The satirist Craig Brown once said that before Sir Terence Conran’s Habitat shops transformed the way England decorated in the 1960s, “there were no chairs and no France.” Along similar lines, you might say that before Ruthie Rogers and Rose Gray opened London’s River Cafe, on September 10, 1987, there was no extra-virgin olive oil and hardly any Italy.
Rogers, an American expat from Woodstock, New York, was an exuberant home chef, married to Richard Rogers, the British-Italian architect; she had absorbed Tuscan cooking through her mother-in-law, Dada Rogers. Gray, raised in Scotland and Surrey, had lived in Lucca with her family and had cooked in Manhattan, at Nell’s, the starry Keith McNally and Lynn Wagenknecht–owned nightclub on 14th Street.
