would have a good meal and then there
were the kind of like you said, the cheap Italians
(18:19):
or the Greek or the places where you could go
and have a great time but maybe not eat so well.
And we thought, well, why can't you combine the two.
Why can't you do a place that has elegance and
it has drama, all the things we look for, but
also you could have fun. From my point of view
as an actor, I realized that I love writing. I'm
(18:42):
writing a book now another one, and I love to garden,
and I love to cook. And if you think that
there are three things, you do them on your own.
My life is spent with a hundred and fifty people
all day, and when I go home, I write, cook,
garden or on my own. And that's why I chose
those things. I didn't know i'd chosen them for that.
(19:07):
One of the questions that I ask everybody at the
end of the conversation is we have food when we're hungry,
and we have food when we're celebrating, but sometimes we
just want food for comfort. What would that be your
comfort food? Well, and years ago I was sausage and mesh. Yes,
now it's ca okay to visit the online shop of
(19:30):
the River cafe. Go to shop the River Cafe dot
co dot UK. River Cafe Table four is a production
of I heart Radio and Adamize Studios. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Ruth Rogers
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