October 16, 2023 • 32 mins
Welcome back to season three of Ruthie's Table 4! We've got a great group of people ahead but we are going to start the season with a good friend, a great director and a great lover of food, Wes Anderson.
I have a few philosophies in life, one of which is to always say yes to Wes Anderson. Ruthie, should we get a sheet from upstairs cupboard and screen Fantastic Mr. Fox outside in the garden tonight? Yes, Wes. Ruthie, shall we try again for the fourth time to make a perfect Bellini? Yes, Wes. Ruthie, how about if we invite all the kids and friends and watch Grand Budapest Hotel before it opens in your living room in London? Yes, Wes. And most recently, Ruthie, I'd be happy to do a podcast with you but, could we do the interview by emailing questions and answers back and forth to each other over a few days or weeks? Yes, Wes. So, here we are, Wes Anderson with Wes Anderson. A little strange, but as always, I said yes.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to season three of Ruthie's Table four. We've
got a great group of people ahead, and we're going
to start with my good friend with a great director,
a great eater of food, appreciator of food, Wes Anderson.
(00:21):
I have a few philosophies in life, one of which
is to always say yes to Wes Anderson, my really
good friend, Ruthie. Should we get a sheet from upstairs
cupboard and screen fantastic mister Fox outside in the garden tonight, Yes, Wes, Ruthie.
Shall we try again for the fourth time to make
(00:42):
a perfect Bellini? Yes, Wes, Ruthie. How about if we
invite all the kids and friends and watch Grand Budapest
Hotel before it opens in your living room in London.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yes, Wes.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
And most recently, Ruthie, I'd be happy to do podcast
with you. But could we do the interview by emailing
questions and answers back and forth to each other over
a few days or weeks, Yes, Wes. So here we
are Wes Anderson with Wes Anderson. A little strange, but
(01:17):
as always I said yes.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I'll just jump around with a few things. Maybe for
introducing myself. I don't know. If I'm responding to something
Ruthie is saying. Is Ruthie saying something at the beginning,
and then I'm chiming in. I'll wait to do that bit,
and then you can also anything you want me to
redo or add more. I'll just give a few things
to start. Maybe I'll say I'll say hello, this is
(01:45):
Wes Anderson. I'm going to read you the recipe for
the River Cafe roast pigeon stuffed with kotaquino. This recipe
serves six. You'll need one small red onion, peeled and chopped,
two celery sticks chopped, two tablespoons of olive oil, plus
(02:09):
twenty five mili liters for the roasting tint to put
that on the side somewhere. You'll need one half ready
cooked cotaquino sausage, half a sausage, ten fresh sage leaves shredded, please,
five hundred milliters kianti. That's a more than a half bottle.
(02:31):
And finally you found it. You said it again, Where
did you find it? Okay, I'll come see it in
a moment. I'm just going to finish this recipe. Finally,
perhaps most importantly, you'll need six breast pigeons. That's six
(02:57):
pigeons from the breast. I guess these are French pigeons.
Breast I think is near near Lyon, near Genevas, south
of must be almost Burgundy or next to Burgundy, or
in Burgundy. I'm not sure. They may. Just make sure
they're plucked and cleaned. Now, preheat the oven to two
(03:18):
hundred and thirty degrees celsius to make the stuffing Soften
the onion and celery in the two tablespoons of olive
oil for ten minutes over a low heat. Small serpent,
she says, remove the skin from the cotaquino and crumble
the meat with your hands. But this get rid of this,
put the skin somewhere else. Now, add the cotaquino and
(03:40):
sage to the onion and celery and fry together for
a few minutes. Then pour off the fat from the
pan and add two hundred and fifty milli liters. I'm
going to continue. Add two hundred and fifty mili liters
red wine and boiled to reduce by at least half
(04:02):
season with black pepper, and allow to cool before stuffing
into the birds. Into the six birds, heat the two
hundred and fifty milli liters of olive oil in a
roasting tin over a medium high heat. Then brown each
bird all over, season with sea salt and black pepper,
and place the tin in the top of the hot
(04:24):
oven the upper shelf inside the oven and roast for
twenty minutes. Remove the tin from the oven and take
out the pigeons. I'm not sure. Maybe we cook them
a bit more through I'm not sure how they come
out twenty minutes, keep them warm, Pour any excess oil
out of the tin. Then add the remaining red wine
(04:47):
over a high heat. Reduce us we got half the
wine still to go, I think yes, over a high heat,
and so their pigeons are not in there anymore. So okay,
over a high heat, reduce the liquid by half. So
cook it until half it goes away. I think all
of the people who cook know this. I don't know that.
Then season with sea salt and black pepper, and then
(05:08):
this is your sauce. Pour it over the pigeons to serve,
maybe with some peese or something like that. You've read
the recipe for a pigeon. Why have you chosen this recipe?
Do you cook it yourself? When did you last eat it?
Were there any memorable moments that you ate it? Well,
I have not cooked any pigeon ever. I haven't cooked
(05:30):
any bird. I can't really cook. I can cook a
few things, but I have chosen the recipe for no
reason other than the fact that anytime I see this
pigeon on the River Cafe menu, I immediately order it.
Pigeon is my favorite bird anyway, and it ruined. Fact
once told me about an occasion when he ate a
(05:52):
pigeon and he literally began to cry out of happiness.
Jaman saw the actual tears. See. I'm in the room
here at the Chateau La Coste, which is extremely comfortable.
It's a great place. So far, I have not been out.
I haven't seen Richard's gallery yet, which I'm going to
(06:13):
go do in about an hour. I've just been doing
my work here in the room, which is really all
I wanted to do except for go see Richard's building.
You know one thing I thought might be worth mentioning
is for years we do often the first premiere of
(06:34):
a new movie I make ends up being one where
you're cooking at it at your house. We had the
first public screening of Grand Budapest hotel in Italy. Many
years ago we showed Fantastic Mister Fox on a sheet
and that was the first time anybody had seen it
outside of the production. We always plan to do one,
(06:54):
as you know, and we always eat very well afterwards.
Now I'm going to act like Ruthie's asked me about
how do we eat on our movies. Well, you know,
on our movies, what we do during the day. We
actually I don't like to stop work in the day.
On movies. Often you stop and that there's a very
(07:16):
long break, and then it takes even longer to get
back from the break. So the way we've been doing
it is we have these little tables. They're made to
be folded into suitcases, and we set them up on
the right on the side of the set. And the
people who are actually working on the set, which is
kind of a small group. Other people working building sets
and things, they have a different experience. But the group
(07:37):
on the set, we have our lunch there and it's
brought out. And for years I tried to make it
just soup and to convince everyone that we would just
eat soup and then get right back to work. But
we did have some very good soups. In Germany, there
was a shop across the street from the hotel that
we lived where they would make soups for us every day,
but most people don't just want soup. Eventually there was
(08:00):
a mutiny. In particular our key grip Sanjay Sammy said
you can't push a dolly all day and just only
eat a thin soup. We started bringing sanch his own
steaks and things. But the thing we do also is
when we finish the shooting for the day, we always
have a dinner with the whole cast and the department heads.
(08:25):
That group. We all live together in a small hotel usually,
and we have our own little dinner room and cook
We always have great dinners at the end of the day.
Almost invariably, everybody who's working in the cast and in
those departments is there for dinner. Our costume designer usually
shows up very late, sometimes close to midnight, but we
(08:47):
keep a plate for her and usually a plate for
the extremely large team of helpers who roll in. It
just reinforces how dedicated she is because she works into
the late out. You know, I've done a lot of
work in restaurants over the years with no Ah boundback
and we wrote a movie in Barpeiti in New York.
(09:07):
We were there for probably six hours a day for
a year, and we still go there of course in
New York. That's our canteen. Ruthie am I allowed to
(09:31):
turn the tables for a moment in this podcast and
ask about Well, I've always loved the history of the
River Cafe, you know, I've looked at the plans that
show how it grew over the years from a little
room which was a canteen for Richard's firm, for Rogers,
(09:55):
Sirk and Harbor. Was it always called?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Were those partners all there in the beginning? Can I
asked you to tell a bit about the beginning of
the River Cafe and what it was like and who
started coming there and was it only at lunch at first?
It reminds me of the commissaries of the old studios,
which used to be such busy places. And I remember
when Owen Wilson and I first went to Los Angeles
(10:20):
to go to work. Essentially we our producers James L.
Brooks and Polyplatt. They had their offices were in the
Sydney Poitier building on the Columbia Lot, which was in
Culver City, and it was the which had been the
MGM lot, and the Commissary was still a busy place.
I mean there were sort of two, but I don't
(10:42):
know how much people use those anymore or if they're
even there, but they were play you know, when I'm
doing a movie. When I'm working on a movie, I
try to have the lunch be briefest experience it possibly
can be. We do it on the set. We bring
to tables onto the set itself, and the people who
(11:03):
are working on the set just have a fifteen minutes
or something like that. That's that's the way I like to
do it. But I love to have a So I
like the idea of having the canteen right there in
the workplace, but then to have a canteen that grows
into the river cafe. That's an unusual story. Can I
(11:24):
ask some nostalgic recollection of the beginnings of it and
the evolution of it?
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Or I wes s it's Ruthie. I'm sitting here looking
at Santa Margharita. I'm watching you were here. It seems
wherever I go on holiday wish you were there, and
I can understand why. So it's interesting your question, and
I'm really happy to turn the table. Have you turned
the table on me? When Richard finished the Pompadou after
(11:53):
six years of living in Paris, working in Paris creating
that building, the view going back to London was to
create kind of almost like you were describing a studio
community with open space, with common rooms and a place
to eat, whether it was a commissary or canteen, that
(12:16):
there would be a place where people could meet and
talk of food. Very often what we did in Paris
in a cafe or a bar on the way to
the office or the way back. And I think what
he did not want was to be just an office
in a large building and then everybody disappeared at midday and.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Came back to work.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
So I think when they found the warehouses on the Thames,
it was completely ideal because it wasn't out of the center,
it was on the river. It had the possibility of
a green space. He actually tore down a building that
blocked the view of the river and made that into
a communal garden. Because it was quite large, there were
(12:59):
spaces taken by other architectural firms. There was a space
taken by a set designer, there was one taken by
a framer, and so everybody was there doing different kind
of creative things, and then the challenge was where to eat,
what to do.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
With that space.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
And I can remember very few decisions or decisions I
think that you can actually remember being made in your life.
But I do remember that we were on a ski
holiday in Switzerland and Richard had sent out the office
had sent out all sorts of applications for people who
might want to open a restaurant or cafe, a canteen
(13:39):
in the Thames Wharf. And I turned to Richard and
I said, you know, the only thing worse not having
a place to meet and to eat, but to me
have something mediocre. Maybe I'll do it. And i'd come
back from Paris. We had just had bo who was
by that time for where as you know, was sort
of fifteen with Jaman at the American School, and so
(14:01):
that's kind of how we started the River Cafe. Rose
and I knew that Rose had worked with the McNally's
in New York and she was back in London really
wanting to cook. And you know, I was a domestic cook,
so I knew nothing about working in restaurants, but I
always say also that restrictions are sometimes the best things
you can have, and we definitely had restrictions. We had
(14:23):
a very small space, we had a very low budget
of what we could create, and we also had the council,
which for some reason really was against having anything in
a residential area, so they only allowed us to open
to the people who worked in the warehouses, and only
(14:45):
at lunch. But then as words spread that this was
going on, that there was a place in Hammersmith where
you could go and have aposta or a sandwich or
Italian ingredients, that we were starting to get Feimashler, in
her first review of The River Cafe wrote in The
Evening Standard, I'm going to tell you about a restaurant
(15:06):
you cannot go to. And of course it was a
big struggle for us because it was very hard to
make money. We were competing not against other restaurants or cafes,
but against the sandwich girl who would bring sandwiches on
her bicycle. So really, like your idea of the commissary
in a film or working in a film and having
(15:28):
tables brought in was exactly what Richard wanted to have
a place where people could work, eat, go over for
a coffee talk about a drawing. That's why we had
the paper tablecloths, and we still do, so that the
architects could draw while they sat there. We also wanted
to be much more cafe can to me, because if
(15:49):
we had linen tablecloss or no table class, it wouldn't
be right. And in fact, not long ago, the Michelin
people came in and said, you know, we could give
you a second star, but you've got to lose the paper.
That is something we'd rather have than a star.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I think that it's best to have paper tablecloths, not
just on every table everywhere, but on every surface everywhere,
because you never know, something always comes out of the
fact if you have a paper tablecloth and a pen,
this is always a great combination. Everybody's going to do something.
So here's me pretending we're having the conversation again. Well,
(16:26):
I live partly in Paris, and when we're in England,
where we partly live, we eat at home every night,
and when we're in Paris we go out to dinner
every night. When I was first kind of living in
Paris or spending more time in Paris, Juman and I, Juman,
my wife, we used to try new restaurants continuously and
(16:49):
then over the years. The thing I is my favorite
kind of restaurant is a restaurant where I've already been
a restaurant where I know the place. I I sort
of know where I would like to sit and what
I want to order already. And in France, I think
it if you're a foreigner, it helps if you're a
familiar face in the restaurant, if you've been there thirty times,
(17:14):
that's a good way to establish yourself there. I will
say in France, I have a tendency to eat the
now I wouldn't call them the healthiest dishes, the confie
of duck and quite a few lamb chops and more pigeon.
(17:35):
You asked about bar Luce and Milan. Well, you know,
we made this sort of restaurant bar bar Lucca in Milan.
It's what Mutual Product wanted, something like a kind of
classic spot. And the sandwiches are very good. They make
extremely good cocktails and things, and lots of sweets and
(17:56):
things like that gelato. I guess I was trying to
make a place, try to draw on different places we love,
like a bit of Nino in Rome and a bit
of a place called New York burgher town. That's on
what is it forty third Street, fifty I can't even
remember where it is. Near Saint Pizez. Is that the cathedral, gosh,
(18:17):
I can't remember where it is. They have these if
it's still there. They have these tables where you sit
more like desks with little arms to the tables, wondering
if there one is the one to mention in Paris
or Rome. In Rome, we like to go to Nino, we.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Like to go to Tulio, we like to go to
Pure Luigi. But maybe our other favorite place to go
eat in the world is Tokyo. Every now and then
we find ourselves in Japan and there as careful and
interesting and inventive and perfectionist with with their cooking as
(18:55):
anyone in the world. Maybe I guess on some level
it's the Japanese food and the Italian food that leads
the way these days. I particularly love Japanese food. But
you know an interesting thing. The last time we were
in Japan, we.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Were there for a couple of weeks probably, and at
the end of our stay, our friend Con had been
trying to convince us to go to this Italian restaurant,
and I was I don't want to go to Italian
restaurant Signal Inoteca. The chef was called Toshiji Tomori. Well, anyway,
(19:35):
finally the last night we were there, we just went
with going to the Italian place. Well, you would be
very impressed because it would be one of the better
ones outside of Italy and the River Cafe. I'll act
like you asked about when we went on the boat. Yes,
we went on the Queen Mary too, and we had
(19:57):
a group with us Jason Schwarzman and Roman and Roman's
wife Jenny, and Tilda Swinton, Sandro cop and me and
my wife Juman and we really all had a great time.
I mean when the boat arrived from New York to England,
we tried to convince them to let us sail on
(20:18):
to Germany, but they had to bump us out of
our rooms. And we showed our movies and things and
did little talks during the journey. One of the great
things was we had this room and it was on
the opposite end of the boat from the kitchens. I
mean there are probably many kitchens on there, but we
often arranged to have a curry dinner that we watched
(20:42):
them roll the cart down a corridor that's probably about
a kilometer long, and it was very good. We had
very good dinners on that boat, all right.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So Wes Anderson, there was Wessa Anderson, Michael Caine, and
Jake John who are our first three podcasts, and when
we didn't really know what we were doing with thought
we might be just doing a recipe. So we asked
Wes to choose a recipe, and he chose a recipe
from the Blue Book, which was published in nineteen ninety four,
(21:19):
soon to be thirty years old. And it has canty classico,
it's stuff with codaquino, and it's a breast pigeon, which,
coming up to Christmas is very christmasy. It's a bit
like the Blito misto using the kurdaquino kanti. What do
you think about that?
Speaker 4 (21:35):
It's one of those dishes that people who have worked
in the River Cafe a long time ago come back
and eat and they're like, it's like the menu was
very from when I was here before, because it's one
of those dishes. It's timeless. It's a timeless dish, isn't it.
I remember when I learned to cook pigeon when I
was a young chef heir and how you guys would
(21:55):
would say, don't cook it, like if we're in rules
or a gentleman's dining club. It's not got to be
served so pink that it's ripping off the bone. It
can be cooked more like an a rosta misto and
cooked so it's so it's maybe cooked a bit slower,
but so you can eat the whole. Yeah, pigeon. And
you know, Riches would literally the whole pigeon.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
You see him cutting off the legs and picking them up.
It's a great bird to have when we don't have
the game season, so when we don't have grouse or partridge, pheasant,
and then we can have pigeon, you know, all through
the other seasons. Now, yeah, I mean as as an animal,
I might offend people, but I really have a real
version to pigeons.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
Generally, maybe the Brits like the thought of eating them
rather than.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
I was trying to Danny about it, and he was saying,
you know, pigeon in a way, it's so rich. I
kind of can also almost taste like fois gras.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Yeah, it's one of the ingredients that we can be
flamboyant with I feel you can put things with it
that you think that I can do a really decadent
dish with this pigeon. Often you can put things like lardo,
fresh chestnuts, cook it in vincanto if you want to
be really swanky, and you can really change the dish
by just altering even the wine.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah. I like doing it, so, especially when we do
velshin and red wine and you're thinking of using so
much red wine, and then you think about what we
can use as a white wine, as you say, vincenta
white wine.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
But we do them on bread that we can do
with brescuetta, with cavaloneio. It's quite versatile ingredient.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Yeah. And you can do them in the summer with
peas locally.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
Yeah. Oh that's very nice and viols.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Yeah. And so I think the recipe that he chose
it's a bit eccentric, and the way he reads it
is eccentric, but it's good. Well, let's hear what else
has to say about his memories of food growing up,
cooking and eating.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Can you describe a typical meal when you were a child,
What was the food? Who cooked it? Can you paint
a picture of a family meal. Well, when my parents
were together, I think it was more of a communal
type family meal. But most of my childhood my mother
was studying. After my parents had split, my mother decided
she would like to be an archaeologist. For ten years,
(24:15):
she was working on studying for her masters than her PhD.
And she did all this she was taking care of
three boys all the time. It was a little more
thrown together, and she was juggling a lot of things.
Wes As a young boy, what is your earliest food memory.
I was known as the one who liked hamburgers. My
(24:37):
older brother was known as the one who liked hot dogs.
I was Ernie, he was Burt. I drove the police car,
He did the radio. I think for most things, anytime
there was there were there were two options. We always
shared that we did. We never competed for the options.
(24:58):
We identified different ones and that became part of our ritual.
There was nothing typical. Every night was a different venue
and a different situation, and I think possibly over the
years this may lead to why I've always liked to
eat in restaurants. In fact, I tend to if I'm
(25:21):
not working on a film, I tend to work at
home and until the thing I do is to go
out to dinner. That's the main often I haven't left
my residence until dinner. Now you mentioned food in high school, Well,
I went to high schools. First, a public high school.
There was a cafeteria in lunch, but I think I
(25:42):
brought my lunch in a sack, and I don't really
remember much. But then I went to another school, the
school where we made Rushmore, and that school had a
system that was a little more It wasn't like a
public school system. It was a thing where they run
you a tab and they send the bill to your parents.
(26:02):
There was much more freedom in what you could eat.
It was more like having a kind of canteen on
the school campus, which was new for me. But the
food was not memorable in either location really, although I
was I don't know if i'd even heard of bagels
before going to this school, and bagels did not become
(26:24):
a huge part of my life. But I guess I
started to see there was a lot out there that
I didn't know about in terms of things to eat.
When did you first meet Ruthie? Rough day place talking?
But do you remember what the event was, what you ate?
Who else, was there any colored to bring it to
life some storytelling. Well, you know, I first met Ruthie
(26:47):
in Italy. I had met Ru already. Rue is Juman's
middle school friend and then life's long friend since then,
so I considered myself as of late arrival. Nevertheless, I
just insert myself into both families. We rented a house
in Tuscany, which we thought was in the middle of
(27:10):
a vast empty countryside surrounded by vineyards, but it was
actually surrounded by several other houses connected to it, all
filled with families and busy. And then slowly we began
to hear a lot of noises and we realized we
weren't in an isolated place at all. Then we got
a call from Rue to go where they were, and
(27:31):
we went down to your house, Ruthie, to where you
were staying, where you often have stayed and for many years,
and it was much better. We were much happier there.
The people were very interesting and wonderful, and the food
was wildly improved over what we were eating where we were,
and along with all that, while I met you, and
(27:55):
also while who happened to be there at the time
was Rape Fines, who I had met before, but who
on this occasion was preparing the earliest stages of his
adaptation of Coreolanis, and he showed me a little clip
he had made, but he also played. I asked how
(28:16):
he was going to do a certain speech, and he
did it for me in close quarters. He in fact,
just a few inches away from me, and it was
extremely powerful. And in that moment I had the thought
that I particularly wanted to write a movie for Raife
and my friend Hugo and I set to work on
(28:38):
that shortly there after, and we actually did the movie,
and Reefe actually played the part. In some of your films,
you have starts, Lennon Waiter's got some phrases drinks beautiful
present aias well. You know, that's a question about food
in relation to my own movies I've made, and I
can say two of them. One is in the Grand
Budapest Hotel. There's a dinner during which the whole story
(29:01):
of the movie is kind of told. And I've always
loved an old menu. I like seeing first what they
used to eat and what they have involved, what we
don't eat that people used to eat, How the preparations
and things have evolved, and as we know often a
dinner in a luxurious restaurant used to involve many, many
(29:24):
courses and a lot more food. And you know, I've
always aj Leebling wrote about food in a way. I
have always that I think he's the funniest writer about food.
And we use some of that in another movie, The
French Dispatch, and that when we do have a tray
of drinks which shows everything from the appartif that you
(29:50):
would have three o'clock in the afternoon to the strongest
d justif at the very end of the night, all
spinning on one round tray. I mean we made our
own versions of each. I guess I think it will
also in French this but we have a cook, and
we tell the whole story of a cook, and we
have some peculiar dishes that he makes. In fact, pigeon
(30:12):
I think we call it a city park pigeon hash.
His food is meant to be specialized in a food
for police working on locations, on stakeouts and things like that,
so it has some special characteristics that make it more
suited to that. So that I've come to the end
(30:35):
of the questions, Wes.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
It's a few weeks later and we are almost done.
I'm in the edit with Willem and you've done a
brilliant podcast. I have to say it's ready to go.
But there is one question that I need to ask you,
because that's what I do for every single person who's
on the podcast, and that is what Wes Anderson is
(30:59):
your for.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Food, Ruthie, I'm answering your last message. It now it's
some weeks later. I always liked the Italian hamburger, the
ash dimonzo with butter and sage. Sometimes that is one
of my favorites, which you sometimes see on the menu
(31:23):
here or there. I would recommend it if somebody crosses
paths with it. Thank you, Ruthie, thank you for listening.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
We're going to be back next week with another great guest.
And meanwhile, we're here if you want to contact us,
if you have ideas, if you have thoughts, please let
us know.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Ruthie's Table Floor is produced by Atami Studios for iHeartRadio.
It's hosted by Ruthie Rodgers. It's produced by William Lenski.
Our executive producers are Zad Rodgers and Facetut. Our production
manager is Caitline Paramore. This episode has additional contributions by
Jean Renaul. Special thanks to everyone at the River Cafe,
Welcome back to season three of Ruthie's Table four. We've
got a great group of people ahead, and we're going
to start with my good friend with a great director,
a great eater of food, appreciator of food, Wes Anderson.
(00:21):
I have a few philosophies in life, one of which
is to always say yes to Wes Anderson, my really
good friend, Ruthie. Should we get a sheet from upstairs
cupboard and screen fantastic mister Fox outside in the garden tonight, Yes, Wes, Ruthie.
Shall we try again for the fourth time to make
(00:42):
a perfect Bellini? Yes, Wes, Ruthie. How about if we
invite all the kids and friends and watch Grand Budapest
Hotel before it opens in your living room in London.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yes, Wes.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
And most recently, Ruthie, I'd be happy to do podcast
with you. But could we do the interview by emailing
questions and answers back and forth to each other over
a few days or weeks, Yes, Wes. So here we
are Wes Anderson with Wes Anderson. A little strange, but
(01:17):
as always I said yes.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I'll just jump around with a few things. Maybe for
introducing myself. I don't know. If I'm responding to something
Ruthie is saying. Is Ruthie saying something at the beginning,
and then I'm chiming in. I'll wait to do that bit,
and then you can also anything you want me to
redo or add more. I'll just give a few things
to start. Maybe I'll say I'll say hello, this is
(01:45):
Wes Anderson. I'm going to read you the recipe for
the River Cafe roast pigeon stuffed with kotaquino. This recipe
serves six. You'll need one small red onion, peeled and chopped,
two celery sticks chopped, two tablespoons of olive oil, plus
(02:09):
twenty five mili liters for the roasting tint to put
that on the side somewhere. You'll need one half ready
cooked cotaquino sausage, half a sausage, ten fresh sage leaves shredded, please,
five hundred milliters kianti. That's a more than a half bottle.
(02:31):
And finally you found it. You said it again, Where
did you find it? Okay, I'll come see it in
a moment. I'm just going to finish this recipe. Finally,
perhaps most importantly, you'll need six breast pigeons. That's six
(02:57):
pigeons from the breast. I guess these are French pigeons.
Breast I think is near near Lyon, near Genevas, south
of must be almost Burgundy or next to Burgundy, or
in Burgundy. I'm not sure. They may. Just make sure
they're plucked and cleaned. Now, preheat the oven to two
(03:18):
hundred and thirty degrees celsius to make the stuffing Soften
the onion and celery in the two tablespoons of olive
oil for ten minutes over a low heat. Small serpent,
she says, remove the skin from the cotaquino and crumble
the meat with your hands. But this get rid of this,
put the skin somewhere else. Now, add the cotaquino and
(03:40):
sage to the onion and celery and fry together for
a few minutes. Then pour off the fat from the
pan and add two hundred and fifty milli liters. I'm
going to continue. Add two hundred and fifty mili liters
red wine and boiled to reduce by at least half
(04:02):
season with black pepper, and allow to cool before stuffing
into the birds. Into the six birds, heat the two
hundred and fifty milli liters of olive oil in a
roasting tin over a medium high heat. Then brown each
bird all over, season with sea salt and black pepper,
and place the tin in the top of the hot
(04:24):
oven the upper shelf inside the oven and roast for
twenty minutes. Remove the tin from the oven and take
out the pigeons. I'm not sure. Maybe we cook them
a bit more through I'm not sure how they come
out twenty minutes, keep them warm, Pour any excess oil
out of the tin. Then add the remaining red wine
(04:47):
over a high heat. Reduce us we got half the
wine still to go, I think yes, over a high heat,
and so their pigeons are not in there anymore. So okay,
over a high heat, reduce the liquid by half. So
cook it until half it goes away. I think all
of the people who cook know this. I don't know that.
Then season with sea salt and black pepper, and then
(05:08):
this is your sauce. Pour it over the pigeons to serve,
maybe with some peese or something like that. You've read
the recipe for a pigeon. Why have you chosen this recipe?
Do you cook it yourself? When did you last eat it?
Were there any memorable moments that you ate it? Well,
I have not cooked any pigeon ever. I haven't cooked
(05:30):
any bird. I can't really cook. I can cook a
few things, but I have chosen the recipe for no
reason other than the fact that anytime I see this
pigeon on the River Cafe menu, I immediately order it.
Pigeon is my favorite bird anyway, and it ruined. Fact
once told me about an occasion when he ate a
(05:52):
pigeon and he literally began to cry out of happiness.
Jaman saw the actual tears. See. I'm in the room
here at the Chateau La Coste, which is extremely comfortable.
It's a great place. So far, I have not been out.
I haven't seen Richard's gallery yet, which I'm going to
(06:13):
go do in about an hour. I've just been doing
my work here in the room, which is really all
I wanted to do except for go see Richard's building.
You know one thing I thought might be worth mentioning
is for years we do often the first premiere of
(06:34):
a new movie I make ends up being one where
you're cooking at it at your house. We had the
first public screening of Grand Budapest hotel in Italy. Many
years ago we showed Fantastic Mister Fox on a sheet
and that was the first time anybody had seen it
outside of the production. We always plan to do one,
(06:54):
as you know, and we always eat very well afterwards.
Now I'm going to act like Ruthie's asked me about
how do we eat on our movies. Well, you know,
on our movies, what we do during the day. We
actually I don't like to stop work in the day.
On movies. Often you stop and that there's a very
(07:16):
long break, and then it takes even longer to get
back from the break. So the way we've been doing
it is we have these little tables. They're made to
be folded into suitcases, and we set them up on
the right on the side of the set. And the
people who are actually working on the set, which is
kind of a small group. Other people working building sets
and things, they have a different experience. But the group
(07:37):
on the set, we have our lunch there and it's
brought out. And for years I tried to make it
just soup and to convince everyone that we would just
eat soup and then get right back to work. But
we did have some very good soups. In Germany, there
was a shop across the street from the hotel that
we lived where they would make soups for us every day,
but most people don't just want soup. Eventually there was
(08:00):
a mutiny. In particular our key grip Sanjay Sammy said
you can't push a dolly all day and just only
eat a thin soup. We started bringing sanch his own
steaks and things. But the thing we do also is
when we finish the shooting for the day, we always
have a dinner with the whole cast and the department heads.
(08:25):
That group. We all live together in a small hotel usually,
and we have our own little dinner room and cook
We always have great dinners at the end of the day.
Almost invariably, everybody who's working in the cast and in
those departments is there for dinner. Our costume designer usually
shows up very late, sometimes close to midnight, but we
(08:47):
keep a plate for her and usually a plate for
the extremely large team of helpers who roll in. It
just reinforces how dedicated she is because she works into
the late out. You know, I've done a lot of
work in restaurants over the years with no Ah boundback
and we wrote a movie in Barpeiti in New York.
(09:07):
We were there for probably six hours a day for
a year, and we still go there of course in
New York. That's our canteen. Ruthie am I allowed to
(09:31):
turn the tables for a moment in this podcast and
ask about Well, I've always loved the history of the
River Cafe, you know, I've looked at the plans that
show how it grew over the years from a little
room which was a canteen for Richard's firm, for Rogers,
(09:55):
Sirk and Harbor. Was it always called?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Were those partners all there in the beginning? Can I
asked you to tell a bit about the beginning of
the River Cafe and what it was like and who
started coming there and was it only at lunch at first?
It reminds me of the commissaries of the old studios,
which used to be such busy places. And I remember
when Owen Wilson and I first went to Los Angeles
(10:20):
to go to work. Essentially we our producers James L.
Brooks and Polyplatt. They had their offices were in the
Sydney Poitier building on the Columbia Lot, which was in
Culver City, and it was the which had been the
MGM lot, and the Commissary was still a busy place.
I mean there were sort of two, but I don't
(10:42):
know how much people use those anymore or if they're
even there, but they were play you know, when I'm
doing a movie. When I'm working on a movie, I
try to have the lunch be briefest experience it possibly
can be. We do it on the set. We bring
to tables onto the set itself, and the people who
(11:03):
are working on the set just have a fifteen minutes
or something like that. That's that's the way I like to
do it. But I love to have a So I
like the idea of having the canteen right there in
the workplace, but then to have a canteen that grows
into the river cafe. That's an unusual story. Can I
(11:24):
ask some nostalgic recollection of the beginnings of it and
the evolution of it?
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Or I wes s it's Ruthie. I'm sitting here looking
at Santa Margharita. I'm watching you were here. It seems
wherever I go on holiday wish you were there, and
I can understand why. So it's interesting your question, and
I'm really happy to turn the table. Have you turned
the table on me? When Richard finished the Pompadou after
(11:53):
six years of living in Paris, working in Paris creating
that building, the view going back to London was to
create kind of almost like you were describing a studio
community with open space, with common rooms and a place
to eat, whether it was a commissary or canteen, that
(12:16):
there would be a place where people could meet and
talk of food. Very often what we did in Paris
in a cafe or a bar on the way to
the office or the way back. And I think what
he did not want was to be just an office
in a large building and then everybody disappeared at midday and.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Came back to work.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
So I think when they found the warehouses on the Thames,
it was completely ideal because it wasn't out of the center,
it was on the river. It had the possibility of
a green space. He actually tore down a building that
blocked the view of the river and made that into
a communal garden. Because it was quite large, there were
(12:59):
spaces taken by other architectural firms. There was a space
taken by a set designer, there was one taken by
a framer, and so everybody was there doing different kind
of creative things, and then the challenge was where to eat,
what to do.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
With that space.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
And I can remember very few decisions or decisions I
think that you can actually remember being made in your life.
But I do remember that we were on a ski
holiday in Switzerland and Richard had sent out the office
had sent out all sorts of applications for people who
might want to open a restaurant or cafe, a canteen
(13:39):
in the Thames Wharf. And I turned to Richard and
I said, you know, the only thing worse not having
a place to meet and to eat, but to me
have something mediocre. Maybe I'll do it. And i'd come
back from Paris. We had just had bo who was
by that time for where as you know, was sort
of fifteen with Jaman at the American School, and so
(14:01):
that's kind of how we started the River Cafe. Rose
and I knew that Rose had worked with the McNally's
in New York and she was back in London really
wanting to cook. And you know, I was a domestic cook,
so I knew nothing about working in restaurants, but I
always say also that restrictions are sometimes the best things
you can have, and we definitely had restrictions. We had
(14:23):
a very small space, we had a very low budget
of what we could create, and we also had the council,
which for some reason really was against having anything in
a residential area, so they only allowed us to open
to the people who worked in the warehouses, and only
(14:45):
at lunch. But then as words spread that this was
going on, that there was a place in Hammersmith where
you could go and have aposta or a sandwich or
Italian ingredients, that we were starting to get Feimashler, in
her first review of The River Cafe wrote in The
Evening Standard, I'm going to tell you about a restaurant
(15:06):
you cannot go to. And of course it was a
big struggle for us because it was very hard to
make money. We were competing not against other restaurants or cafes,
but against the sandwich girl who would bring sandwiches on
her bicycle. So really, like your idea of the commissary
in a film or working in a film and having
(15:28):
tables brought in was exactly what Richard wanted to have
a place where people could work, eat, go over for
a coffee talk about a drawing. That's why we had
the paper tablecloths, and we still do, so that the
architects could draw while they sat there. We also wanted
to be much more cafe can to me, because if
(15:49):
we had linen tablecloss or no table class, it wouldn't
be right. And in fact, not long ago, the Michelin
people came in and said, you know, we could give
you a second star, but you've got to lose the paper.
That is something we'd rather have than a star.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I think that it's best to have paper tablecloths, not
just on every table everywhere, but on every surface everywhere,
because you never know, something always comes out of the
fact if you have a paper tablecloth and a pen,
this is always a great combination. Everybody's going to do something.
So here's me pretending we're having the conversation again. Well,
(16:26):
I live partly in Paris, and when we're in England,
where we partly live, we eat at home every night,
and when we're in Paris we go out to dinner
every night. When I was first kind of living in
Paris or spending more time in Paris, Juman and I, Juman,
my wife, we used to try new restaurants continuously and
(16:49):
then over the years. The thing I is my favorite
kind of restaurant is a restaurant where I've already been
a restaurant where I know the place. I I sort
of know where I would like to sit and what
I want to order already. And in France, I think
it if you're a foreigner, it helps if you're a
familiar face in the restaurant, if you've been there thirty times,
(17:14):
that's a good way to establish yourself there. I will
say in France, I have a tendency to eat the
now I wouldn't call them the healthiest dishes, the confie
of duck and quite a few lamb chops and more pigeon.
(17:35):
You asked about bar Luce and Milan. Well, you know,
we made this sort of restaurant bar bar Lucca in Milan.
It's what Mutual Product wanted, something like a kind of
classic spot. And the sandwiches are very good. They make
extremely good cocktails and things, and lots of sweets and
(17:56):
things like that gelato. I guess I was trying to
make a place, try to draw on different places we love,
like a bit of Nino in Rome and a bit
of a place called New York burgher town. That's on
what is it forty third Street, fifty I can't even
remember where it is. Near Saint Pizez. Is that the cathedral, gosh,
(18:17):
I can't remember where it is. They have these if
it's still there. They have these tables where you sit
more like desks with little arms to the tables, wondering
if there one is the one to mention in Paris
or Rome. In Rome, we like to go to Nino, we.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Like to go to Tulio, we like to go to
Pure Luigi. But maybe our other favorite place to go
eat in the world is Tokyo. Every now and then
we find ourselves in Japan and there as careful and
interesting and inventive and perfectionist with with their cooking as
(18:55):
anyone in the world. Maybe I guess on some level
it's the Japanese food and the Italian food that leads
the way these days. I particularly love Japanese food. But
you know an interesting thing. The last time we were
in Japan, we.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Were there for a couple of weeks probably, and at
the end of our stay, our friend Con had been
trying to convince us to go to this Italian restaurant,
and I was I don't want to go to Italian
restaurant Signal Inoteca. The chef was called Toshiji Tomori. Well, anyway,
(19:35):
finally the last night we were there, we just went
with going to the Italian place. Well, you would be
very impressed because it would be one of the better
ones outside of Italy and the River Cafe. I'll act
like you asked about when we went on the boat. Yes,
we went on the Queen Mary too, and we had
(19:57):
a group with us Jason Schwarzman and Roman and Roman's
wife Jenny, and Tilda Swinton, Sandro cop and me and
my wife Juman and we really all had a great time.
I mean when the boat arrived from New York to England,
we tried to convince them to let us sail on
(20:18):
to Germany, but they had to bump us out of
our rooms. And we showed our movies and things and
did little talks during the journey. One of the great
things was we had this room and it was on
the opposite end of the boat from the kitchens. I
mean there are probably many kitchens on there, but we
often arranged to have a curry dinner that we watched
(20:42):
them roll the cart down a corridor that's probably about
a kilometer long, and it was very good. We had
very good dinners on that boat, all right.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So Wes Anderson, there was Wessa Anderson, Michael Caine, and
Jake John who are our first three podcasts, and when
we didn't really know what we were doing with thought
we might be just doing a recipe. So we asked
Wes to choose a recipe, and he chose a recipe
from the Blue Book, which was published in nineteen ninety four,
(21:19):
soon to be thirty years old. And it has canty classico,
it's stuff with codaquino, and it's a breast pigeon, which,
coming up to Christmas is very christmasy. It's a bit
like the Blito misto using the kurdaquino kanti. What do
you think about that?
Speaker 4 (21:35):
It's one of those dishes that people who have worked
in the River Cafe a long time ago come back
and eat and they're like, it's like the menu was
very from when I was here before, because it's one
of those dishes. It's timeless. It's a timeless dish, isn't it.
I remember when I learned to cook pigeon when I
was a young chef heir and how you guys would
(21:55):
would say, don't cook it, like if we're in rules
or a gentleman's dining club. It's not got to be
served so pink that it's ripping off the bone. It
can be cooked more like an a rosta misto and
cooked so it's so it's maybe cooked a bit slower,
but so you can eat the whole. Yeah, pigeon. And
you know, Riches would literally the whole pigeon.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
You see him cutting off the legs and picking them up.
It's a great bird to have when we don't have
the game season, so when we don't have grouse or partridge, pheasant,
and then we can have pigeon, you know, all through
the other seasons. Now, yeah, I mean as as an animal,
I might offend people, but I really have a real
version to pigeons.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
Generally, maybe the Brits like the thought of eating them
rather than.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
I was trying to Danny about it, and he was saying,
you know, pigeon in a way, it's so rich. I
kind of can also almost taste like fois gras.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Yeah, it's one of the ingredients that we can be
flamboyant with I feel you can put things with it
that you think that I can do a really decadent
dish with this pigeon. Often you can put things like lardo,
fresh chestnuts, cook it in vincanto if you want to
be really swanky, and you can really change the dish
by just altering even the wine.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah. I like doing it, so, especially when we do
velshin and red wine and you're thinking of using so
much red wine, and then you think about what we
can use as a white wine, as you say, vincenta
white wine.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
But we do them on bread that we can do
with brescuetta, with cavaloneio. It's quite versatile ingredient.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Yeah. And you can do them in the summer with
peas locally.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
Yeah. Oh that's very nice and viols.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Yeah. And so I think the recipe that he chose
it's a bit eccentric, and the way he reads it
is eccentric, but it's good. Well, let's hear what else
has to say about his memories of food growing up,
cooking and eating.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Can you describe a typical meal when you were a child,
What was the food? Who cooked it? Can you paint
a picture of a family meal. Well, when my parents
were together, I think it was more of a communal
type family meal. But most of my childhood my mother
was studying. After my parents had split, my mother decided
she would like to be an archaeologist. For ten years,
(24:15):
she was working on studying for her masters than her PhD.
And she did all this she was taking care of
three boys all the time. It was a little more
thrown together, and she was juggling a lot of things.
Wes As a young boy, what is your earliest food memory.
I was known as the one who liked hamburgers. My
(24:37):
older brother was known as the one who liked hot dogs.
I was Ernie, he was Burt. I drove the police car,
He did the radio. I think for most things, anytime
there was there were there were two options. We always
shared that we did. We never competed for the options.
(24:58):
We identified different ones and that became part of our ritual.
There was nothing typical. Every night was a different venue
and a different situation, and I think possibly over the
years this may lead to why I've always liked to
eat in restaurants. In fact, I tend to if I'm
(25:21):
not working on a film, I tend to work at
home and until the thing I do is to go
out to dinner. That's the main often I haven't left
my residence until dinner. Now you mentioned food in high school, Well,
I went to high schools. First, a public high school.
There was a cafeteria in lunch, but I think I
(25:42):
brought my lunch in a sack, and I don't really
remember much. But then I went to another school, the
school where we made Rushmore, and that school had a
system that was a little more It wasn't like a
public school system. It was a thing where they run
you a tab and they send the bill to your parents.
(26:02):
There was much more freedom in what you could eat.
It was more like having a kind of canteen on
the school campus, which was new for me. But the
food was not memorable in either location really, although I
was I don't know if i'd even heard of bagels
before going to this school, and bagels did not become
(26:24):
a huge part of my life. But I guess I
started to see there was a lot out there that
I didn't know about in terms of things to eat.
When did you first meet Ruthie? Rough day place talking?
But do you remember what the event was, what you ate?
Who else, was there any colored to bring it to
life some storytelling. Well, you know, I first met Ruthie
(26:47):
in Italy. I had met Ru already. Rue is Juman's
middle school friend and then life's long friend since then,
so I considered myself as of late arrival. Nevertheless, I
just insert myself into both families. We rented a house
in Tuscany, which we thought was in the middle of
(27:10):
a vast empty countryside surrounded by vineyards, but it was
actually surrounded by several other houses connected to it, all
filled with families and busy. And then slowly we began
to hear a lot of noises and we realized we
weren't in an isolated place at all. Then we got
a call from Rue to go where they were, and
(27:31):
we went down to your house, Ruthie, to where you
were staying, where you often have stayed and for many years,
and it was much better. We were much happier there.
The people were very interesting and wonderful, and the food
was wildly improved over what we were eating where we were,
and along with all that, while I met you, and
(27:55):
also while who happened to be there at the time
was Rape Fines, who I had met before, but who
on this occasion was preparing the earliest stages of his
adaptation of Coreolanis, and he showed me a little clip
he had made, but he also played. I asked how
(28:16):
he was going to do a certain speech, and he
did it for me in close quarters. He in fact,
just a few inches away from me, and it was
extremely powerful. And in that moment I had the thought
that I particularly wanted to write a movie for Raife
and my friend Hugo and I set to work on
(28:38):
that shortly there after, and we actually did the movie,
and Reefe actually played the part. In some of your films,
you have starts, Lennon Waiter's got some phrases drinks beautiful
present aias well. You know, that's a question about food
in relation to my own movies I've made, and I
can say two of them. One is in the Grand
Budapest Hotel. There's a dinner during which the whole story
(29:01):
of the movie is kind of told. And I've always
loved an old menu. I like seeing first what they
used to eat and what they have involved, what we
don't eat that people used to eat, How the preparations
and things have evolved, and as we know often a
dinner in a luxurious restaurant used to involve many, many
(29:24):
courses and a lot more food. And you know, I've
always aj Leebling wrote about food in a way. I
have always that I think he's the funniest writer about food.
And we use some of that in another movie, The
French Dispatch, and that when we do have a tray
of drinks which shows everything from the appartif that you
(29:50):
would have three o'clock in the afternoon to the strongest
d justif at the very end of the night, all
spinning on one round tray. I mean we made our
own versions of each. I guess I think it will
also in French this but we have a cook, and
we tell the whole story of a cook, and we
have some peculiar dishes that he makes. In fact, pigeon
(30:12):
I think we call it a city park pigeon hash.
His food is meant to be specialized in a food
for police working on locations, on stakeouts and things like that,
so it has some special characteristics that make it more
suited to that. So that I've come to the end
(30:35):
of the questions, Wes.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
It's a few weeks later and we are almost done.
I'm in the edit with Willem and you've done a
brilliant podcast. I have to say it's ready to go.
But there is one question that I need to ask you,
because that's what I do for every single person who's
on the podcast, and that is what Wes Anderson is
(30:59):
your for.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Food, Ruthie, I'm answering your last message. It now it's
some weeks later. I always liked the Italian hamburger, the
ash dimonzo with butter and sage. Sometimes that is one
of my favorites, which you sometimes see on the menu
(31:23):
here or there. I would recommend it if somebody crosses
paths with it. Thank you, Ruthie, thank you for listening.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
We're going to be back next week with another great guest.
And meanwhile, we're here if you want to contact us,
if you have ideas, if you have thoughts, please let
us know.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Ruthie's Table Floor is produced by Atami Studios for iHeartRadio.
It's hosted by Ruthie Rodgers. It's produced by William Lenski.
Our executive producers are Zad Rodgers and Facetut. Our production
manager is Caitline Paramore. This episode has additional contributions by
Jean Renaul. Special thanks to everyone at the River Cafe,
Host
Ruth Rogers
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