Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by Me and M,
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Speaker 1: It's my go to for styles that are comfortable enough
Speaker 1: to wear in the kitchen or the restaurant, also polished
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Speaker 1: in its stores across London, Edinburgh, New York. If you're
Speaker 1: in London, I'd really recommend heading to their beautiful, brand
Speaker 1: new flagship store in Marlevine, which opens on the twenty
Speaker 1: ninth of October. The connections between Scott Rothkoff, director of
Speaker 1: New York's Whitney Museum, and I run very deep. When
Speaker 1: Rose and I wrote the first River Cafe cookbook in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four, Scott's husband Jonathan Burnham helped us with
Speaker 1: our introduction. When the Jasper John's retrospective opened at the Whitney, Scott,
Speaker 1: who curated the show, took us and our young children
Speaker 1: through slowly describing the paintings he loved most and why
Speaker 1: museums and restaurants are about connecting art and people. They
Speaker 1: welcome audiences Scott's chosen word, into his space and create
Speaker 1: something beautiful to see, or we cook something delicious for
Speaker 1: them to eat. When I spoke to you yesterday, I said,
Speaker 1: what's new, and you said, Ruthie, what's new is that
Speaker 1: I had a visit from Barack and Michelle Obama to
Speaker 1: see the show that is on right now, which is
Speaker 1: called Edges of Aley.
Speaker 2: Tell me about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is really one of the most exciting thing
Speaker 3: that's ever happened at the Whitney. The show is just
Speaker 3: this extraordinary look into the life and work of the
Speaker 3: American choreographer Alvin Ailey, who famously said that he wanted
Speaker 3: to chronicle in his art, which was Dan dance the
Speaker 3: Black experience, and he does that, but for me, that's
Speaker 3: the American experience. There's everything in this work, you know.
Speaker 3: He grew up in Rogers, Texas in the South. It
Speaker 3: was a sharecropping family, very poor. He lived in la
Speaker 3: He danced on Broadway, he danced in movies. He choreographed
Speaker 3: the opening night of Studio fifty four. You have the Church,
Speaker 3: you have Soul Train, you have Gospel, you have Duke Ellington,
Speaker 3: you have the State Department, which funded his journeys around
Speaker 3: the world. As you know, one of the great choreographers
Speaker 3: of America, beginning in the nineteen sixties, he danced at
Speaker 3: the Lynda Johnson White House, and Ailey has never been
Speaker 3: subject of a big show like this, And he is,
Speaker 3: to my mind, not you know, the greatest black choreographer
Speaker 3: or even the greatest choreographer. He's one of the greatest
Speaker 3: creative geniuses of the twentieth century in any medium period.
Speaker 3: And that's what this show is about. So when the
Speaker 3: Obamas came calling on the second or third day that
Speaker 3: the show was opened to say could we come for
Speaker 3: our anniversary, I thought, sure that we can make happen.
Speaker 3: So they got a private visit too, Ruthie. An hour
Speaker 3: and fifteen minutes they stayed, and it was so moving
Speaker 3: to see that show through their eyes. Was really something
Speaker 3: I'll never forget.
Speaker 1: Well, lucky them, yes, lucky to have you and lucky
Speaker 1: to take them there.
Speaker 2: So you've come for.
Speaker 3: Freeze, I've come for freeze, tell me. And also I
Speaker 3: came for a birthday party of one of Jonathan's old
Speaker 3: friends called the Destination Party.
Speaker 2: It was it was your station.
Speaker 3: We were at Castle Howard, which is a very glamorous
Speaker 3: place to celebrate a seventieth birthday of a mother and
Speaker 3: a thirtieth birthday of her daughter, which ensures that you
Speaker 3: have a lot of good looking young people as you
Speaker 3: get older, and I, being forty eight, was really upset
Speaker 3: that I was seated at the old people's table. Well,
Speaker 3: I thought, you know, and you know, like I had
Speaker 3: this bridge generation. Yeah, so that was a good you know,
Speaker 3: having an English husband means that there are certain things
Speaker 3: that bring me to London other than just art fairs
Speaker 3: and museum openings.
Speaker 2: Why don't we read the recipe?
Speaker 3: Well, this is very exciting for me because I don't
Speaker 3: think I've actually read a recipe since I met my husband.
Speaker 3: He does all the cooking and I do all the eating.
Speaker 3: But this is something I really enjoy. I love artichokes,
Speaker 3: so I'm delighted to read about spaghetti with artichoke pesto
Speaker 3: for six. If we were making it at my home,
Speaker 3: we'd probably make it for eight, even if we were
Speaker 3: only having six. Comeback, because Jonathan is always panicked, there
Speaker 3: won't be enough.
Speaker 2: That's a nice quality, so there's always too much.
Speaker 3: Exactly six small globe artichokes boiled, one hundred grams of
Speaker 3: pine nuts, one garlic clove, two fifty mL of milk,
Speaker 3: two tablespoons of parsley leaves, one hundred and fifty grams
Speaker 3: of grated pecorino, one hundred and fifty mili liters of
Speaker 3: olive oil, four hundred grams of spaghetti. Blend the artichokes,
Speaker 3: pine nuts, and garlic to a rough pulp. Add the milk,
Speaker 3: parsley and pecorino, and pulse again. Add the olive oil
Speaker 3: to the mixture to form a cream, season and put
Speaker 3: it into a small p Cook the spaghetti until al dente.
Speaker 3: Drain and return the pasta to the pan with one
Speaker 3: ladleful of hot water, toss, Add the pesto and toss again.
Speaker 3: The sauce should be wet and creamy. If necessary, add
Speaker 3: more water. Serve with freshly grated pecorino or parmesan.
Speaker 1: Oh great, what do you want to get him? We're
Speaker 1: going to bring some over cooking. Get there in the restaurant,
Speaker 1: even though you're having lunch. We'll have a taste.
Speaker 3: Well. I didn't have breakfast in anticipation of.
Speaker 1: My lunch, so there have spaghetti before lunch. So let's
Speaker 1: talk about growing up in Dallas. First, the start at
Speaker 1: the beginning. In the beginning, tell me about the food
Speaker 1: as a child in your home.
Speaker 3: Sure, I was born in Arizona. I was born on
Speaker 3: an Air Force base called Luke Air Force Base that
Speaker 3: was outside of Phoenix, and my dad was in the
Speaker 3: service then. This was in the seventies, and we moved
Speaker 3: to Dallas when I was just almost a year old.
Speaker 3: So I really did grow up in Dallas and really
Speaker 3: was a kind of child of the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: And thous sisters.
Speaker 3: No, I have a stepsister who entered my life when
Speaker 3: I was twelve.
Speaker 2: Let's say, so you were an only child with your parents.
Speaker 3: I was, My mom worked, My dad was a doctor.
Speaker 3: My mom worked at what was then a new saxophonth
Speaker 3: Avenue store selling handbags to you know, these people in
Speaker 3: Dallas in the eighties who wanted very glamorous looking bags
Speaker 3: covered with rhinestones and things. And she was a good cook.
Speaker 3: And when I was really little, in our household we
Speaker 3: kept kosher actually, so that was interesting and it was
Speaker 3: you know, not that strict. When we went out, we
Speaker 3: kind of cheated, but at home it was because it
Speaker 3: was no pork, no pork, no shellfish, no milk and meat,
Speaker 3: which actually meant I was introduced to all sorts of
Speaker 3: funny products like cool whip, which was a kind of
Speaker 3: fake whipped cream because you couldn't have whiped cream on
Speaker 3: your dessert after a meal that had eaten at things
Speaker 3: like that. And she was a good cook. My mom
Speaker 3: and her grandfather had been a baker, and her grandmother
Speaker 3: the cook at a restaurant in a hotel in the
Speaker 3: Catskill Mountains that they know what it was called the Liberty. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it no longer exists, that hotel. It was very close
Speaker 3: to Gross. It was the sort of less less known
Speaker 3: cousin of Gross Singers.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's where I grew Yeah, I know, so my
Speaker 1: years right and you know that area.
Speaker 3: Well, the hotel was actually called the Dixie Lake Hotel.
Speaker 3: The town was Liberty, New York. That was the nearest
Speaker 3: one to it. So she grew up in this world
Speaker 3: of hospitality. It was a kosher hotel, and she learned
Speaker 3: certain things from from her mother and her grandparents. So
Speaker 3: we did have a lot of home cooking. I remember,
Speaker 3: especially the Jewish holidays like Passover and restaurant on everyone
Speaker 3: coming together around big meals.
Speaker 1: Did your mother have a recipe book of her grandparents' recipes?
Speaker 3: You know, she joked that her grandmother and her mother
Speaker 3: used to always sabotage all the recipes that they would
Speaker 3: give to her, which apparently is not uncommon. They would
Speaker 3: accidentally leave out so that she was sort of foiled
Speaker 3: and ever being as good a cook as they were.
Speaker 3: But you know, it was a time in Dallas where
Speaker 3: there was probably like the kind of inkling of a
Speaker 3: dawning food conscience.
Speaker 2: Or you know, we're talking about what years in the eighties.
Speaker 3: Let's say it's not we didn't go to farmers markets,
Speaker 3: nobody had ingredients like that. But I remember, you know,
Speaker 3: you could buy basil at the supermarket that wasn't flaked
Speaker 3: and dry, or you know, my mother had this cookbook
Speaker 3: that reached us from New York City. It was called
Speaker 3: the Silver Palette Cookbook, and it was about it was
Speaker 3: from this store on the Upper West Side that sold
Speaker 3: prepared foods basically in New York and my mother must
Speaker 3: have thought that this was incredibly kind of chic and worldly,
Speaker 3: and this was sort of before anybody had heard of
Speaker 3: inine Garden, let's say, and the kind of things that
Speaker 3: she has you cook. And she would make recipes from
Speaker 3: that cookbook, and I remember looking at it thinking this
Speaker 3: just must be the most glamorous place in the world.
Speaker 3: I always had an obsession with New York, so it
Speaker 3: wasn't all old fashioned kosher cooking.
Speaker 1: So she would work during the day and shop and
Speaker 1: then come home and would you sit down to dinner?
Speaker 1: And we did as a family.
Speaker 3: We always pretty much always sat down to dinner.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: My parents divorced when I was nine or ten, and
Speaker 3: they had joint custody, so I would go back and forth,
Speaker 3: and it kind of meant that whatever night they had me,
Speaker 3: they were home. They didn't make other plans because that
Speaker 3: was maybe only half the time. And we would eat
Speaker 3: my mom, my stepfather, and I and she would often,
Speaker 3: you know, grill like a simple chicken breasts I can remember,
Speaker 3: like marinated in Italian dressing, which also probably seemed like
Speaker 3: an interesting food concept at the time. And my stepmother
Speaker 3: also cooked. But my father had a recipe that he
Speaker 3: thought that he was famous for. Famous perhaps only to
Speaker 3: those who knew him well, called hamburger lemons surprise.
Speaker 2: Which part was a surprise.
Speaker 3: I don't know, probably the amount of lemons or the
Speaker 3: black pepper corns that as a child I used to
Speaker 3: have to avoid, you know, burning my mouth. And that's
Speaker 3: the only thing I can make without a recipe.
Speaker 2: I can make.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can make it too, Ruthy, I bet, I
Speaker 3: don't think you'd want to.
Speaker 2: You ever put it with pasta?
Speaker 3: You know you could. You could put it with pasta,
Speaker 3: You could put it with anything. You could feed it
Speaker 3: to your dog.
Speaker 1: Do you think your father was was expressing some form
Speaker 1: of love for you in a way?
Speaker 3: There might have been a bit of that.
Speaker 2: I went to Dallas.
Speaker 1: I was in Dallas, which and I he was working
Speaker 1: with Ray Nasher m hm, great collective course, and we
Speaker 1: insisted on staying downtown. But this was in the seventies,
Speaker 1: maybe late seventies. But we had some good food and
Speaker 1: I was wondering if you did you go out meals
Speaker 1: with your parents?
Speaker 3: We did? You know? We went to Italian or Chinese
Speaker 3: restaurants in the neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Special occasion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well there were special occasions there, you know, there
Speaker 3: were and you might know more about this than I did.
Speaker 3: But at that time in Dallas there was this kind
Speaker 3: of beginning of a kind of Southwestern cuisine, and there
Speaker 3: was a chef called Fearing at the Mansion on Turtle
Speaker 3: Creature so expensive that had a really well known chef,
Speaker 3: and they were bringing together ideas from some Mexican cuisine
Speaker 3: and some barbecue and you know, grilling and blackening things
Speaker 3: and kind of thinking about the Southwest and some of
Speaker 3: the more local cooking traditions and a sort of elevated manner.
Speaker 3: So that was a thing. And then there were a
Speaker 3: couple of like really old fashioned kind of restaurants I'm
Speaker 3: sure that don't exist in hotels like the Adulphus, and
Speaker 3: you would go and that's where we stayed, did you there?
Speaker 2: You go, that's the hotel with staff. I'd thought of that.
Speaker 2: In forty year I.
Speaker 3: Had a restaurant there and it was called the Pyramid Room,
Speaker 3: and you could have a sorbet, you know, intermetso that
Speaker 3: they would bring out a frozen swan that I think
Speaker 3: had like a flashlight inside, so it was like this
Speaker 3: glowing ice swan. And you could have a chocolate souflee there,
Speaker 3: which is the only time in my life that I
Speaker 3: ever had a soup flet until probably I went to
Speaker 3: France many years later. So there were these occasions that
Speaker 3: you did go out, you know, infrequently, for these super
Speaker 3: what seemed like very grand dining experiences.
Speaker 1: So going back to the art history, who grew up
Speaker 1: always with art and with the I.
Speaker 3: Visually grew up just always loving art. It was the
Speaker 3: thing that excited me and interested me the most of
Speaker 3: anything in the world. And I had friends in Dallas
Speaker 3: and the eighties who liked football or American football, I mean,
Speaker 3: playing sports. I never had any interest. My father remembers
Speaker 3: me picking flowers by the side of the field at
Speaker 3: my first soccer game, and I think he realized I
Speaker 3: was not going to be one for team sports at
Speaker 3: that point. But my mother was interested in art, and
Speaker 3: she painted little herself, and she really encouraged me. And
Speaker 3: I developed an absolute fascination with Frankloyd Wright, the architect,
Speaker 3: and he had designed the theater in Dallas where I
Speaker 3: took little acting classes and did plays as a kid.
Speaker 3: And maybe when I was about nine or ten, right
Speaker 3: around the time my parents were getting divorced, actually I
Speaker 3: sort of wanted to go see some of these buildings,
Speaker 3: and my mother, I think, realized that this was something
Speaker 3: that she could encourage in me. And we'd plan these
Speaker 3: trips and we went to see falling water outside of Pittsburgh,
Speaker 3: and we went to Taliessen, and we went to Chicago,
Speaker 3: and we went to all these different places, and it
Speaker 3: was this kind of wonderful time in the life of
Speaker 3: a mother and a son. Well, I was probably at
Speaker 3: that point, about eleven to twelve thirteen.
Speaker 2: What do you think was it that drew you to
Speaker 2: Frank Cloyd?
Speaker 3: There was something, you know. I used to study the
Speaker 3: floor plants and I could memory all the buildings. I
Speaker 3: was absolutely obsessed, and I would ask for volumes of
Speaker 3: the catalog Raisina for my birthday. They were very expensive
Speaker 3: and they were printed in Japan. I think we'd go
Speaker 3: to the Soli store and I had a collection of
Speaker 3: Frank would write books, and there was something about the
Speaker 3: kind of complexity of the space, and I would get
Speaker 3: lost in these floor plans and try to understand how
Speaker 3: the rooms fit together. And also the story of him
Speaker 3: was kind of grand and he went under the cape
Speaker 3: and a beret and you know, thwacked his cane and
Speaker 3: made pronouncements. Then at some point an interest in contemporary
Speaker 3: art sort of supplanted the architecture fixation. But what my grandparents,
Speaker 3: who were very I was very close to my grandmother,
Speaker 3: especially my father's my father's mother was it just about
Speaker 3: my favorite person in the whole world. I'm even thinking
Speaker 3: about her now, I get a little choked up. I
Speaker 3: miss her. She always had her face made up and
Speaker 3: went to the beauty parlor, and you know, she wore
Speaker 3: some jewelry. And her husband was an accountant who had
Speaker 3: been born literally in a tenement on Ludlow Street and
Speaker 3: went to City College for free, which was a great
Speaker 3: opportunity that people had in those years during the depression.
Speaker 3: But she really believed in supporting my interest in art,
Speaker 3: and she and my grandfather I would I would go
Speaker 3: once a year to stay with them in August for
Speaker 3: like a week on Delta Airlines as an unaccompanied mint
Speaker 3: or whatever age. I would yeah, Badge and I would
Speaker 3: get there, and I can still picture that that drive
Speaker 3: from LaGuardia Airport out to Hicksville, which is of course
Speaker 3: not a very attractive drive, but in my mind that
Speaker 3: was like people have what's your favorite journey, you know,
Speaker 3: like they're going to the Alps, you know, to go
Speaker 3: see My favorite journey was from LaGuardia to Hicksville, you know,
Speaker 3: your grandmother. Yeah, with them in the car. I remember
Speaker 3: being picked up and the anticipation of what that week
Speaker 3: would be. And they took me to the Whitney Museum
Speaker 3: many times as a child when it was on Madison
Speaker 3: Avenue to look at Calder Circus.
Speaker 2: Will you describe what Calder Circus was?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Calder Circus is one of the real treasures of
Speaker 3: the Whitney's collection, made by Alexander Calder, and he made
Speaker 3: sort of for fun, but it became a great artwork,
Speaker 3: all these different circus figures that he could, you know,
Speaker 3: pull a lever on a kangaroo and you know, it
Speaker 3: would walk and move its feet. And it's actually on
Speaker 3: view right now in the Whitney Museum in downtown Manhattan,
Speaker 3: and I take my son there and he's totally into it.
Speaker 3: The lion, all the different characters, and I'm just reminded.
Speaker 3: It's very touching to meet things do come full circle.
Speaker 1: The River Cafe Cafe, our all day space and just
Speaker 1: steps away from the restaurant, is now open in the
Speaker 1: morning an Italian breakfast with cornetti, chiambella and cristada from
Speaker 1: our pastry kitchen. In the afternoon, I screamed coops and
Speaker 1: River Cafe classic desserts. We have sharing plates, Salumi, Misti, mozzarella, brusquetta,
Speaker 1: red and yellow peppers, Vitello, tonado and more. Come in
Speaker 1: the evening for cocktails with our resident pianist in the bar.
Speaker 2: No need to book see you here.
Speaker 1: Just thinking of change in your life also in terms
Speaker 1: of the way you ate and what you could eat
Speaker 1: and maybe what you didn't need or bother eating.
Speaker 2: You went to college and you went to Harvard.
Speaker 1: Was that either an awakening because of the restaurants that
Speaker 1: were available in Cambridge or did you you know?
Speaker 3: I mean I ate a lot of you know, bad
Speaker 3: dorm food, and I didn't cook and I didn't have
Speaker 3: a kitchen then because I lived in a dorm. But
Speaker 3: it was obviously a more international context.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Now Dallas has many immigrants from all around the world too,
Speaker 3: But we didn't grow up going to those kind of restaurants.
Speaker 3: I remember the first time I ate Ethiopian food and
Speaker 3: the kind of tang of that bread, or the first time,
Speaker 3: you know, I had Vietnamese fa you know, the kind
Speaker 3: of thing in Cambridge exactly, and the kind of thing
Speaker 3: that people associate with graduate student life and cosapolitan areas.
Speaker 3: My taste definitely started awakening to a broader range. Like
Speaker 3: in Dallas, were going to be the only Asian food
Speaker 3: I would have had would have been a certain kind
Speaker 3: of Chinese food, and I say certain kind meaning American kind.
Speaker 3: But as I got to college, I had, you know,
Speaker 3: Japanese food and all these things, and a lot of
Speaker 3: it was was cheap, and we would go out with
Speaker 3: our friends sometimes venture into Boston.
Speaker 2: After Harvard, you moved to New York.
Speaker 3: I moved to New York for a year in an apartment,
Speaker 3: in a little apartment in Chelsea, about three blocks from
Speaker 3: where I'm living now, which is just to talk about
Speaker 3: coming full circle. It was a studio apartment. I did
Speaker 3: not have a bed. I had a sofa bed from
Speaker 3: Ikia that I rarely opened because that was going to
Speaker 3: require too much efforts. I slept sideways on this ikea
Speaker 3: sofa bed, and I don't know that you would call
Speaker 3: it a kitchen. It was not even a galley kitchen
Speaker 3: because it wasn't even enclosed. It was kind of part
Speaker 3: of this room essentially the only enclosed part. I don't
Speaker 3: know what it's called. It had. It had a stove,
Speaker 3: and it had a fridge and had an oven, none
Speaker 3: of which will probably ever used. I think if you'd
Speaker 3: open my fridge then you might have found, you know,
Speaker 3: some tonic and some cocktail olives and some leftovers or
Speaker 3: something growing on them.
Speaker 1: So social life was centered around going to.
Speaker 2: All the restaurants.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we had these teeny tiny apartments and nobody really
Speaker 3: entertained at home. And I remember going, I mean speaking
Speaker 3: of like being in London to around the corner from
Speaker 3: me was the art dealer Gavin Brown, who now was
Speaker 3: part of Barbara Gladstone had this really cool gallery and
Speaker 3: he had this really cool bar, and he had a
Speaker 3: bar called Passerby Yeah, in the front of the gallery. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this social space. So this would have been in my
Speaker 3: first year in New York. So let's say its ninteen
Speaker 3: ninety nine or something. And I would go to this
Speaker 3: bar and I was very aware that everyone in the
Speaker 3: room was really cool and really interesting, and I knew
Speaker 3: they were I knew who you know. Elizabeth Peyton, Oh
Speaker 3: my god, ELIZEB. Peyton's at the bar and I remember
Speaker 3: there was this kind of shorter woman with big curly hair,
Speaker 3: who it turned out was Amanda Sharp, the founder of Freeze,
Speaker 3: speaking of the Freeze Art Fair. So I kind of thought,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm just not ready for New York. I
Speaker 3: got to go back to school and I picked up,
Speaker 3: and I went back to Cambridge for graduate school, so
Speaker 3: studying art history. And then at some point I was
Speaker 3: offered a job of moving to New York to become
Speaker 3: a senior editor, and I thought, I better get to
Speaker 3: New York in my late twenties, and I was going
Speaker 3: to meet artists of my generation and I was going
Speaker 3: to write about them, and I was going to go
Speaker 3: to their studios and I was going to drink with them,
Speaker 3: and maybe I'd make out with them and we'd go
Speaker 3: to bars and we just this was the minute, the
Speaker 3: last minute, or I was going to end up at
Speaker 3: Harvard and the Faculty Club with the pipe, which could
Speaker 3: have happened because I loved I loved the Academy. And
Speaker 3: so I picked up, and I moved to New York
Speaker 3: and started this job in the art world, which I
Speaker 3: never left. In New York. That was twenty years. Yeah,
Speaker 3: then I was ready. I had a business card.
Speaker 1: I knew where I'm not ready for New York.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was like that. I was ready to not
Speaker 3: be that student or that Texas kid anymore. And it
Speaker 3: was an incredible journey about four five oh six, the
Speaker 3: aughts as we call them, meeting so many people.
Speaker 2: So did your aspiration?
Speaker 1: Did you did hang out with young artists?
Speaker 2: Did go to their studios? And you did? And did
Speaker 2: you eat?
Speaker 3: And some of the friends check them out? You know
Speaker 3: the eating again? It was it was funny. I ate
Speaker 3: as a guest, as a journalist, as an editor. We
Speaker 3: went to the places where the business was of looking
Speaker 3: at art, of selling art, and often our hosts were
Speaker 3: museums or galleries that celebrated their artists. And we went
Speaker 3: to around the world to where art first were. And
Speaker 3: I developed a sort of taste for foods in a
Speaker 3: very select set of cities that were the stops on
Speaker 3: the art world's caravan.
Speaker 1: I've always been interested in reading much earlier about to
Speaker 1: Cooning and Pollock and the artists that were in New
Speaker 1: York and what was it called maxis Kansas City where
Speaker 1: they would and the solitary life that they had paying
Speaker 1: all day in his studio and then going out at
Speaker 1: night to drink and to party and too because it
Speaker 1: is solitary.
Speaker 3: And I think Gavin's Bar that one passer by mentioned
Speaker 3: was a bit of a maxis of its moment, and
Speaker 3: you know that it was interesting as a young critic, editor, person,
Speaker 3: whatever I was, We my friends and I were interested
Speaker 3: in the places that had a kind of patina of
Speaker 3: the art world's history. And it's amazing to me now
Speaker 3: to think that quite a few of them that we
Speaker 3: went to still exist twenty years later. And probably they
Speaker 3: were like Indochine, like the Odeon. I mean, these were
Speaker 3: places where we had seen pictures of, you know, the
Speaker 3: Leo Castelli gallery in the bathroom at Odeon with Andy Warhol,
Speaker 3: and you know, we could imagine what it was like
Speaker 3: when people went out there. And that was the eighties.
Speaker 3: So this was twenty years later, and twenty years later
Speaker 3: it's still there.
Speaker 2: You were at the Whitney after art Form, Yes, is
Speaker 2: that right?
Speaker 3: So I went to work at the Whitney almost exactly
Speaker 3: fifteen years ago, two thousand.
Speaker 1: And nine, on Madison Avenue Museum by Marcel Pryor exactly.
Speaker 3: You know, when I started the museum. First of all,
Speaker 3: I was not the director or the chief airs. My
Speaker 3: title was one word curator. It got longer as the
Speaker 3: time went by, so they had already made the decision
Speaker 3: to move downtown and the building was roughly designed by
Speaker 3: the time I got there, although in two thousand and
Speaker 3: nine when I started, we were really not long after
Speaker 3: the wait financial crisis, so there was some concern as
Speaker 3: to whether the museum was able to raise the money
Speaker 3: to do this project, which which we did.
Speaker 1: Did you always knew that you wanted a restaurant.
Speaker 3: There, Yeah, there was always going to be a restaurant.
Speaker 3: I think There've been a number of different ideas that
Speaker 3: I've witnessed in the last twenty years in the business,
Speaker 3: and probably my thoughts have evolved.
Speaker 2: Over that times well.
Speaker 3: I mean, the funny thing is those bad museum restaurants,
Speaker 3: the cafeterias that big museums do. I remember going to
Speaker 3: the one at the Met with my grandmother in the eighties,
Speaker 3: and you could get at a cup of coffee that
Speaker 3: wasn't too expensive, you could serve yourself. The quality of
Speaker 3: the food may not have been that good, but it
Speaker 3: was extremely inclusive. And what I think we came to
Speaker 3: see was the idea that museums wanted to kind of
Speaker 3: up level this food service experience, and in so doing
Speaker 3: they became more expensive and more exclusionary. And I remember thinking,
Speaker 3: there's something funny about the first thing somebody sees is
Speaker 3: a patron eating a forty dollars piece of fish, and
Speaker 3: that became a greater disconnect in I think our minds
Speaker 3: as we wanted to create more access to the museum.
Speaker 3: So we've just relaunched our food service, and we sort
Speaker 3: of liked the idea of this. We're calling it like
Speaker 3: the flagship of French at bakery, that a bakery is
Speaker 3: a place where you can get sandwiches or a croissant
Speaker 3: or a cup of coffee, and that it would not
Speaker 3: be really fine fine dining, but an up level museum
Speaker 3: cafe which is not cheap, but it's certainly much more
Speaker 3: affordable than our past restaurant down stairs. And people can
Speaker 3: come in the neighborhood and take the bread if you
Speaker 3: bake up the Whitney home, they can get a cup
Speaker 3: of coffee. And I like to think that the destination
Speaker 3: is really the art, and the cafe is a place
Speaker 3: where you might if you're meeting a friend to see
Speaker 3: the Avonne Ali show. You'll come and have lunch before
Speaker 3: and then see you get a cup of coffee after
Speaker 3: on the way out. But maybe we're not trying to
Speaker 3: get in the business of running an incredible fine dining
Speaker 3: establishment on our eighth floor of a beautiful bar with
Speaker 3: views all of New York and see the Statue of
Speaker 3: Liberty in the Empire State Building. We had artists redesign
Speaker 3: these spaces, so the artist Deanni Whitehawk made a wonderful
Speaker 3: mural and the artist Rashid Johnson did this incredible sculpture
Speaker 3: in our downstair space that's like a sort of gateway
Speaker 3: to the museum. Very Whitney that we would start with
Speaker 3: the artists designing the space before we had a restaurant
Speaker 3: tour or a food concept. I'm not sure the restaurant
Speaker 3: tours would agree that that was the way to go.
Speaker 1: Go into a restaurant that that had been started with
Speaker 1: in the art world, rather than.
Speaker 3: The restaurant it started in the art world. There was
Speaker 3: a moment where we're like, oh my god, I think
Speaker 3: we've actually made the food service impossible with Rashid sculpture,
Speaker 3: and he let us do some tweaks so that people
Speaker 3: could clear tables or get some access to the bar.
Speaker 1: If you like listening to Ruthie's Table four, would you
Speaker 1: please make sure to rate and review the podcast on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, O, wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: If somebody asked me my luxury, if I would say
Speaker 1: going to a museum when it's closed, and a real
Speaker 1: luxury for me was being taken with you around the
Speaker 1: Jasper John Show.
Speaker 2: Does he like to eat? Jasper?
Speaker 3: Jasper is actually a very good cook, and he's very
Speaker 3: interested in in ingredients and seasonality in his garden. He's
Speaker 3: now ninety four years old. I'm doing the math his birthdays.
Speaker 3: In May he would have turned ninety four, so he
Speaker 3: was born in nineteen thirty. He is a good cook.
Speaker 3: And when you go to lunch at his house and Sharon,
Speaker 3: which is a very beautiful place to visit. It's an
Speaker 3: old stone house in Connecticut, and it has incredible art
Speaker 3: in it.
Speaker 2: Does he collect or is it mostly his art?
Speaker 3: He collects and is his art and his collection has
Speaker 3: the most interesting everything in it has this incredible provenance.
Speaker 3: It'll be like this is a Rauschenberg painting that he
Speaker 3: was given as a gift when they were you know, boyfriends.
Speaker 3: And this is an Andy Warhol you know, sculpture box
Speaker 3: that he uses just as an end table and gets
Speaker 3: a drink ring on it, and he remembers knowing Andy
Speaker 3: and seeing this mint Marilyn in the first time that
Speaker 3: Leo Costelli showed one. Or here's a sculpture of John
Speaker 3: Chamberlain's that he installed multiple times. But he also collects
Speaker 3: older art and as he became you know, had more means,
Speaker 3: he bought Picasso and Duga and seys On and you
Speaker 3: see and things with incredible provenoance like a Seyson that
Speaker 3: Duga owned. You see this greatane of artistic interest fro
Speaker 3: I'm like, wow, I'm looking at Jasper John's looking at
Speaker 3: a season that I know Degay used to look at
Speaker 3: in his living room. And so it's always a treat
Speaker 3: for me. The first time I went there. I'll never forget,
Speaker 3: you know, the experience of being welcomed into this world
Speaker 3: of you know, these incredible artistic objects, but also things
Speaker 3: that he finds interesting that are not as famous, like
Speaker 3: a George or pot or a Hameda bowl from Japan,
Speaker 3: or you know, even a kind of funny like little
Speaker 3: toy that does something that moves. And he used to
Speaker 3: have a chef for a while that I knew very well.
Speaker 3: And when you eat there, like especially if it's at lunch,
Speaker 3: they put out a little buffet. And unlike Jonathan, unlike
Speaker 3: our home, there's not a lot of everything. You take
Speaker 3: like two little carrots, and you take a little piece
Speaker 3: of fish, and you take a little bit of bread
Speaker 3: or some kind of soup. He like soup. But everything
Speaker 3: feels like sort of perfectly selected and chosen, and you
Speaker 3: have quite a few small bites of different things.
Speaker 2: Do you thing that reflects his art? Do you think
Speaker 2: he'd be paying.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, it's funny. There's a certain amount of
Speaker 3: like a level of consideration and intentionality to it that
Speaker 3: nothing will go wasted. He also grew up, you know,
Speaker 3: in the depression, and that everything is sort of appreciated
Speaker 3: as a kind of complete gesture. Maybe I could see that.
Speaker 1: And what about home now that you have two children
Speaker 1: and you have both of you have very important work days.
Speaker 2: What's the word of family balance food wise?
Speaker 3: I am coming up on having met my husband Jonathan Burnham,
Speaker 3: whom you mentioned on your first book. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: think you met over food.
Speaker 2: Did you meet it on a first date?
Speaker 3: We met over it was drinks. Our first date was
Speaker 3: a blind day. We were set up by a mutual friend,
Speaker 3: almost exactly ten years ago. We're about a month shy
Speaker 3: of having known each other for ten years. And I
Speaker 3: would say it was a good of food. I kind
Speaker 3: of knew. I got on a plane right after that
Speaker 3: date and I thought, I've just met the guy I'm
Speaker 3: going to marry.
Speaker 1: I remember Rose and I sort of sitting at his desk,
Speaker 1: probably on the desk grows stretched out, you know, writing
Speaker 1: the introduction to the book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he loved food. He loves he loves food.
Speaker 1: So you married a man who really how does that feel?
Speaker 2: Having one, I mean partner great.
Speaker 3: He loves food certainly much more than I do. And
Speaker 3: everything is taken care of. And I think his love
Speaker 3: of food comes almost from a fear as a child
Speaker 3: of privation, which is a weird thing to say about
Speaker 3: someone who grew up certainly with means. But I guess
Speaker 3: in his household there just wasn't like in my household
Speaker 3: growing up, there was always food. There was coffee cake.
Speaker 3: You never sat down in a Jewish household like ours
Speaker 3: without your grandparents without eating. You know. It was just
Speaker 3: there was lots and lots of food. And I think
Speaker 3: he didn't grow up like that, you know. And he
Speaker 3: remembers his father was actually Japanese prisoner of war in
Speaker 3: you know, World War two, and thinking about like being
Speaker 3: hungry is something that he worried about, even though that's
Speaker 3: you know, ridiculous in terms of our financial situation, but
Speaker 3: it's just a kind of it's there deep down. He
Speaker 3: talks about it, I'm sure, or with a shrink that
Speaker 3: you know, the house just always has to have lots
Speaker 3: and lots of food, whereas I, as I said, would
Speaker 3: have just like an empty fridge. Our fridge is so
Speaker 3: full now. And he loves to cook, and he cooks
Speaker 3: almost six days a week. And this is a person
Speaker 3: who we could come home late from a party and
Speaker 3: I would just like scrounge around like a rodent for
Speaker 3: a cracker, and he would like put on water to
Speaker 3: boil and make pasta. And he cooks all the food
Speaker 3: for our children, and there's always delicious, delicious food at home. Interestingly,
Speaker 3: he reads cookbooks for pleasure almost every morning with his
Speaker 3: coffee while he eats his breakfast.
Speaker 1: Do you think he's thinking about because some people do
Speaker 1: wake up in the morning and think, what am I
Speaker 1: going to?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Definitely, he thinks. I can't wait for I don't even
Speaker 3: eat breakfast. I have coffee, you know. He looks forward
Speaker 3: to that first meal, and he reads cookbooks the way
Speaker 3: people read like newspapers. With his coffee and his toast.
Speaker 1: Food is a celebration, communication, it's a sharing.
Speaker 2: It's also a comfort.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 1: And so if we were for our last question, if
Speaker 1: we were thinking about food for you, Scott, being something
Speaker 1: that will give you comfort, is there something that you
Speaker 1: might go to when you when you need that.
Speaker 3: I mean a dry gen martinie that'll cook.
Speaker 2: Is that a comfort?
Speaker 3: I'm not a comfort food eater, you know. I hear
Speaker 3: these people who say I need cookies or something.
Speaker 2: I mean it's a dry martine is a good as
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: I might be more of a comfort drinker than comfort
Speaker 3: eat my Jonathan ow he says, you know, like if
Speaker 3: he's ordering fresh director when he goes, do you want anything, Darling,
Speaker 3: And I might say, just make sure there's some tomic,
Speaker 3: you know, But otherwise I'll eat whatever is there. I
Speaker 3: enjoy the gesture, whatever it is. But Luckily I don't
Speaker 3: have a lot of opinions.
Speaker 1: About it, so does Olivia hunger and I'm quite personally starving.
Speaker 2: Should we go eat?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I'd love to thank you so much