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.
In those days, Italian food in London meant “spag bol,” veal escalope, Chianti in straw-covered fiaschi. There was clearly a need in London, which apparently nobody else had noticed, for rustic, Tuscan-inspired food driven by a fanatical focus on top-quality seasonal ingredients, turned out with precision and brio, and presented in a room designed by a globally lauded architect, i.e., Lord Rogers himself.
In 1988, Colman Andrews, writing in the Los Angeles Times, floated the improbable notion that the River Cafe—which first opened as a lunch canteen for Rogers’s architecture firm in a former oil warehouse in out-of-the-way Hammersmith—might be the best restaurant in all of London. In 1996, The New Yorker went even further, declaring that it might be the best Italian restaurant in all of Europe.
This no doubt caused a legion of chefs in Florence and Rome to cancel their subscriptions in fury. But, if anything, it was an understatement. The River Cafe was already becoming something more than a restaurant. It was a cultural force—enough that a leading Tory politician grumbled that England was “now all about Britpop and the River Café.” By the turn of the millennium, Brit-pop was done, but in the third decade of the 21st century, Rogers and Gray’s little Tuscan restaurant on the Thames—which, by the way, was one of Conran’s favorite places to eat—endures.
“It’s very much a fantasy of what a restaurant can be,” Ruth Reichl, the former editor of Gourmet, tells me. “It’s a ‘family’ kind of restaurant that grew organically, and it has that whole notion of caring about your staff and your suppliers.” The only other place like it, she says, is Chez Panisse, the restaurant that sparked an American, and then a worldwide, food revolution. Like Chez Panisse, which Alice Waters founded in 1971, the River Cafe has shaped The Way We Eat Now.
It has also launched the careers of countless chefs, including Jamie Oliver; Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall; April Bloomfield; the two Sam Clarks of London’s Moro; Jess Shadbolt and Clare de Boer, the charismatic duo behind the celebrated New York restaurants King and Jupiter; and Britain’s newest superstar chef, Tomos Parry, among many others. It has reordered the industry’s expectations of how kitchens can be run. And it continues to create plate after plate of more or less perfect food, from its devastatingly simple pappa al pomodoro to its coma-inducing Chocolate Nemesis cake.
“We just wanted to create a place where you walk through the door and you feel taken care of,” Rogers tells me. “A place where you feel like you’ve come home.”
A Natural Connector
The River Cafe isn’t homey in the way you think of a trattoria. It’s not the kind of place with checked tablecloths. In fact, the tables are covered in white paper, something that Richard Rogers, who died in December 2021, at 88, insisted upon when the restaurant opened, enabling architects to sketch while on their lunch breaks. When the Michelin team considered awarding the River Cafe its second star, they hinted that losing the paper might do the trick. But Rogers—who is universally known as Ruthie, and has incandescent blue eyes and ginger bangs—refused. And so the one-star designation remains.
At the River Cafe, the emphasis is on space and light, with a garden that rolls down to the Thames. The dining room is gorgeously calibrated—elegant without being stuffy, spare without being frosty—with decisive splashes of color, from the cobalt-blue carpet to the projection clock on the wall, to the fuchsia pizza oven, which looks like a landing craft from Barbieland.
The artist Ed Ruscha describes the experience of arriving at the restaurant after the customary winding cab journey from central London. “The doors would be open,” he says, “and it’s an outdoor-indoor kind of thing. You can walk along that waterfront on the Thames. You just always feel good going into the place.” Ruscha is one of the restaurant’s many enthusiasts in the art world. Lucien Freud was a regular, Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly made drawings on the menu, Damien Hirst has studio space in the same complex, and the late art historian Kirk Varnedoe was Rogers’s best friend.
In the River Cafe of the imagination, Tracey Emin is plotting her next gallery show over the grilled squid with red chili while Michael Caine is over at his usual table tucking into a panna cotta. (Caine celebrated his 90th birthday at the restaurant in March.) Tina Fey and her kids are sharing plates of tagliarini with slow-cooked tomato sauce while Simon Schama is discoursing on the Dutch masters over favas and pancetta, Paul McCartney is enjoying a vegetarian feast (which is not a contradiction at the River Cafe), Edward Enninful is holding court among the fashion faithful with help from the veal shank with Barolo, and Wes Anderson is ordering his beloved roast pigeon.
In 1988, the Los Angeles Times floated the improbable notion that the River Cafe might be the best restaurant in all of London.
The River Cafe is surely one of the great culinary clubhouses, an aspect of the restaurant that is perfectly captured in Rogers’s companionable, and hugely addictive, podcast, Ruthie’s Table 4, in which you can hear Frank Gehry rhapsodizing about matzo brei, Al Gore explaining to British listeners what a “meat and three” is, or Christiane Amanpour reciting a recipe for a Negroni caldo.
But, thanks to Rogers, the aura is that everyone belongs, the V.I.P.’s and the vacationers. (And, amazingly, you can hear the other people at your table, even when the dining room is packed.) There is a long-standing joke at the restaurant that the front-of-house designation “friend of Ruthie’s” had to be scrapped because seemingly everyone is an “F.O.R.” Rogers is a natural connector. “Whenever she’s around, it’s lively,” Ruscha says. “There’s usually lots of people, and she just cuts through it all with her sense of humor and way of mixing with people. She’s really inquisitive.”
It goes back to Rogers’s girlhood in the Catskills, where her parents’ house in Woodstock was a hub of conversation and hospitality. “They loved having people over,” Rogers tells me of her parents, Frederick and Sylvia Elias, he a doctor and she a librarian. A frequent guest was the painter Philip Guston, who was one of her father’s best friends. (In 1980, Guston died of a heart attack at the family’s dining table.)
“Woodstock had a vitality to it in the mid-60s,” Rogers recalls. One afternoon, a teenage Ruthie and a girlfriend spotted Bob Dylan in a local café. The singer scribbled a note on a napkin, inviting them to come watch him rehearse with the Band. “We wrote back, ‘No, we have a test in school tomorrow,’” Rogers says. “I wish I’d kept that napkin!” It’s a lasting regret. She also missed out on the 1969 concert that made her hometown synonymous with peace and love, because she was having her tonsils taken out. But Woodstock’s legacy of creativity and bohemianism rubbed off on all of the Elias kids. Ruthie’s sister, Susan, is an artist, and her brother, Michael, is a novelist and screenwriter who collaborated with Steve Martin on The Jerk.
For her part, Rogers dropped out of Bennington after her freshman year, found her way to London in the fall of 1967, enrolled in the London College of Printing to learn graphic design, and got a job in the art department of Penguin Books. She married Richard Rogers in 1973 and moved to Paris for a few years while he worked on the Centre Pompidou. There, Rogers says, they “went to every restaurant, from five stars to local bistros.”
An approach to food was developing in her own kitchen, centered around family as opposed to formal training at Le Cordon Bleu. It leaned heavily on the cooking of Dada Rogers, who was born into a well-to-do Triestine family, moved to Florence, and then to Blitz-era London, where she learned to make miraculous meals amid wartime scarcity. The lessons of thrift, good ingredients, and deep respect for sustenance fused with Rogers’s growing sophistication as a gifted cook.
There is a long-standing joke at the restaurant that the front-of-house designation “friend of Ruthie’s” had to be scrapped because seemingly everyone is an “F.O.R.”
In 1987, D.I.Y. gumption was the order of the day when Rogers and Gray, who had been friends since 1969, put down around $45,000 for the space in Hammersmith, which was then, as Rogers puts it, “a backwater.” She now views the strictures originally placed upon the fledgling River Cafe by the local planning board—lunch only, customers must work in Thames Wharf—as a plus: it allowed her and Gray to get their sea legs. The kitchen was basically four hot plates, and there were nine tables. The menu was short; Rogers might prep sandwiches while Gray worked on pasta, or vice versa. But despite the outward modesty of the operation, Rogers tells me, she and Gray had ambition: “We knew we wanted to be the greatest restaurant ever.”
In February 1988, after about six months, they were given permission to open to the general public. Elizabeth David, Britain’s reigning food authority, made a beeline to it. Nigella Lawson marveled in The Spectator that bollito misto could now be had in London. “Back when so many good restaurants were still fussy and the menus were bigger than your head,” Reichl says, “the River Cafe felt bohemian and cool and like who you wanted to be—and also democratic, in a way.”
This was indeed the vision. Rogers and Gray wanted their restaurant to be easygoing: no snooty waiters or pompous sommeliers. But it would champion impeccable seasonal cooking, of the kind that Waters, Judy Rodgers, and Wolfgang Puck were doing in America. As Rogers says, the operative question at the River Cafe has always been “Why can’t you have great food and great fun in a space that’s not scary?”
An Army of Thinkers
And what of the chefs that have come through the place? Fearnley-Whittingstall, of the popular River Cottage cookbooks and television series, who started in the River Cafe’s kitchen in 1989, once said, “I learned more from Rose than from anyone I have ever cooked with.” Bloomfield, who cooked at the River Cafe before her lauded run in New York at the Spotted Pig, the Breslin, and, now, Sailor, said that, thanks to Rogers and Gray, “my palate moved to a higher consciousness.” For Reichl, the River Cafe is “almost more like a teaching institution than a restaurant. It’s always been about empowering people and encouraging them and being happy when they move on.”
When Rogers talks about the qualities she looks for in a potential hire, she uses words such as “curiosity,” “cleanliness,” and “rigor” rather than “training” or “experience.” The Caff, as River Cafe alums affectionately refer to the place, practices a unique kind of culinary pedagogy. Shadbolt, who worked at the restaurant for nearly a decade, says, “You’re not taught to cook with recipes; you’re taught to really consider the ingredient in the midst of everything else.” This means constantly asking questions in the kitchen: “What is this? Where is it going? What else is on the menu?” (Constantly is no hyperbole: the restaurant devises and executes complete lunch and dinner menus every day.) “At other kitchens, it’s more like a factory,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Here’s your station.’ You’re spoon-fed.”
Shadbolt’s chef partner, de Boer, who opened the acclaimed Stissing House, in the Hudson Valley, last year, tells me, “There’s a holistic approach, and everyone who works there feels it. Everyone participates. So as a member of the team, you’re also an evangelist.”
The River Cafe does not observe the traditional split between the front and back of house. The waitstaff chips in with slicing garlic in the morning, and the kitchen staff is acutely aware of what is going on in the dining room. The restaurant’s open kitchen, originally inspired by Rogers’s and Gray’s own homes, further breaks down traditional hierarchies. It also encourages civility. The staff is on full display, “so nobody shouts,” Rogers says. “It’s stressful, yes, but the communication is controlled.” As de Boer puts it, “There’s no behind the scenes at the River Cafe. What you see is what you get.”
“I like Gordon Ramsay,” Rogers says, “but I have a problem with the image of the temperamental chef.” And so the River Cafe has acquired a reputation as a place free of martinets, bullies, and tantrums. The staff, which is around 50 percent women, works a five-day week with a maximum of two shifts in a row and may join a yearly pilgrimage to Tuscany to learn about olive oil or cheese or wine.
After Gray’s death, in 2010, a heavy blow for the River Cafe (coming two years after a fire that required a complete rebuild), a foundation was set up in her name to provide study grants for employees. There have been endless Rogers-led initiatives and projects and drives around social-equity issues, making the River Cafe a global standard-bearer for progressive reform in commercial kitchens. “It’s not all hippie-lovey,” Rogers says. “It’s hard work here. But I love coming to work, and I want everyone who comes to work here to want to come to work.”
Despite the outward modesty of the operation, Rogers and Gray had ambition: “We knew we wanted to be the greatest restaurant ever.”
It’s no surprise that a job at the River Cafe is coveted. “People don’t pass through those doors that frequently,” Shadbolt says. “It’s so hard to leave.” The executive chefs, Sian Wyn Owen and Joseph Trivelli, have each been there for almost a quarter of a century. (They, Rogers, and the managers, Charles Pullan and Vashti Armit, are the restaurant’s partnership team.) But when chefs do leave, they are unusually equipped to make an impact on the wider world of food.
“The people that come and go from the River Cafe all have the ability to find their own way,” Oliver, who worked in the kitchen in the 1990s, tells me. “It’s not just beautiful restaurants, it’s delis, it’s bakeries, it’s trattorias, it’s pizzerias—they all go off and do spectacular things.” And why is this so? “Ruthie’s created an army of thinkers,” he says. “Not just robots, not just craftspeople, not just artisans, but thinkers.” (Oliver’s television career was launched in 1997, thanks to an appearance in a BBC documentary about Christmas at the River Cafe.)
“They are the major oak tree,” Shadbolt says of Rogers and Gray, “and now there are all these little acorns sprouting up all over the world that have followed suit.” River Cafe alumni tend to feel that Rogers will always be a presence in their lives. They are thrilled (and terrified) when she shows up at one of their restaurants, and, if they’re back in London, they inevitably find themselves heading out to Hammersmith to pay homage and reconnect. “She was my boss,” Oliver says. “And she will always be my boss.”
Rogers has never had dreams of a global empire. There are no plans for a River Cafe Dubai. The brand extensions are limited to the periodic appearance of an instantly classic cookbook (the latest being 2022’s The River Cafe Look Book), an online shop, and, since 2021, the podcast, which was launched during the pandemic and which kicked off its third season last month.
After living in England for the better part of half a century, and achieving C.B.E. status in 2020, Rogers still prefers coffee to tea, has yet to see the appeal of Marmite, keeps a keen eye on American politics (she has a hard time remembering who her M.P. is but can name a good chunk of the House of Representatives), and relishes her visits to New York. In September, she went to Ruscha’s opening at the Museum of Modern Art, with Austin Butler in tow.
One typically English trait she has picked up is a habitual modesty, making her reluctant to crow about the embarrassingly huge success of the River Cafe. “You don’t really talk about that here!” she says with an all-American laugh. Yet Rogers has no problem when it comes to assessing the thousands of hours she’s logged at the lunch canteen that grew to become a culinary and cultural crossroads one fritto misto, osso buco, and Chocolate Nemesis cake at a time: “I think it’s the best job in the world.”
Mark Rozzo is an Editor at Large for AIR MAIL and the author of Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles
