Speaker 1: Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and
Speaker 1: Adami's Studios.
Speaker 2: Last night, after dinner in the River Cafe, I sat
Speaker 2: with the chefs. Usually we talk about the evening service,
Speaker 2: what happened, who came, what we cooked. But this time,
Speaker 2: knowing he was coming to the kitchen today, we spoke
Speaker 2: about our guest, Yotam Ottolenghi. They've all the chef's read
Speaker 2: his books, they've all eaten in his restaurants, and like me,
Speaker 2: love his food. In short, they were thrilled he was coming.
Speaker 2: Yatama and I were introduced years ago by a mutual friend,
Speaker 2: Ari Shapiro Ruthie. He said, you've got to meet this guy.
Speaker 2: You think the same way, and you will adore him.
Speaker 2: Yatim and I share a lot. Most of all, we
Speaker 2: believe in the people we work with, valuing them and
Speaker 2: their creativity. We also share a kind of geography. Mine
Speaker 2: is an Italian landscape with cities of the Renaissance. His
Speaker 2: is further east, desert mountains and biblical We both live
Speaker 2: and work in culture is far from where we were born.
Speaker 2: Today we will talk about separation and connection, Eastern and
Speaker 2: Western family and friends. Would you like to read a
Speaker 2: recipe uniquely, I would say, not from one of our cookbooks,
Speaker 2: but from one of yours.
Speaker 3: I was looking forward to reading a recipe from one
Speaker 3: of your cookbooks because they're just so much shorter. Famously,
Speaker 3: al Telengy recipes are very long, so I worked hard
Speaker 3: to find a short recipe in the minutes. Yeah right,
Speaker 3: and it's only going to have like twelve ingredients and
Speaker 3: not like twenty four. But this is from one of
Speaker 3: my most recent books, called The Alto Lengthy Test Kitchen
Speaker 3: Shelf Love. It's a butterbean recipe, so it's called one
Speaker 3: jar of butter beans with preserves, lemon, chili and herb oil.
Speaker 3: Five garlic cloves, finely chopped, two mild red chilies, finely chopped,
Speaker 3: seeds in all, two tablespoons coriander seeds finely crushed with
Speaker 3: a pestable mortar. Three preserved lemons, inner parts discarded and
Speaker 3: skin finally sliced. One and a half tablespoons roughly chopped
Speaker 3: thyme leaves, four rosemary sprigs, one tablespoon to milo paste,
Speaker 3: one hundred and seventy meals olive oil. One jar of
Speaker 3: butter beans seven hundred grams. Two large vine tomatoes roughly
Speaker 3: grated and skin discarded, flaked sea salt, and black pepper.
Speaker 3: Put the first eight ingredients and one quarter teaspoons of
Speaker 3: flaked salt into a medium saute pan on a medium
Speaker 3: low heat and steer everything together. Heat gently for twenty
Speaker 3: five minutes until very fragrant but not at all brown.
Speaker 3: If the oil gets too hot to turn the heat
Speaker 3: down too low. Stir in the butter beans. Then turn
Speaker 3: the heat, eat up to medium and cook for ten minutes.
Speaker 3: Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for at
Speaker 3: least an hour or longer if time allows. Meanwhile, mix
Speaker 3: the greater tomatoes with a third of a teaspoon of
Speaker 3: flakes sea salt and a good grind of pepper to
Speaker 3: serve poor the butter beans. Mixture into a shallow bowl
Speaker 3: and spoon over the greater tomatoes. Mixing it in places.
Speaker 2: Sounds like a recipe that I would definitely want to make.
Speaker 3: It sounds a bit like a river feb I.
Speaker 2: Actually I did read that. Your first word was was
Speaker 2: it Therali word for Hebrew word for soup.
Speaker 3: Well, it is the kind of the little dumplings that
Speaker 3: go into the soup, so it has the word soup
Speaker 3: in it. Yeah, it was it something I think my
Speaker 3: mum used to spread on the table while we were
Speaker 3: waiting for the food and I just used to kind
Speaker 3: of grab them and eat them.
Speaker 2: And So going back then, starting at the very very beginning,
Speaker 2: tell me about your early childhood in terms of food
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: What you know. Yeah, so I grew up in Jerusalem
Speaker 3: and the food in Jerusalem.
Speaker 2: At that point, can I just ask you were your
Speaker 2: parents born in.
Speaker 3: Israel or My parents were born in Europe just before
Speaker 3: the Second World War and they immigrated with their parents
Speaker 3: as little kids just before the war in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 3: My mother was from a German family, so they were
Speaker 3: German Jews, and my father were they were an Italian
Speaker 3: family from Florence.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so my dad was born in Florence and they
Speaker 3: met in Israel and they so, yeah, they met in
Speaker 3: Israel years later, yeah, yeah, and Jerusalem was so I
Speaker 3: grew up in a very kind of a non traditional
Speaker 3: Jewish home, very secular food wise, Like we had pork,
Speaker 3: which nobody was unheard of. You know. My mom had
Speaker 3: that butcher in Jerusalem, the one and only one that
Speaker 3: sold pork, but it was under the counter and the
Speaker 3: brown bag. Yes, she used to come in by a
Speaker 3: ham and we used to get ham sandwiches for school.
Speaker 3: But you know, we were not allowed to say what's
Speaker 3: in our sandwiches and we were not allowed to share
Speaker 3: it with friends. So the cover story was that it
Speaker 3: was Turkey, where it was a very pink Turkey.
Speaker 2: Great woman, very woman to come from Germany. She was
Speaker 2: from Germany, so she probably had pork in Germany. I
Speaker 2: was not going to give that up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there were various secular you know, and so
Speaker 3: she just had to have four. But it was you know,
Speaker 3: the stories about these things they sound quite you know, inocus,
Speaker 3: but actually it was quite. It was a big deal.
Speaker 3: So that butcher, and when people found out that he
Speaker 3: was selling pork, you know, his shop was vandalized and
Speaker 3: you'd have like people would like like glue in his locks,
Speaker 3: so he couldn't open the shop the next day, et cetera.
Speaker 3: It was in Jerusalem. Food is not a neutral stance,
Speaker 3: you know, like all those decisions, all those things that happened,
Speaker 3: those political implications, what.
Speaker 2: Year with this have been?
Speaker 3: So this was so I was born in sixty eight,
Speaker 3: so we're talking about the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 2: So late as that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. So the food culture of the
Speaker 3: city was the food of the immigrants from wherever they came,
Speaker 3: the Jewish immigrants, but also the Palestinian population, which was
Speaker 3: so had such a rich, wonderful culinary history. And I
Speaker 3: feel that I grew up in this world in which
Speaker 3: we ate very European food. At home, my father was
Speaker 3: cooking traditionally Italian dishes, and my mom was kind of
Speaker 3: an international cook, but with a very Germanic approach to cooking.
Speaker 3: But outside, you know, when we went out, we used
Speaker 3: to have Palestinian food, Arabic food, and that's the mix
Speaker 3: that I grew up having, and I always thought that
Speaker 3: I was quite lucky to have had been exposed to
Speaker 3: all those kind of foods from quite a young age.
Speaker 2: Could your father find ingredients that he wanted for Italian.
Speaker 3: Cooking, Yeah he could, so, first of all, they've had
Speaker 3: they used to have food, like like I remember my grandparents,
Speaker 3: because they couldn't really separate themselves from their Italian background,
Speaker 3: so they used to have food sent to them, so
Speaker 3: we had to. We used to get like anchovy paste
Speaker 3: and olive oil and biscuits and cookies and things, so
Speaker 3: they always get these packages of Italian produce that arrived
Speaker 3: in Parmesan. So they lived about an hour from where
Speaker 3: we lived in Jerusalem. They lived in the suburb of
Speaker 3: Tel Aviv, and I used to come to their house
Speaker 3: as a kid with my dad and the smell was
Speaker 3: just completely different. It smelled of Italy in so many ways.
Speaker 3: So they kept the Italian connection going on. And they
Speaker 3: used to travel in the summer because they had a
Speaker 3: house in the hills outside Florence that we used to
Speaker 3: go to when I was growing up, So we had
Speaker 3: a lot of a lot of that. So in between
Speaker 3: the Italian and the Palestinian and the German influences, I've
Speaker 3: had all that.
Speaker 2: Because I often think that I often say that in
Speaker 2: my history as as an interviewer, that many of the people,
Speaker 2: especially immigrants, talk more about their grandparents food than their parents.
Speaker 2: That if you've moved from your culture to another culture,
Speaker 2: the mother is probably tried and adapt So if you
Speaker 2: have a family from Ghana coming from Ghana to London,
Speaker 2: the mother would try and kind of still remember her
Speaker 2: food she grew up with, but would try to adapt,
Speaker 2: and the children completely adapted and would have the food
Speaker 2: of their friends, but the grandparents, when he went to
Speaker 2: their house, they would cook the Danaan food or the
Speaker 2: Italian food. And my mother in law left Italy for
Speaker 2: London pre war, and her father, who's kind of Florentine
Speaker 2: site aristocrat, would send her candied oranges every month. You
Speaker 2: know that she craved those kind of Italian the Italian
Speaker 2: food of your culture totally.
Speaker 3: And the only difference is that in Israel at the time,
Speaker 3: there wasn't like a cuisine as such. It was because
Speaker 3: it was just so early on and it was just
Speaker 3: so new and so young, so a national cuisine has
Speaker 3: not evolved. There was a place Senian, the Palestinian food
Speaker 3: was extremely evolved, but what people would call Israeli food
Speaker 3: is something that evolved later. But when I was growing up,
Speaker 3: there was the food that Polish Jews would would have cooked,
Speaker 3: or Russian Jews, or Libyan Jews, or Moroccan Jews or
Speaker 3: Iraqi Jews. Those each one had their own cuisine. But
Speaker 3: I always like to say, like in Jerusalem was like
Speaker 3: survival of the fittest, you know, like the best food
Speaker 3: from every culture would surface and we have yeah, that's
Speaker 3: really great.
Speaker 2: So you would have the Sephardic and you would.
Speaker 3: Have so you'd have a Sephardics, you know, salads and
Speaker 3: like and messies, and you'd have like the bubkas that
Speaker 3: would come from the Ashkenazi food and and in some
Speaker 3: ways like some restaurants in Jerusalem these days, that then
Speaker 3: when you go, that's what's featured, you know, like the
Speaker 3: best of every culture that makes up the city.
Speaker 2: Because in America, definitely my family where they were Hungarian
Speaker 2: and Russian Jews, and my hunger and grandmother was a
Speaker 2: great pastry cook, you know, she made all the strudles
Speaker 2: and all that, but I remember not really liking all
Speaker 2: that sort of can filter fish and multi course that
Speaker 2: that meat they cooked for hours, and I'm going to
Speaker 2: get in trouble for this.
Speaker 3: I always you're in good company. It's fine, the Eastern
Speaker 3: European food. I always say, like, you know, there is
Speaker 3: this Israeli chef called Aras Komorowski. He's a baker and
Speaker 3: he's become quite well known because he's outspoken. He's one
Speaker 3: of the founders of the modern way of cooking. And
Speaker 3: he always says in Israeli, only you filter fish if
Speaker 3: your grandmother is still alive.
Speaker 2: That's funny, and I guess they are, but those grandmothers
Speaker 2: might not be here for very long now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But I also think there's good things you can
Speaker 3: do with and I always say there's no bad cuisines.
Speaker 3: It's just about how people cook those foods. And there's
Speaker 3: when I go and people say, oh, how could you
Speaker 3: would you like about British cooking, I said, like, there's
Speaker 3: so many things here, and the desserts are like some
Speaker 3: of the best desserts in the world, and you know that,
Speaker 3: And I think it's it really is about what you
Speaker 3: do with it, not I agree.
Speaker 2: So going back again, it seems like you had a
Speaker 2: household where food was really important, but your father and
Speaker 2: your mother cooked.
Speaker 3: Yeah, both my parents cooked. My father because of this
Speaker 3: Italian sensibilities, he used to cook in a way that
Speaker 3: doesn't remind me of the way I cook now. So
Speaker 3: it was quite minimal, great ingredients, cooked with care and attention.
Speaker 3: And he used to make polenta and he's just to
Speaker 3: stand there and stir it, you know, for forty five
Speaker 3: minutes or an hour until it was just right, and
Speaker 3: at the cheese, but everything very kind of moderately and
Speaker 3: with a lot of attention, and was so different from
Speaker 3: the way I ended up cooking, which is this kind
Speaker 3: of quite a maximalist way of cooking, quite a lot
Speaker 3: of ingredients more in I think, more keen to maybe
Speaker 3: how they cook in North Africa or in Asia, South
Speaker 3: Asia or Southeast Asia, in the sense that quite a
Speaker 3: lot of spices, cook them down, create something, which is
Speaker 3: kind of a base for sauce. He didn't cook like that.
Speaker 3: He cooked much more the Italian way, but he was
Speaker 3: a professor of chemistry at the university, so he had
Speaker 3: a really kind of a deep understanding of ingredients. Intuitive.
Speaker 2: But I would say that a recipe, I don't know
Speaker 2: if you agree, is part science and part poetry. Yes,
Speaker 2: you know, everybody likes the image of the Italian that
Speaker 2: throws something in and does something there and does something that.
Speaker 2: But actually they're very precise, I think.
Speaker 3: Very precise. But he loved food. But there's certain things
Speaker 3: he just like all Italians, he loved his foods the most,
Speaker 3: and he just looked like there are certain combinations that
Speaker 3: he would just not have, Like he said, sweet in
Speaker 3: savory food. No, because he was from northern Italy, you
Speaker 3: know that's maybe in Sicily you'd find there. Pulia but
Speaker 3: not in the North. So if you'd have like something Moroccan,
Speaker 3: you know, like a tagine with prunes or whatever, I
Speaker 3: wouldn't touch that.
Speaker 2: And your mother did she cook German sy Then.
Speaker 3: My mom cooked German food. She was more of an
Speaker 3: international cook, you know. She had these international cookbooks of
Speaker 3: the fifties, you know, and she would try like a
Speaker 3: Malaysian curry or delicious caspachio. But she also was a
Speaker 3: food in the sense that for her food was very important.
Speaker 3: The most important meal of the day in our house
Speaker 3: was breakfast, and we had this kind of spread of food. Again,
Speaker 3: not very tally. You went to school mostly on the weekend,
Speaker 3: but even before I went to school, there was like
Speaker 3: freshly sliced vegetables, fresh vegetables and some cheese and brine,
Speaker 3: you know, like feta style and fresh bread and egg.
Speaker 3: And this is still what I do for my kids,
Speaker 3: Like before they go to school, I give them this
Speaker 3: massive breastfast and Carl, my husband, looks at me and says, like,
Speaker 3: is that really breakfast? You know, but they love it.
Speaker 3: It really is delicious. But the whole concept of breakfast
Speaker 3: is like people different cultures do it very different.
Speaker 2: My grandchildren have Chinese and they have chicken soup for
Speaker 2: breakfast service. They can think of nothing nicer than having
Speaker 2: a bowl of soup. You know, I agree, and why not?
Speaker 2: You know, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: When I came here and I saw that grilled tomato
Speaker 3: and beans and sausage, I thought like, what, I'm an abomination.
Speaker 3: I do like it now? You okay?
Speaker 2: And so growing up in your do you have brothers
Speaker 2: and sisters?
Speaker 3: I have one sister.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so the family meal would be sitting. Did
Speaker 2: your mother work yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, my mom was a teacher.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you would sit down to breakfast, fantastic breakfast,
Speaker 2: and then most dinners, would you have dinner together?
Speaker 3: Yeah? We would also have dinner together. Yeah. Breakfast was
Speaker 3: the main time you could trust that everybody would be there.
Speaker 3: My parents worked a lot of dinner, not always, but
Speaker 3: we also had dinners together.
Speaker 2: Do you have memories of the kitchen?
Speaker 3: Yeah? We So we had. The kitchen I was growing
Speaker 3: up with was a long, kind of gally kitchen with
Speaker 3: a dining table and chair at the very end. It
Speaker 3: wasn't fancy at all. It was very particle, but there's
Speaker 3: always cooking going on, and it was Yeah, I remember
Speaker 3: I remember a cupboard where everything was was stored. And
Speaker 3: I remember that I was alway used to climb up
Speaker 3: the counter. I couldn't reach to get chocolate. There was
Speaker 3: a box and she didn't mind. I don't know. She
Speaker 3: always she never told us off, but we was. We
Speaker 3: just come and had that cooking children.
Speaker 4: When we need to start in the morning, they do
Speaker 4: all the fish hungary and all the butchery.
Speaker 2: So we start off with the meat and fish. While
Speaker 2: I'm writing the menu.
Speaker 3: Watch the level of butchery, like we get a we
Speaker 3: get a whole pig or.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, or a whole you know, being saloon on
Speaker 4: the bone or yeah, the legs of lamb and all
Speaker 4: and the whole fish fully scale with all the scales
Speaker 4: and everything that's gotten gill and scale fish and do
Speaker 4: all the proper you know stuff that's skillful stuff that
Speaker 4: I suppose some we're busy kitchen, but we have a
Speaker 4: lot of chefs and.
Speaker 2: We do all that.
Speaker 3: We don't have stations stations, so anyone can do everything anything.
Speaker 4: By the end of probably it takes about four years
Speaker 4: to learn all the sections. Well, not everyone here can
Speaker 4: look on every section past the section is quite hard.
Speaker 3: It is hard.
Speaker 4: A lot of people be learning that section, so the
Speaker 4: person on it today it's sort of.
Speaker 2: Learning as well.
Speaker 4: We're teaching them how to you know, and thank.
Speaker 3: You at all.
Speaker 2: Did your parents take you to restaurants? Did you go out?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we didn't have We didn't have great restaurants
Speaker 3: in Jerusalem in the sense in the way we have now.
Speaker 3: So this whole, this whole revolution in food has not
Speaker 3: happened yet, so we ate when we ate out. We
Speaker 3: used to go to Palestinian restaurants. So the war just
Speaker 3: happened not long before the nineteen sixty seven war in
Speaker 3: which Israel occupied East Jerusalem. So in some ways this
Speaker 3: is before the pre traumatic times. You know, it was
Speaker 3: all very new and obviously it was complicated, but it
Speaker 3: was relatively peaceful. So I remember we used to go
Speaker 3: travel a lot into the West Bank. We used to
Speaker 3: go to Annapolis to Jericho to have bron to have meals.
Speaker 3: So we used to go to Jericho and have like
Speaker 3: incredibly little meals. Oh, we would have these spreads of
Speaker 3: delicious things that you find, some of them you'd know
Speaker 3: and some of them you wouldn't. So from you know,
Speaker 3: like hummus or in Labana, you know, the strain yogurt,
Speaker 3: but you'd also have like local herbs that be sauteed
Speaker 3: in garlic and olive oil. They have incredible so they
Speaker 3: have wonderful oranges, so you'd have orange juice freshly squeezed
Speaker 3: a bit like Seville's, like they have some of them
Speaker 3: that are cooking and some of them mostly for juicing
Speaker 3: because it's so hot and humid, it's like perfect for
Speaker 3: citrus and lamb on the grain. Also they have with
Speaker 3: cooked lamb on open grill and rice dishes like my cluba,
Speaker 3: like upside down rice cakes and bulgar salads. And it
Speaker 3: was an amazing wonderful olive oil. Wonderful olive oil, and
Speaker 3: great freshly baked breads, pizza breads and all and other
Speaker 3: variations on that fiend. Because of Palestine cook their bread
Speaker 3: in a taboon, which is that you know that kind
Speaker 3: of ceramic oven, earthenware oven. So all that was there,
Speaker 3: and I really have really really strong memory of driving
Speaker 3: down to Jericho and just having all these wonderful foods
Speaker 3: and coming back, but also in Jerusalem, I have such
Speaker 3: strong memories of the of these flavors.
Speaker 2: Did you ever think that you would like to do that?
Speaker 2: Did you ever think you'd want to be a chef.
Speaker 3: No, I didn't really think I would want to be.
Speaker 3: I really loved eating so much so that like my
Speaker 3: dad always used to make fun of me, used to
Speaker 3: call me golozzo, which is like it's that in word
Speaker 3: for like greedy, because I was greedy and I had
Speaker 3: to make them like take me to restaurants. On my
Speaker 3: There was one restaurant and restaurant in Jerusalem that served
Speaker 3: as seafood, like shrimps and squid in that and it
Speaker 3: was in East Jerusalem and the Arab part because they
Speaker 3: were Christian era, I mean, Muslims can eat seafood as well.
Speaker 3: And we'd go there and have like a plate of
Speaker 3: like prawns and like butter and garlic and lemon, you know,
Speaker 3: like and I just thought it was the most delicious
Speaker 3: thing I've ever had. It was so exotic and so yeah.
Speaker 3: So I had all really all that wonderful food. But
Speaker 3: I never thought I was going to become No. I
Speaker 3: kind of just assumed I'm going to follow in my parents'
Speaker 3: path an academic, you know, go to university study, which
Speaker 3: I did. I went to university and I studied and
Speaker 3: Tel Aviv university. In the late nineties, I studied university,
Speaker 3: I moved to Tel Aviv.
Speaker 2: So what did you eat?
Speaker 3: So my first apartment that I had with my boyfriend
Speaker 3: at the time, we live by Caramel Market, which is
Speaker 3: the main food and vegetable market, so it really was
Speaker 3: an apartment really close to the market. And this was
Speaker 3: when the first time I started to cook because I
Speaker 3: was at university and so many students, like you know,
Speaker 3: food was not forthcoming anymore, as I had to cook,
Speaker 3: and I fell in love with cooking through the market.
Speaker 3: So on Friday I would go and buy fresh herbs
Speaker 3: and vegetables and cheese that I had this incredible cheese standards.
Speaker 3: They had all the Balkan cheeses, you know those sitting
Speaker 3: in brine, you know, the different types of feta and
Speaker 3: many different there are many different types of I used
Speaker 3: the word feta, but it's the Bulgarian cheeses. It's a
Speaker 3: whole range of young cheeses that they vary in saltiness
Speaker 3: and texture from something which is more like a ricotta
Speaker 3: to something much firmer. Yeah, you have like really really
Speaker 3: bland like with unsalted cheeses that would you be used
Speaker 3: for one use and then things that are crumblier like
Speaker 3: more like every kota, and some are much smoother, like
Speaker 3: other Greek cheeses, And so you'd have the whole the
Speaker 3: whole range, and would you entertain. Yeah, we would have
Speaker 3: other student friends came over and I would make like
Speaker 3: you know, I remember making, you know, just starting to
Speaker 3: understand what the like marinating a chicken and grilling it
Speaker 3: and making a salad to go with, like very baby
Speaker 3: steps in the kitchen. But I did fall in love
Speaker 3: with cooking through that, but I was still I was
Speaker 3: still in university. I still didn't think it's going to
Speaker 3: be a career for me. So I finished a master's
Speaker 3: degree in comparative literature and philosophy, and I just decided
Speaker 3: it's not for me.
Speaker 2: It's the academic life.
Speaker 3: I just thought it was very insular, you know. I
Speaker 3: thought like I was speaking to like seven people who
Speaker 3: knew what I was talking about, and then the rest
Speaker 3: of the world knew nothing and wasn't really remotely interested,
Speaker 3: and it just felt esoteric. And it's like and then
Speaker 3: the opposite happened when I started cooking, because all of
Speaker 3: a sudden, everybody's interested, right, And that dichotomy between somewhere
Speaker 3: where you really have no one to share your passions
Speaker 3: with the world in which you can everybody is interested.
Speaker 3: Was such a eye opener for me, and I realized, yes,
Speaker 3: I want to try and engage in this conversation, and
Speaker 3: I'm in that conversation. When I came to London in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety seven, I haven't made up my mind who
Speaker 3: I wanted to be and what I wanted to do.
Speaker 3: But I thought, like, I'm going to take a year off,
Speaker 3: and I went to the Court on Blue and yeah,
Speaker 3: and I took a course there in Marleybone, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: Marlivaut Lane.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I did a course there and I thought, okay,
Speaker 3: maybe there's something for me there, but I wasn't at
Speaker 3: sure I did. I did pastry and savory cooking for
Speaker 3: three months and then I started working in the evenings.
Speaker 3: I worked at the Capitol Restaurant and yeah, yeah, behind
Speaker 3: hard I was. It was really good. They had a
Speaker 3: mission and star and I was an assistant to the
Speaker 3: pastry chef there.
Speaker 2: I was working with her right into pastry.
Speaker 3: Right into pastry. Well, I didn't know anything. So they
Speaker 3: always throw you into pastry if you don't know anything,
Speaker 3: because you know nobody's way. So I loved that. And
Speaker 3: then I met Roly Lee and I started working at
Speaker 3: Kensington Place. Yeah that was in ninety eight. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: I worked for him for a couple of years and
Speaker 3: I learned a lot.
Speaker 2: So by that time you kind of knew that this
Speaker 2: was a career, but.
Speaker 3: That Yeah, I was a pastry chef. Yeah, and I
Speaker 3: always I was with Roly I did mostly pastry as well.
Speaker 3: I was running the pastry kitchen at some point, and
Speaker 3: then I realized, I'm want to specialize in pastry. And
Speaker 3: then I went to work for gale a baker and spice.
Speaker 2: What do you think you liked about pastry?
Speaker 3: I loved how that just the fact that you got
Speaker 3: to play with your go for I love that, and
Speaker 3: the magic that happens when you bake. I still I
Speaker 3: still love that, how one thing turns to another thing.
Speaker 3: You know, you take a chicken, you put in the oven,
Speaker 3: you get a chicken. But when you take a cake
Speaker 3: and you put in the oven, you get something completely different.
Speaker 3: It's it's not the same thing, and I still love
Speaker 3: that magic. So I really specialized in baking, and even
Speaker 3: when we opened up to lengthy years later, I was
Speaker 3: I was still baking. Yeah, when I went to your
Speaker 3: kitchen now, it really reminded me of the way we
Speaker 3: work at Baker and Spice. Like Gaye would come back
Speaker 3: from the market with like strawberries and apricots and quinces
Speaker 3: and she said, like, there you go, like six boxes.
Speaker 3: Do something with them. There wasn't a plan, and there
Speaker 3: wasn't a there wasn't a recipe or a plan for
Speaker 3: the day. It was just like these things arrived because
Speaker 3: she saw them and they looked great, and we just
Speaker 3: had to work what we have.
Speaker 2: Amazing times you could do that.
Speaker 3: And then and then my good friend, my ex partner,
Speaker 3: Noam Barr, came back from traveling the world and he said, like,
Speaker 3: let's do something together. And he studied business and I
Speaker 3: was a Baker and Spice at the time, and he
Speaker 3: said like he said, like, let's let's open a shop.
Speaker 3: And we decided to do it. And it took about
Speaker 3: a year to make it all happen, and Sammy Sammy Tamimi,
Speaker 3: who's our other partner, I wasn't quite ready to join us,
Speaker 3: so we started the process without him. And it was
Speaker 3: supposed to be just a bakery in which I would
Speaker 3: be baking. And then when Sammy joined at the very
Speaker 3: last minute, This was in two thousand and two when
Speaker 3: we opened on Lidbury Road in notting Hill. He joined
Speaker 3: us and we decided we're going to have two sides
Speaker 3: to our offering, which would be freshly made salads and
Speaker 3: savory food mirrored by amount of cakes and.
Speaker 2: Fruit are colors.
Speaker 3: And we just thought, like the same thing that you
Speaker 3: were doing in restaurants, we thought we can do the
Speaker 3: same kind of philosophy apply it in in a takeout environment.
Speaker 3: You know, we will just cook things freshly every single
Speaker 3: day and sell it until we run out. And that
Speaker 3: was still the idea that these these tiny kitchens produce
Speaker 3: a lot of food and people come in and instead
Speaker 3: of cooking themselves, we put the food and the cakes
Speaker 3: out there and they come and buy them. But there
Speaker 3: was there was nothing made off site. There's nothing. We
Speaker 3: don't buy anything and we just cook it all there
Speaker 3: for you.
Speaker 2: I think what you brought to us to London to
Speaker 2: food was a sense of exotic which was also so accessible.
Speaker 2: You know that you had ingredients of perhaps the words
Speaker 2: we couldn't pronounce. So we had a dish that was
Speaker 2: named something we'd never heard of, or we could go
Speaker 2: in and try one of your beautiful salads and take
Speaker 2: it home and eat it. Or it just celebrates so
Speaker 2: much a kind of a joy of ingredients of cooking.
Speaker 2: Would you call this Middle Eastern?
Speaker 3: Do you like that phrase or think so? I don't
Speaker 3: think it's Middle Easter. And there's been Eastern sensibilities in
Speaker 3: what we do. So even when Sammy and I started
Speaker 3: cooking and serving food, it wasn't until like when we
Speaker 3: published the book Jerusalem, in which we talked about our
Speaker 3: heritage and background Sami's Palestinian background in Jerusalem, my Jewish
Speaker 3: background in Jerusalem. Only that then people started saying, oh,
Speaker 3: Middle Eastern ottelengis and Middle Eastern restaurants because before we yeah,
Speaker 3: we used to have tahini and sumac and all those things,
Speaker 3: but we also used to use miso and soy and
Speaker 3: pomegranates and chili and cumin, which are not specific to
Speaker 3: this region. But there's something about this kind of little
Speaker 3: strip of the that goes from all the way from
Speaker 3: Tunisia and Morocco and North Africa all the way through
Speaker 3: the Middle East and then through South Asia all the
Speaker 3: way to Southeast Asia, and it has a certain language
Speaker 3: that I think we use. Sometimes you find something in
Speaker 3: Mexico that speaks the same language, but it's a kind
Speaker 3: of some sunny temperament. It's Chile's it's garlic, it's citrus,
Speaker 3: it's these kind of intense flavors. So of course the
Speaker 3: Middle East has them, but there's other places that have them,
Speaker 3: and we just love to borrow from all those parts
Speaker 3: of the world and use it and build on it.
Speaker 2: To travel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I travel less now, but I used to travel.
Speaker 3: My children are seven and ten, they're still quite young man.
Speaker 3: So I chose to travel less when they were born
Speaker 3: because I realized that every time I traveled, if I
Speaker 3: couldn't take them with me, I would miss them too much.
Speaker 2: But I find it necessary to go to Italy. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a kind of we go, we go to taste
Speaker 2: the new oil. But for me, going back to the
Speaker 2: source is very important, you know, to actually go to
Speaker 2: somebody's house in Rome, or in Piso, or in Milan.
Speaker 2: There's a kind of sense of also. It kind of
Speaker 2: makes me feel we are you know, the connection is strong,
Speaker 2: and those roots are very important, you know, the identity
Speaker 2: too well.
Speaker 3: I have that in Israel, so yeah, because my mom's
Speaker 3: we go to visit her a few times a year,
Speaker 3: and she lives outside a village in our village called
Speaker 3: Abu Goosh, which is on the way from Tel Aviv
Speaker 3: to trus Im, And whenever we arrive, we go and
Speaker 3: as soon as we'd arrive with the kids, we go
Speaker 3: and eat in the local restaurants and we have those
Speaker 3: platters of Palestinian food that I love so much, and
Speaker 3: then we go to the green grove certain by the
Speaker 3: local vegetables, and I reconnect and I love that and
Speaker 3: I find it very familiar in a way that I
Speaker 3: don't find anywhere else. You know, everything is very familiar.
Speaker 2: It's amazing. I'd like to know what you feel about
Speaker 2: the food scene or the culture of food in Israel
Speaker 2: right now is something that I'm made aware of all
Speaker 2: the time, either by friends of mine who go there,
Speaker 2: friends of mine who live there, and chefs that come
Speaker 2: into the restaurant from you know, I can see them.
Speaker 2: You know, there's the table of eight Israelis and they've
Speaker 2: come and there they order everything on the menu or
Speaker 2: they're tasting. And in London there are more restaurants. How
Speaker 2: did this happen?
Speaker 3: I don't have a really good explanation, but I'm seeing
Speaker 3: it everywhere, Like you say, in London, there's some fantastic
Speaker 3: Israeli restaurants. In America, they're really really flourishing, and in
Speaker 3: Israel itself. And what I find interesting is this thing
Speaker 3: has not existed fifteen or twenty years ago. When I
Speaker 3: was living in Israel. There wasn't an original cuisine, and
Speaker 3: those great restaurants, the good restaurants that you could find were,
Speaker 3: you know, the restaurants of immigrants that have just arrived, right.
Speaker 3: But this didn't formulate, and I think so when I looked.
Speaker 3: I did a show for the BBC years ago called
Speaker 3: Jerusalem on a Plate, and I took the director around
Speaker 3: and showed him, you know, this is this this cuisine
Speaker 3: and that cuisine, And then I was trying to formulate
Speaker 3: actually what was going on that I really understand. And
Speaker 3: the one thing that occurred to me is that it
Speaker 3: was just all so new and fresh, and nobody felt
Speaker 3: that they were kind of like committed to one way
Speaker 3: of cooking. There was something very liberating about this sense
Speaker 3: that everything is possible, you know, like, which is a
Speaker 3: very Israeli thing. First of all, like you know there
Speaker 3: isn't that there's a lais say air kind of like
Speaker 3: whatever attitude, which helps, but also nobody felt nothing had
Speaker 3: and I haven't seen it. I haven't been to another
Speaker 3: country that is just so recently informed. But there's that
Speaker 3: possibility of just like working with all those options, is
Speaker 3: created these cuisines, and people travel in Israel or they
Speaker 3: go to Israeli restaurants here and they realize that there's
Speaker 3: something very original about it. And I think it has
Speaker 3: to do with the fact that it's not indebted to
Speaker 3: one part of the world, one teh wir one cuisine.
Speaker 3: It's kind of it's a magpie of cuisines and then
Speaker 3: it comes together really nice. Is it strongly ara based
Speaker 3: on I think there is a lot and that's not
Speaker 3: being acknowledged enough. There is a very very strong underlying
Speaker 3: Palestinian tradition of cooking that underscores this, and often people
Speaker 3: don't talk about it enough for political reasons, and they
Speaker 3: don't mention that often enough. I always have to say
Speaker 3: that I don't think it's a bad thing that Palestinian
Speaker 3: cooking has become so much part of what is perceived
Speaker 3: as Israeli cooking, but it's really important to tell that story,
Speaker 3: to tell that fact, because that's very much the basis
Speaker 3: of so many of those dishes, not all of them,
Speaker 3: many of them belong to Jewish diasporas of other cultures,
Speaker 3: but Palestinian is really a massive factor there in the
Speaker 3: way the news really.
Speaker 2: Chef's cook I think that's something that we're all looking
Speaker 2: at right now, is acknowledging the history and to recognize
Speaker 2: where these roots come from.
Speaker 3: I think what I had understood intuitively when I started
Speaker 3: publishing cookbooks is that the best thing you can do
Speaker 3: is just put it all on paper, you know, like,
Speaker 3: where does this come from? Because first of all, I
Speaker 3: think it adds depth to a recipe if you can
Speaker 3: tell a story. But I think it's also really important
Speaker 3: to be able to acknowledge the people who were even
Speaker 3: if it's an individual, not necessarily a culture. You know,
Speaker 3: to say, oh, that's this person, that idea came from
Speaker 3: this person or from that person, because it's just the
Speaker 3: right thing to do. But also it really helps to
Speaker 3: create a much more a deeper sense to the recipe,
Speaker 3: to the dish that you're eating if you know where
Speaker 3: it comes from.
Speaker 2: Writing books, yeah.
Speaker 3: All of my last few books are all co written,
Speaker 3: so I've collaborated with someone. That's what allows the books
Speaker 3: to stay fresh, the fact that they featured other voices,
Speaker 3: not just mine.
Speaker 2: What is your most recent book?
Speaker 3: So my most recent book is The Extra Good Things
Speaker 3: from the Auto Lengthy Test Kitchen. So it comes out
Speaker 3: of the Auto Lengthy Test Kitchen, and I've written it
Speaker 3: together with Norm Rudd, who's yeah, she's half Baheranian, half English,
Speaker 3: so she's got that kind of what I have, which
Speaker 3: is this kind of mix of culture. And it is
Speaker 3: a book that tries to feature what we call extra
Speaker 3: good things are condiments, are things that marinades and dressings
Speaker 3: and sprinkles and things that are derivatives of a recipe
Speaker 3: that you could kind of keep to one side and
Speaker 3: use another day. Because often in our food we have
Speaker 3: a dressing or sauce marinad. And what we're trying to
Speaker 3: do is at tea people how people used to cook
Speaker 3: in the old days, so they would instead of cooking
Speaker 3: starting from scratch, every time you're go into the kitchen,
Speaker 3: you'd have like a pot of sauer kraut or kimchi
Speaker 3: or flavored oil or just something that is useful already
Speaker 3: is halfway through it to a meal. So every recipe
Speaker 3: has a takeout, something that you could keep on a
Speaker 3: shelf or in the fridge that you could use for future.
Speaker 2: I always like, first, you know, to follow a recipe really,
Speaker 2: really precisely and really do it, and then you know,
Speaker 2: to spontaneously change. And I also think when you talk
Speaker 2: about the number of ingredients. I had a friend who
Speaker 2: had six children and one summer she was taking They
Speaker 2: were all under the age of sort of shit, twins
Speaker 2: under the age of ten. I said, are you taking
Speaker 2: all the kids to Martha's Vintage? She said no, because
Speaker 2: I'm just going to take four of them, because you know,
Speaker 2: it's really hard to stay with a friend when you
Speaker 2: have six kids, but if you only have four, you
Speaker 2: can stay with anybody, you know. And it was so relegive,
Speaker 2: you know, to the idea that suddly, you know, so simple,
Speaker 2: because you did book with ten ingredients, didn't you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well I did simple It has some ingredients. Some
Speaker 3: recipes have ten or yeah, which is like nothing, which
Speaker 3: for me is not exactly ingredients. Yeah, I know, And
Speaker 3: people say, you know that, why do you need so
Speaker 3: many ingredients and so many exciting areas? I said, you
Speaker 3: don't need anything. It's a choice, you know. But there
Speaker 3: is this expectation these days that every recipe is for everyone,
Speaker 3: and people can I substitute this if I don't like that,
Speaker 3: And I always have to say, yes, you can. But
Speaker 3: why don't you just choose another recipe?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Maybe exactly. But and you're cooking? Are you cooking
Speaker 2: at home? Do you have time to cook.
Speaker 3: Less than I used to, which is a shame. I
Speaker 3: cook mostly on the weekend. So we are we as
Speaker 3: parents to young kids. I wouldn't say young parents. We
Speaker 3: don't entertain much during the week, but on the weekend
Speaker 3: we have people over and then there will we do
Speaker 3: big weekend meals.
Speaker 2: It's a question that I ask everyone if there's a
Speaker 2: food we know, people that we turn to for comfort
Speaker 2: and places we go for comfort. But if there's something
Speaker 2: that you would want to eat apart from your mother's
Speaker 2: chocolate being hidden, I can never get rid of that
Speaker 2: image on the top shelf, is there a food that
Speaker 2: you've reached for when you really need comfort?
Speaker 3: So I have to say that from all the things
Speaker 3: that I've had, it's things that my father used to cook,
Speaker 3: or my Italian grandmother she used to make. And it's
Speaker 3: not just because I'm at the River cafam saying, as
Speaker 3: she used to make ki ala romana. Ah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: And it's the one smell that I have. As you know,
Speaker 3: people talk too much about you know, those you know,
Speaker 3: moments of childhood, but this is really one that stands
Speaker 3: so strong in my mind that in my head that
Speaker 3: is there thinly spread semolina and yoki on a tray
Speaker 3: dotted with butter and cheese, and it would go under
Speaker 3: the grail and all. And since they did get grete
Speaker 3: cheese from Italy and they had parmigiano, and she would
Speaker 3: put that under the graill and it would just make
Speaker 3: and that kind of semolina soft, you know, milky with
Speaker 3: a grated cheese milk and cheese on top. It's just
Speaker 3: it's just such a child with favor and that is
Speaker 3: definitely the one that brings the most comfort to me.
Speaker 3: And I've never managed to do it as not even
Speaker 3: remotely as good as she does.
Speaker 2: I know, well, we'll try and make it for if
Speaker 2: I know, we would have put it on the menu.
Speaker 2: It on the menu sometimes, yeah, yeah, especially we have
Speaker 2: it on very often when we have white truffles because
Speaker 2: it's one of those delicious recipes, which it's still just
Speaker 2: without white truffles, but it does take because it's like
Speaker 2: it's almost like a cheese fla and they are so delicious.
Speaker 2: So we're going to go ahead and have lunch in
Speaker 2: the River Cafe now without Jacky Romana. But the next
Speaker 2: time we do, we'll definitely have Thank you, thank you, Yes,
Speaker 2: let's do it.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much much great.
Speaker 1: The River Cafe Book is now available in bookshops and online.
Speaker 1: It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated with photographs
Speaker 1: from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book has fifty
Speaker 1: delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a host of
Speaker 1: River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks.
Speaker 1: The River Cafe Lookbook Recipes for Cooks of all ages.
Speaker 1: Ruthie's Table four is a production of iHeart Radio and
Speaker 1: Adami Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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