Table 4 at the River Cafe

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:14)
Well, she is an award-winning chef, co-founder of a Michelin-starred restaurant, author of 13 cookbooks. A native New Yorker has a podcast where she talks with the likes of Paul McCartney, Tina Fey, David Beckham, Mel Brooks, Martha Stewart, Francis Ford Coppola, Mark Carney, Bob Iger, Johnny Ive, whose comfort food, by the way, is peas.

**Carol Massar** (0:34)
Okay. I like that.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:35)
Who would have known? She has also, full disclosure, talked with Michael Bloomberg, of course, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies. She has talked with many, many folks. All of it comes together in a great book. It also comes together like a great meal with amazing company. Her new book is entitled Table 4 at the River Cafe, which as we understand is a highly coveted physical table located near the restaurant's open kitchen. Here to tell us about it and more is Ruthie Rogers, co-founder of the River Cafe in London, host of her podcast, Ruthie's Table 4 She joins us from London. We are so delighted to have you. We know it's a little bit later there in London. Congratulations on the new book. And we were thinking about where should we begin? And if you had to pick one single thing, Ruthie, as to where you are today, why you got there, your restaurant, iconic, well known in London, award-winning, you've got now a five-year-old podcast, what might that thing be?

**Ruthie Rogers** (1:32)
I think that, you know, from the very beginning, we started with the values of a restaurant. What is a restaurant? Why do people go to restaurants? What do you look for in a restaurant?
And I was just downstairs just now, and I see that the way people are greeted, the way people are made to feel welcome, of course the food, we change the menu for every meal. We write a menu, we rather like you do at home, we see what is fresh, what we have, we bought the day before, and of course always what is in season in the Italian market. So I think every day is a different day. We have great people working here who we, you know, the whole kitchen is open, and so there's a kind of way that we all work together. And I think, you know, we want really people to come to your restaurant and leave, so I always say quite simply happier than when they arrived.

**Carol Massar** (2:21)
So tell us about, for people who haven't been to the restaurant, the coveted Table 4

**Ruthie Rogers** (2:27)
Well, you know what?
Michael Caine always used to sit at Table 4, but then, you know, when Nancy Pelosi came in, we sat at Table 1, and there might be a table of who prefers, somebody who prefers Table 10, which is near to the entrance. Table 4 is slightly also a pun on the word 4, so it's a table number, but it also is a table for Michael Bloomberg, a table for any of the other people who are in the book, because what we wanted to do during, when we had to stop the restaurant because of the pandemic, we wanted a way to reach the people who ate in the restaurant. How could we reach them? We thought about reading a recipe every day, and then that segued into the story, because when you think about, when we talk to people through the lens of food about their memories, it's very thoughtful. It brings back, if I asked you, did your mother cook? Did your father cook? Did you go to restaurants? It brings up other stories.

**Tim Stenovec** (3:26)
I love that aspect, being from a large family.
Food was a big part. My mom loved to cook, and especially around holidays, birthdays, a relative in town, she would cook and make sure there was things for everybody who liked, even if she had to do like five different vegetables to make sure everybody was happy. But we would sit, Ruthie, at that table for hours, and I feel like that's where you're coming from.

**Ruthie Rogers** (3:53)
The best things happen around a table, I think, and the sad things happen around a table, but I think it is around a table that we all meet. It doesn't matter. We could have a sandwich around the table or a drink around the table, but there is something of that conversation. And when we interviewed Elton John and David Furnish, the woman who worked for his chief of staff, who said she'd worked with and heard so many interviews over 25 years, but it was only when Elton started talking about potting peas with his grandmother, or how they tried the people who use food to seduce, to impress, to give joy, to share.