Speaker 1: Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and
Speaker 1: Adami's Studios.
Speaker 2: For years, I've wanted to sit at his table and
Speaker 2: talk to Nick Allett, one of our most favorite regulars
Speaker 2: at the River Cafe, who when he walks in, absolutely
Speaker 2: lights up the restaurant with his deep voice and his
Speaker 2: deep warmth. I imagine we would talk about the musicals
Speaker 2: he's produced, Lay Miss Katz, Carousel, Hamilton, but he's doing now,
Speaker 2: his political battle to save theaters during the pandemic, and
Speaker 2: the great love he had for his best friend, the
Speaker 2: late brilliant restaurant critic Adrian gil and of course about
Speaker 2: the food he's going to order. But then I remember
Speaker 2: the line in the classic movie Casablanca when Ingrid Bergmann
Speaker 2: asked the manager of the Cafe American for Rick, her
Speaker 2: long ago lover Humphrey Bogart, to join her. Madam. He responds,
Speaker 2: Rick never sits with the customers, never the same with me.
Speaker 2: So I say hello and then leave to have whoever
Speaker 2: it is, be with the person they're dining with. But
Speaker 2: today Nick all it is not a guest in the
Speaker 2: River Cafe, but a guest on Ruthie's Table four. And
Speaker 2: we are here to talk. He's just come from the
Speaker 2: kitchen where he baked a lemon tart with the pastry chefs.
Speaker 2: He'll tell us how he made it, and then we
Speaker 2: will discuss the food he grew up with when he
Speaker 2: cooks at home, theater and food, food and friendship. I
Speaker 2: think even Rick would approve and appreciate how lucky I
Speaker 2: am to have Nick with me a man I adore
Speaker 2: and for a while online.
Speaker 3: Ruthie, what a joy to be here, thank you. So
Speaker 3: I've just come from making the River Cafe lemon tart.
Speaker 3: So this is how you do it. You take one
Speaker 3: quantity of sweet pastry baked, then for the filling you
Speaker 3: take a finely grated zest and juice of seven lemons.
Speaker 3: And that is quite a sure in itself. If you've
Speaker 3: got a soux chef in your kitchen, you can do
Speaker 3: that work for you. That makes life much much better.
Speaker 3: And indeed I once had Adrian Anthony Gill as my
Speaker 3: shoe chef grating the lemons for me. Not very well.
Speaker 3: I hastened to adding three fifty grams of caster sugar,
Speaker 3: six whole eggs, nine egg yolks, three hundred grams of
Speaker 3: unsalted butter, which are softened. You preheat the grill to high,
Speaker 3: and then you make your filling. Put all of the
Speaker 3: ingredients except the eggs in a large salcepan over a
Speaker 3: very low heat, stirring until dissolved. Combine the mixture with
Speaker 3: the eggs, return to the salcepan, and cook on a
Speaker 3: low heat until thick. That getting it together so it
Speaker 3: doesn't curdle is a real, real school. You have to
Speaker 3: do it very, very slowly.
Speaker 4: My name's got a tubs on the head, Pastry Chepherd
Speaker 4: there of a cafe, so we're nearly there. So if
Speaker 4: I had a spoon, it would definitely be coating the
Speaker 4: back of a spoon. Right now, you can kind of
Speaker 4: see it round the edge starting to tick again.
Speaker 3: When it says that and you draw a line through it,
Speaker 3: should it hold completely.
Speaker 4: Orders well with this in particular, because we're about to
Speaker 4: put it under the grill. If you think about it,
Speaker 4: the grill's going to add a whole another layer of heat,
Speaker 4: so you don't What you really want to do with
Speaker 4: the lemon curd before it goes into the tart filling
Speaker 4: is actually do it slightly under have it quite a
Speaker 4: have be quite a thin curd, so that again we're
Speaker 4: very particular about the spots that we get under the grill. Well,
Speaker 4: you can really tell when something's been overcooked. The spots
Speaker 4: are absolutely tiny. As with something that's been perfectly cooked.
Speaker 4: It looks much more like a sort of giraffe print,
Speaker 4: and you want that kind of beautiful mouffling over the
Speaker 4: whole thing. We grate the pastry into the tartshell and
Speaker 4: then we press it around the edges, and then we
Speaker 4: go around with a knife, and then our trick is
Speaker 4: we freeze.
Speaker 2: The top shells.
Speaker 4: We have a whole stack once it's made, and then
Speaker 4: we can throw it in the oven without bacon beans
Speaker 4: and it doesn't side stone shrink, so very much like
Speaker 4: a pizza. We're just going to slowly rotate. It doesn't
Speaker 4: matter if there's a slight wobble to it at this point,
Speaker 4: because it will will eventually settle.
Speaker 3: What ideally is the temperature you serve.
Speaker 2: Then if you.
Speaker 4: Put it in the fridge, the pastry goes sob You
Speaker 4: want it to be lovely and Chris.
Speaker 3: How beautiful will there? You go?
Speaker 2: Choose to eat it for lunch, might be.
Speaker 3: Or just in one slice. Yeah, I know, It's definitely
Speaker 3: one of my favorite puddings. Here.
Speaker 2: As you say that you choose a dessert, do you like.
Speaker 3: I love cooking. I came to cooking quite late.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: Growing up, food was never a big part of my life.
Speaker 3: I come from an army background. My mother was a
Speaker 3: very competent cook, but when living on army bases all
Speaker 3: over the world, in Germany, in Hong Kong and Australia.
Speaker 3: We didn't live in England until I was in my teens,
Speaker 3: and really the ingredients that she had available to her
Speaker 3: were those available from the NAFI, you know, the army store.
Speaker 2: She wouldn't go into the local Germany.
Speaker 3: No, you were discouraged basically from leaving the base. This
Speaker 3: was sort of late fifties, early sixties, so post war
Speaker 3: there wasn't that much integration still in the NATO bases,
Speaker 3: more so when we moved to Australia. But again, we
Speaker 3: had a year or two in Hong Kong when I
Speaker 3: was quite young, and it tended to be what you
Speaker 3: could get from the shop that was available. I mean,
Speaker 3: we never left the bases. I went to school, went
Speaker 3: to army schools or my friends were local. When I
Speaker 3: told my friends I'd lived in Germany for I think
Speaker 3: ten out of the first fifteen years of my life.
Speaker 3: They said, do you speak fluent German? Not one word.
Speaker 3: You just didn't integrate. So for her with a bit.
Speaker 2: Of mature had she had a career at all.
Speaker 3: She married quite young. She married my father quite young,
Speaker 3: and actually being an army officer's wife is a career
Speaker 3: because you're responsible for so much hr and looking after
Speaker 3: the army officers wives and organizing charity drives and things
Speaker 3: like that. That was pretty full on.
Speaker 2: Was your father on the base he.
Speaker 3: Was, No. He was away a lot of the time.
Speaker 3: He was away on maneuvers. He was a cavalry officer,
Speaker 3: which didn't mean he read a halls. It meant he
Speaker 3: drove tanks and things like that, and he was away
Speaker 3: a lot for exercises.
Speaker 2: So did Jim, who cooked in the house.
Speaker 3: My mother cooked. It never occurred to me to actually
Speaker 3: offer to help. I wasn't that interested that family. Myself
Speaker 3: and two sisters, and you are the I'm the eldest,
Speaker 3: So our relationship with food was not one of It
Speaker 3: was not indifference, but it wasn't a key part of
Speaker 3: my life. I used to years and years and years later,
Speaker 3: more recently, up until she died, I used to take
Speaker 3: my mother to really lovely restaurants and she's going down
Speaker 3: and it's really lovely, but I mean it's awful lot
Speaker 3: of money. We could be doing better things like going
Speaker 3: to the theater, and well we can do that as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So would you sit down for family meals every
Speaker 2: we did after school? You'd come home and sit down
Speaker 2: to the family suffer.
Speaker 3: We did by your mother and I would watch I'd
Speaker 3: watch her, you know, prepare you have to do a
Speaker 3: lot of entertaining as an army I do. You have
Speaker 3: to do the other officers wives and visiting offices and
Speaker 3: things like that. As you move up through the ranks,
Speaker 3: you then start to get staff. And by the time
Speaker 3: that my father died in ninety sixty nine, he was
Speaker 3: a commanding officer at a large base in Dorset and
Speaker 3: we had I think a permanent chef and two or
Speaker 3: three other staff.
Speaker 2: So and then what did that change the food in
Speaker 2: the house?
Speaker 3: Not really, it was sort of pretty simple. Staff. The
Speaker 3: army didn't necessarily engage in Courdunbleau Andtyle sixties. This was
Speaker 3: late sixties, mid to late sixties on my relationship with food,
Speaker 3: As I say, it was one of not particular interest.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately it changed quite radically because my father tragically died
Speaker 3: in a helicopter crash when I was fifteen, and my
Speaker 3: younger sister abroad. No he was He was killed in
Speaker 3: a helicopter, was a passenger being flown to a conference
Speaker 3: on the other side of England, and to this day
Speaker 3: no one really knows what happens there was it was
Speaker 3: raised in the house and there was an investigation, but
Speaker 3: essentially a lot of helicopters were coming in and the
Speaker 3: helicopter flying in in front of his when it took off,
Speaker 3: instead of going out at an angle of forty five degrees,
Speaker 3: went straight up into the air, straight into his helicopter
Speaker 3: coming down.
Speaker 2: And both helicopters were everybody, All.
Speaker 3: Three, the two pilots and my father were both killed
Speaker 3: and there was an extraordinary There were two young soldiers
Speaker 3: watching from a canteen and they saw these I saw
Speaker 3: the helicopters come down. I was reading about it recently,
Speaker 3: and they ran. They jumped through the windows of the
Speaker 3: canteen and ran and tried to pull the bodies out
Speaker 3: of the helicopters, and they both got very badly burned,
Speaker 3: and they both got decorations for doing it, but sadly
Speaker 3: it was too late.
Speaker 2: It was too late, and you were fifteen. And that
Speaker 2: did you then leave the military?
Speaker 3: Well, yes, the army are the army a wonderful family
Speaker 3: to be part of. It's rather like the theater. Actually
Speaker 3: is a very close community. But they're also very very practical,
Speaker 3: and if you lose the commanding officer of a base,
Speaker 3: of a big base, then you have to replace him
Speaker 3: quite quickly. So within a couple of weeks of his death,
Speaker 3: we were dispatched as it were, and picked up and
Speaker 3: my mother had to find somewhere else to live. They
Speaker 3: didn't range alternative accommodation. We end up living in a
Speaker 3: little cottage on a friend's farm nearby.
Speaker 2: And also did you go to boarding school?
Speaker 3: I did. I went to boarding school from a quite
Speaker 3: a young age, and it was traditional to send boys
Speaker 3: away at eight. But then I had a wonderful break
Speaker 3: and that we were shipped to Australia. This is obviously
Speaker 3: while he was still alive, and they gave me the
Speaker 3: choice of staying in English boarding school or going to Australia.
Speaker 3: Not our choice to make everything. So I had a
Speaker 3: wonderful time.
Speaker 2: In Australia to explore. Were you allowed?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I was at a weekly boarding place where
Speaker 3: you could either go home at weekends or stay. But
Speaker 3: if you stayed, the boys that stayed and I chose
Speaker 3: to would go on these incredible expeditions up into the
Speaker 3: mountains and camping in the bush and learning to surf
Speaker 3: and things like that. It was everything you would expect
Speaker 3: the Australian outdoor life for a young person to be.
Speaker 2: I wonder if the Australian boarding schools was any different
Speaker 2: from British.
Speaker 3: It was very neat, as you can imagine. We've made
Speaker 3: a lot of friends there and one of our closest
Speaker 3: friends was a sheep farmer. So my mother insisted on
Speaker 3: rescuing a lamb that had lost its mother that they
Speaker 3: were going to kill, and she said, no, you can't
Speaker 3: do that. Let me take it home. And we lived
Speaker 3: in the middle of a little town called Queenscliffe. And
Speaker 3: the farmer said you can't, you can't die actually if
Speaker 3: I'm with you. But she did, and we reared it
Speaker 3: in our garden and it would and it behaved like
Speaker 3: a dog. My mother would take it shopping with her
Speaker 3: on the end of a lead and you could hear
Speaker 3: the local star. Here she comes, here's Mary. He's marry
Speaker 3: with a little lamb, even though he name is Shirley.
Speaker 3: So no, no, that was a very joyful, very joyful
Speaker 3: part of my life.
Speaker 2: Did you were you fussy about food?
Speaker 3: I wasn't. Later in life, after my father died, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: both my sisters contracted anorexianaboza, which was an illness in
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty nine that nobody.
Speaker 2: Understood in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 3: But then two girls, twelve and nine, they both they boasted.
Speaker 3: They never they didn't know people that young who had
Speaker 3: had it, and they didn't know any two people in
Speaker 3: the same family. So that was really the only time
Speaker 3: in my life where food became a threat. Yeah, meal
Speaker 3: times were a challenge, and I can't imagine it because
Speaker 3: I'm very greedy and I love food. But my trying
Speaker 3: to get my sisters to explain, they said, if you
Speaker 3: imagine putting a bucket of slugs in front of you,
Speaker 3: that's what it's like. It doesn't matter what it is,
Speaker 3: whether it's sweet or savory. And of course they've become
Speaker 3: incredibly cunning and they hide things and they drink lots
Speaker 3: of water. And I mean how my mother coped. I
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 2: That is a food trauma in our life with your
Speaker 2: father's death, and then reacting with further, well.
Speaker 3: She dealt with it. She eventually she was told we
Speaker 3: eventually we find somebody who who had an idea about
Speaker 3: how to cure it, because we tried everything from faith
Speaker 3: healers to things called the box, and eventually she found
Speaker 3: a man in Westminster who said, look, I think I
Speaker 3: know how to do this, but you cannot have them together.
Speaker 3: So one child was in one hospital and one was
Speaker 3: in another, and my mother sort of drove between the two.
Speaker 3: And her response to try and get me out of
Speaker 3: that rather toxic atmosphere was basically to send me away
Speaker 3: back to Australia, which is what I did by yourself.
Speaker 3: Yeah wow, Oh I was seventeen, you know, I was
Speaker 3: old enough. I just was just leaving school. I was
Speaker 3: going on a gap here, but I'd never been away
Speaker 3: on my own. And the lovely thing about Australia then,
Speaker 3: and this is sixty nine seventy seventy one, they were
Speaker 3: getting this sort of hippie genre. Two or three years
Speaker 3: after the England so I was too young to really
Speaker 3: book a hippie in the UK, but I was perfectly
Speaker 3: so I hit the hippie trail Ruthie and I lived well.
Speaker 3: I lived, I traveled all over, I went to I
Speaker 3: was there at the creation of this extraordinary center in
Speaker 3: Australia which is still there. It was a festival that's
Speaker 3: supposed to start last a week and it's still there
Speaker 3: forty years later. It's called Nimbin and it's the center
Speaker 3: of Australia counterculture. It's quite near Barren Bay, which is
Speaker 3: much more famous. And it was a beautiful, beautiful experience.
Speaker 3: They painted the whole town in rainbow colors and the
Speaker 3: locals integrated, and an invasion of Australian hippies, and in
Speaker 3: fact people from all over the world came.
Speaker 2: And was music.
Speaker 3: There was some music, people like Donovan turned up and
Speaker 3: Dollar Brand, but it was more kind of gathering together
Speaker 3: of faith. And I joined the Radha Krishna temple for
Speaker 3: a while. Did you well, only because if you chanted
Speaker 3: for them, they'd feed you at the end of the day.
Speaker 2: What did they feed you back of food?
Speaker 3: No, exactly. It was beautiful sort of sweet rice with
Speaker 3: coconuts and sweet vegetables, all serving a banana leaf. Then
Speaker 3: I temporarily joined the Divine Light Mission, which gets for
Speaker 3: the food, No, not for the food that one, mainly
Speaker 3: for the girls who were very very girls. But so
Speaker 3: I tried those different things, and very sadly eventually moved on.
Speaker 3: You know, I could have stayed there probably and remained
Speaker 3: the rest of my life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that was what was.
Speaker 3: That was by now I sort of seventy one. But
Speaker 3: then for a year I lived almost exclusively on brown
Speaker 3: rice and vegetables because I was hitchhiking all over the
Speaker 3: country and through the desert in particular. You had to
Speaker 3: eat what you could carry because they weren't shops and
Speaker 3: cafes along the way. And a hippie doctor told me
Speaker 3: that brown rice was a cure all for everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember the macrobiotics. Mac there was a place
Speaker 2: in London when I came.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's right, there's something in it. Because I cut
Speaker 3: my foot on a coral reef, and coral, as you know,
Speaker 3: is organic and it's very very toxic, and my foot
Speaker 3: sold up like a balloon and it started to climb
Speaker 3: up my leg and again we were miles.
Speaker 2: From a proper doctor that's very dangerous.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he said, look live on brown rice for
Speaker 3: a couple of weeks, which I mean didn't cure me,
Speaker 3: but it seemed to stop spreading anyway. I then found
Speaker 3: a doctor who gave me a large shot of penicillin
Speaker 3: the regular food. But now I didn't really eat regularly
Speaker 3: into a regular food as we would know it until
Speaker 3: I came back, until I came back to England and
Speaker 3: went to university.
Speaker 2: And so you never did you become a vegetarian?
Speaker 3: Well, I was vegetarian, not out of a choice, certainess,
Speaker 3: and it didn't really bother me. Again, I wasn't really
Speaker 3: focused on food, and it wasn't until I dropped out
Speaker 3: of university with a loud report I shouldn't I shouldn't
Speaker 3: have gone there in the first place. I went to
Speaker 3: Exeter left after well, I left after it. I like
Speaker 3: to say my letter to them resigning cross for theirs
Speaker 3: in the post, saying I think you're better off elsewhere.
Speaker 3: I think mine hopefully got there a beat before. But
Speaker 3: they had a theatre on the campus there called the
Speaker 3: North Theater, and we did a lot of very good
Speaker 3: work there. I just knocked on the door. No, I
Speaker 3: never did I acted a lot at school. I went
Speaker 3: to Charterhouse in English standard public school, and I had
Speaker 3: a very very inspirational teacher who I remember to this
Speaker 3: day called David Summerscale, who loved the theater and he
Speaker 3: directed plays. And I stopped doing anything else. I stopped
Speaker 3: doing sport, I stopped playing musical instruments. I just wanted
Speaker 3: to thirteen to eighteen to say. And when I was leaving,
Speaker 3: and to this day I can picture the conversation, he
Speaker 3: said to me. Look, just before you go, I'm going
Speaker 3: to ask you something. He said, you want to act,
Speaker 3: don't you? And I said, yes, I do, and he said,
Speaker 3: forgive me, but you're not good enough. Oh wow, bang
Speaker 3: arrow to the heart. But he said, look, you're quite bright,
Speaker 3: you get on with people. There are many other jobs
Speaker 3: in the theater that you could probably do quite well,
Speaker 3: and why don't you give it a go? And it
Speaker 3: was the best piece of advice probably I've ever had.
Speaker 3: I've got lots and lots and lots of actor friends.
Speaker 3: And of course, no matter how good you are, it's
Speaker 3: an insecure profession. And I've been very lucky in the
Speaker 3: almost fifty years I've worked in the theater, never had
Speaker 3: a day out of work and worked with the most
Speaker 3: extraordinary people, had the most wonderful time. So it was good.
Speaker 3: It was good and sound advice.
Speaker 2: How do you see the parallel of restaurants in the theater.
Speaker 3: First and foremost, I love restaurants because it's an extraordinary
Speaker 3: convivial experience. It's about being in large groups of people.
Speaker 3: I would be hopeless on my own on a desert island.
Speaker 3: I love being in crowds I get at Glastonbury. I
Speaker 3: love football, I love sitting in a theater more than anything,
Speaker 3: and I love being in a big, crowded restaurant. There's
Speaker 3: something chilling about going into a restaurant finding you're the
Speaker 3: only person there. And it's the same in the theater.
Speaker 3: You know, if you have anything less than the full house,
Speaker 3: you feel that you haven't really succeeded. And the other
Speaker 3: I would say the big similarity is that by and large,
Speaker 3: with small variations, you're serving the same thing every night,
Speaker 3: and we are doing the same thing in terms of
Speaker 3: presenting a play or a musical, but the audience react
Speaker 3: in different ways, and you'll get a night when it's
Speaker 3: absolutely buzzing and jumping, and then for some reason you'll
Speaker 3: get another night were you think they're not getting this,
Speaker 3: they're not. And it may be the same with the
Speaker 3: crowd of people where you've got someone who's tired or
Speaker 3: picky or didn't like this, or you know, was dragged
Speaker 3: out to a restaurant by their other half who they
Speaker 3: didn't really want to go, and you can sense the vibe,
Speaker 3: which is why you know the difference between what you
Speaker 3: do and what I do is you're there nearly every
Speaker 3: night and you're working in the room. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: we are our great mutual friend Jeremy King. You know,
Speaker 3: watching him work in his restaurants is an art, and
Speaker 3: watching you, as you say, you can't spend too long
Speaker 3: at each table, but you spend just enough time to
Speaker 3: sprinkle a little bit of fairy dust. Whereas we can't
Speaker 3: actually do that. I can't walk through my audience going
Speaker 3: come on, cheer up, this is a really good bit
Speaker 3: coming up. But what you can do is you can
Speaker 3: go backstage at the mental and go, hey, guys, you
Speaker 3: know you need some kick some butt here. You've got
Speaker 3: to raise your game a little bit.
Speaker 2: And you can and you do that.
Speaker 3: All you have to do because I mean the very
Speaker 3: very big difference between now and when I start in
Speaker 3: the theater is the length of run for successful shows.
Speaker 3: I mean I came into London. That's really when my
Speaker 3: career properly started. I'd run small regional theaters in the
Speaker 3: seventies in Liverpool and Northampton and places, but I happened
Speaker 3: luckily enough to come to London in nineteen eighty one
Speaker 3: when Kat started, and that was the beginning of the
Speaker 3: extraordinary eighties decade where so much change was enacted. It was,
Speaker 3: you know, love or hate Margaret Thatcher. There was massive
Speaker 3: change that came out of that, and culturally it was
Speaker 3: a really exciting time, you.
Speaker 2: Know it was. And for restaurants, yeah, yeah, no, exact
Speaker 2: same time exactly. This is going on. Jereby started the
Speaker 2: IVY and.
Speaker 3: My first real experience of being a regular anywhere was
Speaker 3: when Jeremy was matred at Joe Allen.
Speaker 2: Actually he said that to me this morning, that he
Speaker 2: met you at Joel What year was that that?
Speaker 3: There was nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 2: And did you when you say regularly were.
Speaker 3: Well, we would go. Well, the thing is, you know,
Speaker 3: you're working in the theater. Your social life doesn't really
Speaker 3: start until the end of the curtain. So at about
Speaker 3: ten thirty, every single life a trot down to Joe Allen's.
Speaker 2: I asked that the actors. I asked that a very
Speaker 2: You know, the actors, when do they before the theater,
Speaker 2: during the theater, after the theater? And of course some
Speaker 2: people Emily blunt ate the whole time. Yeah, she was
Speaker 2: really adorable. She would say that she'd have a hamburger before,
Speaker 2: then something in the intermission, and something at the end.
Speaker 2: Judy Dench, everybody had a different way. She'd have a snack.
Speaker 2: But most of the people that I know in theater
Speaker 2: are friends of mine who in a place. They meet
Speaker 2: me after the play and we'll go out and need
Speaker 2: Is that right? Why is that?
Speaker 3: It's? I think really because they are then suddenly off duty,
Speaker 3: they can relax. You can't help but keep your performance
Speaker 3: in the back of your head beforehand. You know what's
Speaker 3: going to happen to night. Am I going to be
Speaker 3: all right? Looking after yourself? You know, you need to
Speaker 3: really look after yourself. I always remember Jonathan Price is
Speaker 3: a very good friend. When he stopped temporarily being a
Speaker 3: great classical actor and became a musical actor when he
Speaker 3: did Miss Sagon for US, and he did Desert Island
Speaker 3: discs and he talked to Sue Lawley and she said,
Speaker 3: tell me, what's the difference between being a classical actor
Speaker 3: and a musical actor. And he said, rashly, being a
Speaker 3: musical actor is a doddle compared to being a classical actor.
Speaker 3: And the following week he lost his voice, and he
Speaker 3: lost his voice for quite a long time, and he
Speaker 3: said it was the most incredible lesson to learn that
Speaker 3: as a singer, you really have to look after yourself.
Speaker 3: And I watched him because he's done a lot of
Speaker 3: shows for us and talking to people like Martine McCutcheon
Speaker 3: and things like that, and he said, look, you have
Speaker 3: to learn that your voice is you know, it's responsible
Speaker 3: for everything as far as the audience is concerned. And
Speaker 3: therefore you don't talk. You know, you wake up in
Speaker 3: the morning, you do not talk to anyone until lunchtime.
Speaker 2: And so that goes back to eating and about food,
Speaker 2: about how you take care of your body. Is that
Speaker 2: what you're saying an actor.
Speaker 3: So well, the thing is acting, by and large, is
Speaker 3: a very physical thing. I mean, we've talked about singers
Speaker 3: looking after their voices, dancers looking out for their bodies.
Speaker 3: I mean I noticed through the year that I was
Speaker 3: the theater manager at the New London where Cats was on,
Speaker 3: be in there every night watching And there were three
Speaker 3: artists in that one year who worked out for an
Speaker 3: hour before every single performance an hour. One was Wayne Sleep,
Speaker 3: the other was Bonnie Langford, and the third was a
Speaker 3: very very beautiful girl who went to America and became
Speaker 3: a big star call for Nola Hughes. And they were
Speaker 3: the only three who rigorously worked out. They were the
Speaker 3: only three who did not miss a performance. It's a real,
Speaker 3: real responsibility. But going back to Joe Allenson afterwards, of course,
Speaker 3: Jeremy then went on and you know, as we all
Speaker 3: started to do a bit better, you.
Speaker 2: Would go there, what would be your day?
Speaker 3: I would well, until I really settled into London, because
Speaker 3: I in the Provinces, you tend to do everything and
Speaker 3: you're responsible for everything. I would never do less than
Speaker 3: a twelve or fourteen hour day in the Provinces. So
Speaker 3: I started to do this in London until people said, look,
Speaker 3: this is crazy. You need to actually start coming in
Speaker 3: a bit later. So I had a nice little flat
Speaker 3: in Kensington and I'd walk in and my day would
Speaker 3: be talking to the theater staff, getting to know, you know,
Speaker 3: looking at the theater bookings. This was the early days
Speaker 3: of theater bookings where everything was manual. You know, we
Speaker 3: didn't take credit cards, we didn't do phone bookings. It
Speaker 3: was all checks or cash, and you know, you talk
Speaker 3: to the box office. Cues for these big hits would
Speaker 3: go to snake around the block for hours. People would
Speaker 3: would queue. It was an extraordinary time and we were
Speaker 3: all learning on our feet then. And then, of course
Speaker 3: there was a lot of corruption in ticket selling because
Speaker 3: ticket tabs would buy tickets and resell them at huge
Speaker 3: prices and double cell so you'd have the very difficult
Speaker 3: task every night of actually facing up to people and going, look,
Speaker 3: I'm terribly sorry, but your tickets are either forgeries or
Speaker 3: they've been double booked, you know, and this is for
Speaker 3: a show that they may have waited a year to see.
Speaker 3: But I mean, that time was incredible because you know,
Speaker 3: I was a boyfriend the Provinces, nearly in the army,
Speaker 3: and every single person I'd ever wanted to meet my
Speaker 3: life was coming through Cats, whether it be the entire
Speaker 3: orld family. I mean, I watched Charles and Diana dancing
Speaker 3: around my office just after they were married, you know,
Speaker 3: and watching her drop into this perfect split. He said,
Speaker 3: you know, how do these dancers do that? She'd let
Speaker 3: me share you, darling, literally dropped into a perfect split.
Speaker 2: But the thing about the restaurants and the theater food
Speaker 2: there is that they're both extreme. Think it's extremely collaborative jobs.
Speaker 2: So if you don't chop the par so, you can't
Speaker 2: make the sauce, And if you don't probably paint the set,
Speaker 2: you can't you know, put on the play. If you
Speaker 2: don't remember your lines, your fellow actors, you know, have
Speaker 2: a problem. Do you think there is a collaboration.
Speaker 3: I think there's a very, very relarity. It's absolutely right.
Speaker 3: I mean, theater is an enormously collaborative venture. And the
Speaker 3: great thing is, you know, you go and see a
Speaker 3: big musical at say the theater Aldery Lane. When we
Speaker 3: did Miss Saigon, there were two hundred people involved in
Speaker 3: getting that show on, whether it be the lady selling
Speaker 3: the ice creams, the backstage us share, the person pulling
Speaker 3: the ropes, the actors, the lighting technicians are SIGND technicians,
Speaker 3: and then you know, going all the way back to
Speaker 3: the creators of the show be the authors. And in
Speaker 3: musicals it's even more so because you have an added
Speaker 3: layer of responsibility. You have orchestrators, you have members of
Speaker 3: the band, you have choreographers, you have assistant choreographers, armies
Speaker 3: and people who look after it, all of whom are
Speaker 3: working to that specific moment, which is curtain up at
Speaker 3: seven thirty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, curtain up at seven thirty. That's we have a
Speaker 2: curtain up at seventh. Theory and the flooras and you
Speaker 2: know Hoover and the as I said, the chef's aprins and.
Speaker 3: You get into a huddle beforehand, get into the huddle.
Speaker 2: Then we go through and then and then the same
Speaker 2: and then nobody eats before you know, you just don't
Speaker 2: really want to eat. If you're about to cook, you
Speaker 2: have a drink. But then, did you do work in restaurants,
Speaker 2: would it always be kind of at the end of
Speaker 2: the meal you'd just go and relax, or would you
Speaker 2: with Cameron or your other colleagues.
Speaker 3: And it was very well, you were always you were
Speaker 3: sort of always on the job. As you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: theater is the theater is full of gossip when exchanging
Speaker 3: information and stuff, and you know, in the days before
Speaker 3: social media, happy days before social media. That's how you
Speaker 3: got your information. And you walk into someone like Joe
Speaker 3: Allen's and there'd be you know, Wayne Sleep on a
Speaker 3: table over there, and there'd be Trevor Nunn with the
Speaker 3: Royal Shakespeare Company, and there would be someone from the
Speaker 3: National Theater, and there would be as always Princess Margaret
Speaker 3: in the corner, and so you'd move from the table
Speaker 3: hopping that went on. It was sort of became rather
Speaker 3: a joke. And Jeremy had that wonderful pianist. He'd sit
Speaker 3: there and you know, you would suddenly notice seamlessly as
Speaker 3: you walked in, you walked in down those steps into
Speaker 3: that famous seller and he'd see you coming and very
Speaker 3: sudden he realized he's playing someone from Cats or The
Speaker 3: Miss or one of those teens that that you did.
Speaker 3: So yes, I mean restaurants were always the good button.
Speaker 2: What what about another cities? When you were on Broadway?
Speaker 2: Would you go to Sardis? I grew up thinking that
Speaker 2: the theater district, wass wasn't it was?
Speaker 3: And that's where you traditionally had your first night parties.
Speaker 3: So our first that I opened over there was Cats
Speaker 3: and we had a massive first night party in I
Speaker 3: can't remember the hotel, but I always remember they had
Speaker 3: police forces in the foyer of the theater and they
Speaker 3: had trucks outside with ice full of champagne, and everyone
Speaker 3: who came out. It was the most extraordinary thing. We
Speaker 3: then did Oliver on a slightly smaller scale and went
Speaker 3: to Sardi's and had a traditional Broadway opening at Sardi's,
Speaker 3: and I took the director across the room to meet
Speaker 3: our producer and wonderful uncle James Niedlando recently died, and
Speaker 3: I said, come on, we should go and chat to Jimmy,
Speaker 3: our producer. And as we got there, an aid of
Speaker 3: Jimmy's came over, leaned over and said, the New York
Speaker 3: Times is out. It's a load of shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's.
Speaker 3: Like everyone got up and left. Apart from the Brits.
Speaker 3: We were all sitting there going what just happened? What
Speaker 3: just happened? And indeed The New York Times was out
Speaker 3: and it was a terrible review.
Speaker 2: It's about to say, you must have known it's going
Speaker 2: to be a hit.
Speaker 3: Well, the audiences were, but at that time the New
Speaker 3: York Times had that they could close the show, close
Speaker 3: the show, and they did. We battled on, we spent
Speaker 3: money on television. Four weeks later we were gone.
Speaker 2: Somebody else told me that story about that if you
Speaker 2: were at a party, the after party of a play,
Speaker 2: waiting for the review, then everybody would just go. It
Speaker 2: was it was just they would just you just leap.
Speaker 3: It was very very strong. Yeah, because the papers would
Speaker 3: hit the streets about halpus leven midnight, you might might
Speaker 3: might get a tip off if the critic was friends
Speaker 3: with the publicist. So occasionally, you know, led whispering Cameron's ear,
Speaker 3: Lemmy's is going to be okay nowadays that you don't
Speaker 3: have that kind of romantic The first night is more
Speaker 3: about social media and TV and stuff, and the critics
Speaker 3: have all been in the week before. They don't come
Speaker 3: on the first night anymore, And I think, to be honest,
Speaker 3: that's the reflection of the fact their role is not
Speaker 3: as important as it once. Yeah, you know, I fear
Speaker 3: for theater criticism just like I fear for food criticism.
Speaker 3: You see, the great restaurant critics are sort of slipping.
Speaker 2: Away talking about a restaurant critic talking about a restaurant,
Speaker 2: talk about the restaurant critic when we had the dinner
Speaker 2: at the River Cafe to celebrate Adrian girl to launch
Speaker 2: the bursary.
Speaker 3: It was the Sunday Times Prize for an aspiring food
Speaker 3: writer and they could write about food or a restaurant
Speaker 3: they've had, and it was for someone who never been
Speaker 3: published before.
Speaker 2: I in my opening little speech, I read the review
Speaker 2: that he wrote about the River Cafe, which was pretty
Speaker 2: damn very combating first, but then he focused on the Nemesis.
Speaker 2: Do you remember that? And how difficult it was to make?
Speaker 2: It was so Adrian and we just, you know, we
Speaker 2: loved mister and when he came into the restaurant with Nikola,
Speaker 2: it was just he was one of a kind and
Speaker 2: he was your closest friend.
Speaker 3: He was, I think generally was my closest male friend.
Speaker 3: We had a pretty difficult beginn because I met him
Speaker 3: at a very very smart party and the girl I
Speaker 3: was with at the time, who remains a very dear friend,
Speaker 3: had misread the invitation and I turned up in full
Speaker 3: Venetian puff trousers, puff sleeves, great comedian at lastin.
Speaker 2: Mile costume party.
Speaker 3: It was for Viennese, not Venetians. Everyone else was entails
Speaker 3: and I was on the same table as Adrian, and
Speaker 3: I hadn't met him before I knew who he was.
Speaker 3: He was going through that rather affected stage of wearing
Speaker 3: a monocle, and he looked at me and said, one
Speaker 3: of us has got a strange idea of geography, dear,
Speaker 3: and I don't think it's meat anyway. I rang him
Speaker 3: the next day and said, you're a bastard for making
Speaker 3: me feel so uncomfortable. Said let me take it out
Speaker 3: to lunch, and we did, and we became very very
Speaker 3: good friends, and I loved going out to eat with him.
Speaker 2: Like with a food critic, quite daunting.
Speaker 3: In the case of Aid. Well, first of all, there
Speaker 3: was that thing, of course, he could never go as
Speaker 3: a girl. The bookings were always in the name of
Speaker 3: mister Ox, mister Cambridge. Yeah, so you'd arrive and you
Speaker 3: say table for for mister Cambridge, and you see the
Speaker 3: colored rain from the matre d's cheeks. We'd sit down
Speaker 3: and look. He knew enormous. He was, as you know,
Speaker 3: a very good cook himself. I mean I used to
Speaker 3: read his cookery column in Tatler and it was hysterical.
Speaker 3: He'd go for ham and peace suit, get some ham,
Speaker 3: get some peace, cook it, you know, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: But he was a very good He was a very
Speaker 3: good cook, and he had enormous respect for restaurants, restauranteurs,
Speaker 3: and for particularly for front of house staff. He was
Speaker 3: very He admired waiters a lot, but they had to
Speaker 3: know their stuff. And why it was daunting was he
Speaker 3: would challenge you just to see how much you knew
Speaker 3: if you had been charged a lot of money. So
Speaker 3: he'd go, so, tell me about the venison and they'd go, well,
Speaker 3: it's from a deer, sir, yes, yes, I knew that
Speaker 3: what part of the deer? And he'd go either way.
Speaker 3: It would either go, well, you know, it's a haunch
Speaker 3: or bank whatever it is, or they'd go I'll just
Speaker 3: go and find out then come back and say, okay,
Speaker 3: so tell me where's the deer from and they go, well, Highlands,
Speaker 3: new forest. And he was testing them.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's really testing testing the restaurant because that's
Speaker 2: the job of the exactly. That's one of the things
Speaker 2: we do with the River Cafe, the ideas that everyone
Speaker 2: participates in the prepping of the food and so if
Speaker 2: you are serving not everything, but if you're serving a
Speaker 2: sal severity you know, because you chopped the parson, and
Speaker 2: you wash the capers and you clean the anchovies. There's
Speaker 2: a kind of involvement and then the importance of knowing
Speaker 2: how something has cooked. So he tested the restaurant.
Speaker 3: He tested them, and then, as you know, he could
Speaker 3: be absolutely excoriating if he didn't like the food. And
Speaker 3: I've met a number of restauranteurs since who knew. I
Speaker 3: knew him and said, did you know your friend? You know,
Speaker 3: bankrupted me. And because I think he was one of
Speaker 3: the very very few critics who could still had that power.
Speaker 3: He was rather like the New York Times, and it's fair, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think so. If you're going to be paying a
Speaker 3: lot of money, then you know your standards should be exacting.
Speaker 3: But when he loved you as he loved you, and
Speaker 3: he loved Jeremy, and he loved Andrea at Reva, you know,
Speaker 3: he had his favorites, the places he would always go
Speaker 3: back to.
Speaker 2: Did he tell you what to order?
Speaker 3: He would try and make sure we all had something different.
Speaker 3: He'd go, well, that's a bit boring if we do that,
Speaker 3: And then if we did, he then eat off each
Speaker 3: of our places. Yeah, yeah, And what was interesting he
Speaker 3: would take notes. No, he didn't. He'd never take notes because,
Speaker 3: as you knew, he was chronically dyslexic and he couldn't
Speaker 3: spell anything anyway. He would always at the end of
Speaker 3: the evening ask for a copy of the menu to
Speaker 3: take away, and that was his aide memoir. But we
Speaker 3: went to incredible places. I mean, you know, at the
Speaker 3: time of the great gastronomic explosion we had, we went
Speaker 3: to Heston Rumentals for the first time together and he
Speaker 3: and Heston became very good friends. And we went to
Speaker 3: Favigan in Sweden, and we went to all bullies, oh
Speaker 3: we did, and Noma pop ups and things, and when
Speaker 3: it was a real it was exciting going to the
Speaker 3: theater internationally, sorry, into a restaurants the same thing, to
Speaker 3: the Oh yeah. He was my regular first night date,
Speaker 3: and in fact, quite more often than not he would
Speaker 3: either bring Flora, his wonderful daughter, and I'd bring one
Speaker 3: of my sons and they too sit together an aide
Speaker 3: and I sit together. No, he was exactly he was asked.
Speaker 3: In fact, I don't know if anyone knows this. He
Speaker 3: was asked to be the Sunday Times theater critic, and
Speaker 3: he said no, I can't possibly because I've got far
Speaker 3: too many good friends in the theater, and I wouldn't
Speaker 3: have any if because I did read a couple a
Speaker 3: couple of his theater reviews in The Boy they were singers. No,
Speaker 3: I miss him. I miss him every day. He was
Speaker 3: literally someone I spoke to every day. And what was
Speaker 3: extraordinary about him, and you probably know this again, is
Speaker 3: is it was only after he died that I realized
Speaker 3: how many people he spoke to and where did he
Speaker 3: get the time to do, you know, to do that
Speaker 3: He never ever hung up on me. I've had, let's
Speaker 3: just say, I've had a lot of drama in my
Speaker 3: life over the years, in terms of losing close friends
Speaker 3: and losing members of my family and various problems and
Speaker 3: things like that. And I find it really difficult to cry.
Speaker 3: But the only thing that I cry like a drain
Speaker 3: is music. Music is my kind of go to emotional release.
Speaker 3: It's a wonderfully cathartic thing and it can be a
Speaker 3: beautiful piece of classical music or it can be a
Speaker 3: great bit of rock and roll. And I told Bono,
Speaker 3: who's a regular clan of yours, I know that for
Speaker 3: one reason or another, I don't know why. When my
Speaker 3: first son Tom was born thirty five years ago, I
Speaker 3: came back at four o'clock in the morning from the hospital,
Speaker 3: dizzy and confused, and I pulled myself a large class
Speaker 3: of Scotch and danced to his song bad. So after
Speaker 3: that that became a tradition. So I got four sons
Speaker 3: and I danced so bad for every one of them.
Speaker 2: When do you go to Glastonbury? Do you eat?
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you don't eat well. It's very hard to
Speaker 3: eat well. I mean interestingly, there's a lovely local restaurant
Speaker 3: close to us because I live in the West Country
Speaker 3: most of the time in Bruton, called Out the Chapel,
Speaker 3: and Bruton has become a sort of new color in
Speaker 3: the West. Sip At the Chapel was the first and
Speaker 3: they had it's just changed hands and they have a
Speaker 3: pop up restaurant Glastonbury now and they came close to
Speaker 3: getting the sort of chapel experience. But when you're catering
Speaker 3: for many hundreds of people, so no, it's not really
Speaker 3: about the food.
Speaker 2: What about cooking at home?
Speaker 3: Cooking at home? I love doing it, Yeah, because.
Speaker 2: You described to me about cooking for your family and
Speaker 2: taking a lot of Asian food.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, I love I mean both the very very
Speaker 3: important partners in my life. Neither of them could cook.
Speaker 3: So I sort of cooked to survive and I taught
Speaker 3: myself and then rather wonderfully, all four of my children
Speaker 3: have loved cooking. And in fact, my elder son Tom
Speaker 3: has just opened his first restaurant. Yeah, it's called Outcrops Social.
Speaker 3: It's a pop up restaurant in one eighty the strand,
Speaker 3: is it and it's Thai food, and they're giving him
Speaker 3: three months to see if it goes. And I can
Speaker 3: say totally objectively, he'said the most incredible reviews and it's delicious.
Speaker 2: Let's go. What's it called?
Speaker 3: Then, out Crop Social? Yeah, I'll take you down in
Speaker 3: September do.
Speaker 2: That, And so what do you cook it? Out?
Speaker 3: So at home? Well, if we're there and it's Sunday
Speaker 3: and it's a great sort of traditional Sunday lunch, and
Speaker 3: then we will all do our bits and we all
Speaker 3: love quite spicy food. I love cooking Asian food. I
Speaker 3: love cooking Indian food in particular. I love grinding spices
Speaker 3: and preparing things like that. But it is a lot
Speaker 3: of work. But that's why it's good to have all
Speaker 3: your family around you so you can say to someone
Speaker 3: that you do.
Speaker 2: This the collaboration. Yeah, and do you go out to restaurants?
Speaker 3: Now I don't go out nearly as well. I tend
Speaker 3: to go out probably mill down in the West Country.
Speaker 3: And also because as I've sort of moved away from
Speaker 3: actively being involved in the West End on a daily basis,
Speaker 3: I'm not there as much. In the evening, still go
Speaker 3: and see the theater quite a lot. So I'll go
Speaker 3: out to places and.
Speaker 2: You still go after yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: I can't bring myself to really have a big, big
Speaker 3: nursery teas we call it at five or stays. But
Speaker 3: you know, again I've got the go to places like
Speaker 3: you know, the Ivy Club and things and that will
Speaker 3: stay open and again are very convivial. But I worked
Speaker 3: for many, many years with Camera Macintosh, who was an
Speaker 3: absolute food and a brilliant cook as well. He was
Speaker 3: someone else who really inspired me to cook, because we
Speaker 3: all would shut the office down in the early days.
Speaker 3: You know, cats can run itself and they can run itself.
Speaker 3: And we go off to his place in Scotland and
Speaker 3: where you have the most incredible produce of seafood and things,
Speaker 3: and we'd all be given a job. And as far
Speaker 3: as he's say, it wasn't cooking unless or at least
Speaker 3: twenty people around their lunch table. So people come out
Speaker 3: of the hills and so that was fun learned. I
Speaker 3: learned a lot at his knee, as it were. So
Speaker 3: we'll always go together. But I mean, no, I mean
Speaker 3: the days of the high the high high high end
Speaker 3: dining with Adrian, and it'd been fun. I think probably
Speaker 3: behind and.
Speaker 2: Working in restaurant. Will you meet people from meetings?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the business lunch is sort of past. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean in the early days, you know, I'd go off
Speaker 3: and meet our advertising agents and it would be you know,
Speaker 3: and he'd sit down and he goes this a two
Speaker 3: bottle lunch or one bottle lunch. And now it's I'll
Speaker 3: have a glass lunch, which is a shame in a way,
Speaker 3: but probably we get we get more done. I honestly
Speaker 3: think it was more fun in the eighties and nineties
Speaker 3: for us than it is now because it's much more pressure,
Speaker 3: the challenges are much more, the margins are much lower.
Speaker 3: The good thing is the way we look after people
Speaker 3: has changed a lot, and you have to do that now,
Speaker 3: and as you should, and as we know, the actor
Speaker 3: strikes on at the moment about getting proper regging and
Speaker 3: that's going right through society. So the way we behave
Speaker 3: has changed. But in terms of that feeling of real
Speaker 3: excitement of you know, I can't tell you what it
Speaker 3: was like opening they met it on Broadway, or Phantom
Speaker 3: on Broadway, and you know Psychone, which was a massively
Speaker 3: controversial production because of the casting.
Speaker 2: And so I have a letter from you, but I
Speaker 2: don't remember where the correspondence, but it says I'll read it.
Speaker 2: I'm going to read your letter that you wrote me,
Speaker 2: Ah Darling. I had an emotional evening last night, the
Speaker 2: first night of Carousel. Adrian was one of my few
Speaker 2: friends who really enjoyed musicals, and even though we used
Speaker 2: to warble if I loved you from it, he never
Speaker 2: actually seen the show. They announced a revival just as
Speaker 2: he got sick, and I made him promise to stay
Speaker 2: well enough to come to the first night with me.
Speaker 2: Of course that didn't happen, so I kept an empty
Speaker 2: seat next to me. I miss him badly, and we'll
Speaker 2: definitely know when I'm next seeing you. Much loved Nick,
Speaker 2: so I was wondering because I thought, you do have
Speaker 2: one of the most beautiful speaking voices that I know,
Speaker 2: and I was wondering if you might sing if I
Speaker 2: Loved You, And here's the lyrics. I'll he should we
Speaker 2: have a go and I'll sing it with you a
Speaker 2: little bit. You know. I grew up on musical so fa.
Speaker 2: I lived in upstate New York. We'd go in the
Speaker 2: car and we'd drive down the throughway to New York
Speaker 2: and we would see the big ships, and then we'd
Speaker 2: see the SS France, and we'd see in the United States.
Speaker 2: Then we would go and have lunch, and then we
Speaker 2: would go to musical We'd go to by Fair Lady,
Speaker 2: West Side Story. This is I guess I was, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of twelve, and so it was late early sixties,
Speaker 2: a late yea early sixties. And then we would go
Speaker 2: to Sam Goodie, a record storage, you know, Sam City,
Speaker 2: and we would buy the record and then we would
Speaker 2: drive up back to the country and we'd play the
Speaker 2: record over and over and over again. So I know
Speaker 2: the words basically every musical of that era, and so
Speaker 2: I know this song if I Loved You, So shall
Speaker 2: we try? It?
Speaker 3: Is one of my favorites. I know the first two
Speaker 3: lines to more songs until then, so I'm going to
Speaker 3: cheat and read yeah, absolutely, I love you time and again.
Speaker 5: I will try to say, oh, Ruthie, well, I'm gone
Speaker 5: wow to Adrian, to.
Speaker 2: Bet, to carousel you and to love. So the singing
Speaker 2: gives you. Singing can give you comfort, and food can
Speaker 2: give you comfort. So my very very last question of
Speaker 2: talking and listening and singing is to ask you, if
Speaker 2: you have a food that you need not to eat
Speaker 2: when you're hungry, but to eat when you need comfort.
Speaker 2: What would that be in the gallat?
Speaker 3: If I tell you, you'll be so appalled. No I won't,
Speaker 3: because it was the most delicious thing I've everything. I'm
Speaker 3: going to be down or depressed or hungry or wanna
Speaker 3: And it was actually a concocted recipe by a friend
Speaker 3: of mine who wrote it in a play and I
Speaker 3: read it I thought, I can't believe he's actually done this,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to try and put it together. And
Speaker 3: it's basically toast with peanut butter, very crispy bacon and
Speaker 3: cheese melted on top.
Speaker 2: I'm that disgusted, I'm interested. It was I think food
Speaker 2: because the food that comforts has a story. Well, the
Speaker 2: next time you have one, call me.
Speaker 3: Okay, well there when we go to my son's restaurant,
Speaker 3: was sneak home. Thank you very much, Thank you, Ruthie,
Speaker 3: thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: The River Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops
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Speaker 1: illustrated with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The
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