Ab Rogers, Designer

0:00Speaker 1:Ruthie's Table four is now a book. Paul McCartney, Michael Caine, Kamala Harris, David Beckham, Tina fey Elton John and many more. It's full of stories, beautifully designed, and a celebration of the way food connects us all. It's available now wherever you buy your books. Ruthie's Table four brought to you by Sky and Montclair. There was a time that I think it was you that was had been going every single day down to the harbor to try fish and catch a fish. And every day we had this little fishing rod, I think it was maybe it was true with you, and would stand there for hours. And one day we just thought we can't go on any longer.

0:43Speaker 1:So we bought a fish, a little fish in the fishing market, and then you drove down underneath the fishing and attached it to the fishing rod, and he pulled it up swimming. So they hatched it to the rod and he pulled it up. Of course, what he did really cut onto is that it was a dead fish. There are many many things I admire about abe Rogers. He is the founder of Abe Rogers Architects, an international practice where he breaks boundaries, creating beautiful buildings, challenging exhibitions, and dynamic interiors. As a parent, he is patient, exuberant, and as a stepson, well, he and I have been side by side with many, many stories to tell. Today, we're going to talk about Abe as a cook, the inventive, inspiring, and brave way he brings ingredients together, creating some of the most delicious food I've eaten in my life. I think I know Abe very well. Today I'm going to know him even better and we'll share with you what he does, what he thinks, and what he makes. What a privilege we're going to talk an't we we have known?

2:03Speaker 1:I don't think i've known apart from maybe I would rather. I don't think i've known any person I've interviewed as long as I've known you have.

2:10Speaker 2:I think I'm one of the apart from the only people that have eaten your food all their all.

2:15Speaker 3:Their their lives.

2:16Speaker 2:And I think that's quite a privilege. And I even make your food kind of before it was this, when it was we were.

2:22Speaker 1:Making the other day, I went up to Ruse and he said, I want you to cook something that used to cook.

2:27Speaker 2:Yeah, So I was thinking about soufles is like bicycled over here.

2:31Speaker 1:Yeah, he said, he said, let's make something that you know you used to make, and so I said, soufle And I used to make cheese, one cheese to and one finish, and then.

2:42Speaker 2:I remember the whole theater, then looking through the oven and then rising.

2:45Speaker 1:You remember the time we were skiing, Yeah, we were skiing. You know how everybody makes you feel like souffles. You can't open the oven door, nobody can make a noise, you can't play music. And we were in a shallow in some apartment house and some humor, and we made a cheese to play and a spinach shoe flay, and the oven kind of broke or something happened, and we took both soufles out of the oven as they were rising, went down the hall, turned on the other oven, which was like a very low temperature, and put the soufles in and slammed the door. And they were the best soufles I've ever had. So is not always right, No, exactly where the mythology of a tradition. We're going to ask you to read a recipe that you've chosen. I thought it was interesting that of all the recipes that you've chosen, it's a dish that I absolutely adore with a fish that I think worked so well in this recipe.

3:43Speaker 1:Why don't you read it first?

3:44Speaker 2:And why discuss going to say prior to reading this is what when in the last years with that we'd had these kind of emotional conversations and he was very soft and he said, your super power is your fearlessness, and that is you know, that's what. But actually the one thing makes me fearful is reading out louds So I walk endeavor to read, especially dyslexia. Yeah, and this is very beautifully printed in LUNs writing for me. Acropats is an extraordinary dish because a little bit like my mete, the Spanish dish is kind of made by the fisherman to be kind of eaten on the boat almost. And so this idea of using the local seaweed and this kind of strange curdle, a multiplication that comes with a fish protein and the olive oil and the garlic the coming together so for kind of crazy water acropats. So we need three pielt garlics. We need four tablespoons of chopped fresh flat parsley, two fresh or tinned plum tomatoes, true crushed dried chilis. One whole red mullet. I mean, I love the red mullet. I think it's exceptional. Fish white wine optional, all necessary. I would say four scallops of longesteed, two slices of sheap batter, bread, one lemon

4:50Speaker 2:hard in a pan large enough to hold the fish in one layer. Five water with garlic, pastia, tomates, and chili. Season weal and boil for five minutes. Add the mullet and splash of wine and cover for six minutes. Then carefully turn the fish over. Add the shell fish. Cook for six more minutes. Carefully turn the fish over, cook for further six minutes, seasoned, drizzle olive oil. Toast the bread, rub garlic on one side, and place on a plate. Add the fish, spooning over tomatoes and broth. Be on a rocky boat.

5:22Speaker 1:And why did you choose this recipe?

5:24Speaker 2:Because I think it represents the simplicity of kind of Italian food, of food that that you know, that that you cook and bringing these ingredients together, and the idea that it's cooked by the by the fishermen.

5:36Speaker 1:That's why it's called crazy water. Because the myth or the reality that if you drink salt water of the sea, you will become insane, you'll be crazy. And so the aqua patza means pazza is you know, means crazy in Italian. So I think I think it's a beautiful name for a recipe and the mythology of it. As you tell me more about aqua, parts of what do you when you make it? What do you do well?

6:02Speaker 2:I mean for me, it's just coming together of these different ingredients, and you have you know that you'll see the shellfish and meeting with the red mullet, and they can make.

6:11Speaker 1:It without like it without and I just like a mullet.

6:15Speaker 2:Just a mullet. Yeah, I mean clans I think you know, I wouldn't nessary, but it's scallops. But I think it's it's a celebration of pure ingredients, which all you're cooking is a bat.

6:25Speaker 1:The other appeal of this dish for me is that it's a whole fish. Yeah, I don't want to make it with a filet. You would never make it with a filet if.

6:33Speaker 2:I can avoid. I like to cook everything, whole everything point I would only cook vegetables whole as well. I mean, now I've kind of got more. But I quite like going through these conceptual moments of kind of defining the food by the.

6:46Speaker 3:Way you doing it.

6:49Speaker 2:Because then it's as it arrives and it cooks inside it itself. And I try not to add water to things, so I kind of like this idea of concentration and trying to get the water from the vegetable, and if it's not cut, then it sits inside and kind of cooks in its own self.

7:03Speaker 1:And also when you see a fill it of sea bass or a turbot, whatever you are very often putting on the grill, it kind of shrinks and gets all sort of angry and tight.

7:16Speaker 2:The juice kind of escapes, and you need the bones, and.

7:18Speaker 1:You need the bones. That's you know. I don't think I ever ate a fill of a fish. When I lived in Paris, we'd either get you know, sea bass big enough for every everyone to share, and taking it off the bone is part of the whole process, and.

7:32Speaker 2:Then the bone becomes the stock. And I had some friends for dinner last night, did you cook? I cooked a turbots, but I sput it on the wire frame of the shelf and the vegetables underneath it. So the kind of the enzymes drop and you do a kind of salt and olive oil and vinegar massage into it and releases the proteins. It's the kind of bass thing and everything drops out. And I was cooking for Lynn Harris to perfume, and it was very interesting to be talking about food with someone who's just obsessed with the smell, smell and the kind of whole taste and smell and that inter.

8:03Speaker 1:I get that, you know, I always say that very often you want to make something up because of what it will taste like, but what it will smell like.

8:10Speaker 2:And how your house will smell when people enter the.

8:14Speaker 1:Ways. Yeah, sometimes you don't wantever you do one I don't have. I don't have extraction in my house.

8:22Speaker 2:I think I learned that from you. I have.

8:25Speaker 1:Open window. Yeah, what are your early memories of the kitchen?

8:29Speaker 2:When I was bically him thinking about this conversation, I realized that most of my early memories are about food, and when I talked to that, his memories are very different. I think it's very interesting early on what we take from our memories and our past. So yeah, definitely. I mean we were five that we'd all sit down together. Chicken would kind of be devoured in minutes with such a with five kids and two adults and two great danes, and soon would make packed lunches for all of us every morning and be at the kind of five making homemade bread. I mean, it was quite in this kind of conveyor belt and we go off my little plastic bags with the sandwiches and the carrots. Where they eat with you most nights every night, or my bedroom is next to the kitchen because I was the youngest, and so I'm going to go to bed as they were cooking.

9:12Speaker 2:I mean, lot of people would see that I was in the cupboard in the basement, but it was. But it was actually a real kind of generous things that kept me very close. She was always in the kitchen. But I grew up, you know, with this incredible privilege of these I know, kind of five four amazing cooks. You know, you're you know you cooking, and we'd go every week to Bell Sized Grow And there was a period when Dad was supposed to cook every Tuesday.

9:35Speaker 1:Do you remember that. I, you know, Richard who really.

9:39Speaker 2:Food was important respective.

9:41Speaker 1:Everything was about. He would literally go to bed at night and think what we were going to eat the next day, or he would, you know, after a meal, talk about what he you know, had eaten that lunch. There was a conversation about food. There was this.

9:55Speaker 2:Love of very natural food. He wanted he wanted the livers and the kidneys, and he wanted in fact, and he wanted you know, the substance.

10:02Speaker 1:Yeah. So going, so you had the Tuesdays whenever we did one of the.

10:06Speaker 2:Tuesdays when he could and he couldn't cook. He didn't know how to cook. He liked the idea, but he you know, so I would cook with you.

10:14Speaker 1:So you were saying that your memories of your childhood really centered around food. Yeah. Yeah.

10:19Speaker 2:And then of course Dada Dada who was who was my grandmother? I think quite inspiration had totally who kind of was the first Italian cook. I mean obviously the first, but was kind of And you would go to her house and she would skate around with cloths attached to her feet and you know, she would slowly cook these carrots and she's had.

10:39Speaker 1:The clothes on her feet now for cooking but cleaning. Yeah, so we should tell everyone about data who was born in Trieste.

10:47Speaker 2:Early century, women who survived the wars, who kind of fled Italy in thirty nine, who kind of arrived in England the beginning of the war at a moment kind of great nationalism in a way.

11:07Speaker 1:And she had a very privileged childhood. So she was brought up with I think cooks in the kitchen and cleaners in the bedrooms, and a little private train that took her to the top of her house.

11:19Speaker 3:And James, James Joyce.

11:22Speaker 1:That's always my question, who do you think Richard's mother to speak English? And there was James Joyce who was living in Triesta.

11:29Speaker 2:And I think when they had the flu in eighteen eighteen, nineteen eighteen, she didn't need the house free, you know, and people would bring the through to the kind of doorstep of the house.

11:37Speaker 1:There were two things she wanted to have in London, many things, probably, but coming from this privileged life to a wartime Britain was one not being able to have a view. Because she grew up in Florence where there were the hills and she could walk up there and see the view of a Florence. And so she said to me once and she used to walk around London all day trying to find a view. And the other one was to have the kind of food that she'd grown up with, the trisque. Her father, even though it was wartime Britain and rationing, would send her candy chestnuts and candied fruit. She often told me about getting these packages.

12:17Speaker 1:I don't know how he got them out of Italy and to Britain, but for her having the candied fruit. But you can imagine coming from parmesan cheese and olive oil and anchovies and garlic to a country where there was just a very, very different level of type of cooking.

12:33Speaker 2:But she had this amazing house that Dad had designed her as kind of super experimental house, his first kind of real vision of the future of his eye.

12:40Speaker 3:That wasn't until sixty eight, sixty eight.

12:42Speaker 2:Yeah, this kind of yellow box where she would cook her childhood food and with this incredible generosity and precision in how she would cook. And for me, I always wouldly remember the carrots, and the carrots would take four hours and she would kind of turn them over each one individual. She almost knew them by name slice by the end of the kind of carrot cooking, and he would have this orange all of oil that had been kind of touched by this very very slow cooking.

13:08Speaker 1:Italian vegetables are never undercooked. Everything in Italy is, you know, the prety rules. Even though yeah you can have raw you do. But I think that the whole the difference between you know, a blanched vegetable and French cooking or you know, other cooking, and then the Italians which just cooked them for a very long time, they do it because of the olive oil. I think they get away with it. So tell me more about the influences in your cooking.

13:39Speaker 2:And then so you know, I grew up, you know, with Rose and her kids, we were all very much that.

13:44Speaker 1:Would be Rose Grades, my co founder of the River.

13:47Speaker 2:Capitol was you know who moved to Florence in when I was like fourteen, twelve thirteen, and we would go out there and all that they would do there was cook and she kind of demanded everybody in the house to be cooking. I don't know how you could make it too much. I saur so collaborative, and she always wanted to push and like you were saying in my introduction, she always really wanted to push the baund and she was going to use chili. She wants to make you cry from the heat, you know. She kind of she was she was experimental, not when she was hit in those kind of periods and interesting things, so bohemian in a way. Kind of going there as a teenager was like anything could happen, and food was the absolute glue that operated around that.

14:25Speaker 1:And she was taught to cook by daughter. She always said that. You know, there were about five friends of Richard who lived in South London, Wimbledon, she that area, and they were friends of Richard, and then what they really loved was being taught by Richard's mother daughter, your grandmother, how to cook. And so there was and actually if you went to Rose's house or sus or you know, Georgie Walton's house or Wendy Foster's, there was you could tell that they'd been taught by Dadda. There was a consistency.

14:57Speaker 2:Because her food was about approach to exactly me dishes. But the way that you learned you could apply it to anything. As you say, you talk about the vegetables, or we talk about it, the salad, the ice creams, you know, which extortedly we're all still trying to recreate many years later, or the Christmas cake that you make every year. But in a way, the really interesting thing for me is this is the kind of creation is quite humble food that you make so exquisitely. And something I find fascinating in your cooking is the more noble your guests, the more humble the food that you serve them.

15:28Speaker 2:So you have the American Ambassador for lunch and you give them which is, you know, kind of the peasants food, but you make it so perfectly, you know, I think, and it changes all the time, whether you're using parmesan or you're not using parmesan, that if tomates you're using the time of years, but it's always, you know, it's it's yeah. Eva Drittna says in design that three materials make a palette, and I think, you know, that's quite true in a lot of these dishes. I just ate the targa with tomatoes outside, and that's two ingredients. Maybe we add salt three, but it's just it's this kind of poetry in your in your mouth, the kind of fish to the field, which is fabulous.

16:03Speaker 1:And also when you have few ingredients, if you just have two ingredients. They'd better be good. There's no masking them, you know that. Butka has to be great a certain way.

16:15Speaker 3:A ribbon, Yeah, you like the ribbon.

16:17Speaker 1:I quite like it greater.

16:18Speaker 3:We'll go have a comparison.

16:20Speaker 2:Okay.

16:20Speaker 1:So you had Sue, you had you had me, you had daughter, you had Cheer and then your cousin she's married to the Cheerman.

16:32Speaker 2:Was married to Richard's first cousin. And she was this kind of extraordinary, short, completely energetic cook who would spend no money, but she would barter with the local farmers and she would drive off in the morning for forty minutes to get this very fresh paccarino they just had just kind of been been set and she would drive back across and you would have that, and she'd be so excited to bring you this and this and this bread. And she would have huge fights with the other chefs in Florence because their food was being too comp lo caterd and it well, you know, it was always trying to be there was a real activist. I remember this meal where she had given the farmers free ducks, and she'd given them the and she specified their diet.

17:11Speaker 1:These three ducks, she gave them as us to be.

17:14Speaker 2:Fair, and then for six months they fed them and grew them, and then she came and picked them up and she did this whole meal devoted to the duck. So you start with duck soup, then you have duck bravioli, then you have rosed duck. So how you can take one animal and it influenced the whole meal. And I kind of love that linear story that starts to be told and how we can use, you know, food to really tell stories. And it almost has kind of conceptual art in some ways that he's sow in these other narratives.

17:43Speaker 1:So there are five women in the sense that you grew up with is you know the importance and no wonder your memory is so strong a food. You know that you had these very different views in the way people cook, but a kind of quality and also a sense of that food was a way of bringing a we want together. Do you remember going to restaurants? Yeah?

18:03Speaker 2:I remember going to Chinese, going to mister choosing to go to Chinese restaurants, Pizza Express, Yeah, a lot of that definitely with you and Richard are going to restaurants in Paris. Yeah, I also remember those holids days where we would live in a boat house and you would cook you know, sardine. I mean it was a very it was. It was not a lavish exist.

18:22Speaker 1:That was of Coudie, wasn't it. We had the keys to the house, we had a map to take us to the house. We had three children, I was pregnant, it was. And we stayed there for three weeks and we never found the house where.

18:37Speaker 2:The houses never have found the house.

18:40Speaker 1:We stayed in this room which we thought we could go to be one night and ended up being sort of three weeks. But I think we did eat. You know, we ate from the sea. We ate, and so I think that probably part of your childhood and growing up.

18:54Speaker 2:I mean, which you couldn't cook, but he would gather. We'd go to the sea urchins, we would get brickly pears, we'd be covered in splinters.

19:00Speaker 1:Yeah, there was a time that I think it was you that was had been going every single day down to the harbor to try and fish and catch a fish. And every day we had this little fishing rod. I think it was maybe it was Rue you and would stand there for hours and one day we just thought we can't go on any longer. So we bought a fish, a little fish in the fishing market, and then drove down underneath the fishing and attached it to the fishing rod and.

19:25Speaker 3:He pulled it up.

19:28Speaker 2:What's doing.

19:31Speaker 1:Swimming? So they attached it to the to the rod and he pulled it up. Of course, what he did really cut onto was that it was a dead fish, and so then he was so.

19:42Speaker 3:Ses it was this big. It gut it and we brought.

19:46Speaker 1:It back, the fish back to the house, and then by that time was so attached to it he wouldn't let us cook it, and so he slept with.

19:53Speaker 2:It nights and we were all sleeping in one room. So it started to really really smell and it dried leave fish, and we had to persuade him to let the fish go. And he's going to get back to his mom. He wasn't well. His mom was going to make him better. Maybe had to get the hospital we had, and we launched it back into the sea, and this Viga water is completely stiff.

20:13Speaker 1:I don't think you get away with that now, because the whole idea of honesty and treating children as when you go to a city and you think, what is the culture of food, going to tell me about the culture of the country.

20:29Speaker 3:The city, the market.

20:30Speaker 1:So what do you what do you look for?

20:32Speaker 2:And I look, I love the mark. We want to look. But the locals are eating what the locals are doing, And I think for me, Thailand is fascinating. You have some of the best thing I've had in my life. You have these fish which are barbecued, but in this kind of salt and flower. You have fish that you cannot recognize. I might get obsessed with fish particularly, they're such strange creatures and we don't see them most of the time because they're under the water. But then you have you know, you have seventy seven different types of mangos.

20:55Speaker 2:If we don't about a mango as if it's the one thing, or in the same way, I guess with apples, you have all these different rice is you have. You know, that's great kind of uh pioneers. We're trying to bring back all the heritage growing that has kind of been lost along along the way. And you know, when I work in Thailand, we have you know, I eat it in the canteen in the morning, and you eat this, you know, it's all blood and guts because it's incredibly inexpensive, but the taste is fantastic. And if you're getting up at six in the morning to spend all day on site working, you want this kind of high protein, this high iron, this high kind of toxing thing. And it's it's, it's, it's it's superb.

21:30Speaker 1:Your work is taken you to Japan, Thailand.

21:34Speaker 2:In Thailand we work with Wonder Fru, which is a big festival and that has this they have it has an amazing food culture inside it and the food culture for the kind of workers which I find really interesting. And how we treat our workers is so bolled. At the canteen, you know, the Sophie around the canteen here, which was which was fantastic. You started this as a canteen itself at the beginning, which is really amazing and such some kind of privileged the office team here, who's the best canteen in London?

21:59Speaker 1:Yeah, judge, judge. You judge a society by the way it feeds its Parker poor, the way they feeds hospitals. And you've done a lot of work in hospitals, you know, this is this brings back the immersion of you know, architecture, design, food, cooking.

22:15Speaker 2:Serving sociologists I think as designers, and I think you know, the Dad was very much a kind of sociologists in his way. His architecture, his cities were for humans. They were the manifestation was was a building or a street, but it was really coming from how can we improve people's lives as as as the human and I think that's what we're you know, and food is part of that and which was really interesting trying to put the restaurants in the street and how that would ignite and bring people into the street and how you know Sparcelonia did it better than London. What we could learn from that and transforming into that.

22:46Speaker 1:Tell us about your work with hospitals.

22:49Speaker 2:I mean, I think, you know, having designed a lot of very high end fashion shops and very high culture museums and restaurants, et cetera. You know, we started working in Maggie's designed the Maggie Center. Everyone with mag Maggie is a cancer center which sits outside the hospitals, and it's really designed for the patients to energize them. If the hospital makes them impotent, Maggie's empowers them. And it's you know, they're extraordinary architectural buildings that are designed around the needs of the human. So it's very important about the texture. If you have had chemotherapy, then you're very affected by cold materials, so we tried everything you touch is made of wood, Everything is handmade. It's really about the psychadian rhythm, how light gets in the space, smoothing off corners, so you really it's like it's a form of church in a way. It becomes this anchor. You walk out of the hospital in this car parck and you come to this oasis. You know, we work for an amazing landscape garden and Peter Udorff, who designed the high Line, who created this incredible god. So you totally

23:49Speaker 2:forget one that you have cancer or not. You forget you have cancer, but you forget the trauma that you're in and you give you a moment and you really see people in this space laughing, and it's not just we're incredible architect We are good, but it's because the brief is amazing and the whole network is amazing, and the staff is amazing, and the architecture becomes part of that support system. So we developed a theory which is the third care, which is if the doctor and the nurses the primary, the family and the friends the secondary, how the building can really care for you. And part of that kit goes into food. So Maggie's is designed around this centralized kitchen where people come and cook, and we'll come and cook at tomatoes, sauce. And when Maggie's finished, they invited us to the donor's dinner. Maggie's is completely paid for by donors fundraising. There's no government money, and we felt very indebted to these people. They'd give us this amazing opportunity to do this amazing thing. We created this building, which took eight years, in many conversations with the patients, the users, with the staff. So we said

24:47Speaker 2:we'd only come to the meal if we could cook it. So we set up this meal. Our building is seven shades of red, so we propose to do seven courses of red foods with seven different red wines. And then we had all these very generous donors there who would come for kind of half an hour, and then they stayed for four hours and actually getting in telling their drivers to hold on and getting quite drunk. And this whole thing became this really convirial experience, and it is that power of food, you know, which goes back to you serving humble food to noble to noble guests, that brings people together and sets you at edge. And I think there's a generosity in your cooking, which for me I've really learned a lot about, which is, you know, making everybody feel welcome around that table, to you know, to joy in this in this generosity.

25:33Speaker 1:So the thing between food and design, food and architecture, food the people, because you have a system in your office, isn't it too where everybody takes a turn to cook?

25:43Speaker 2:Yeah, or more. Now I find myself cooking because I find that they're you know, they're drawing, I'm sketching, and I think as a kind of a love back to them, it's nice for me to cook. And I will cook and dictate letters at the same time, be dyslexic. Dictating is a much faster way of getting a letter out. You can do that kind of multi dimensional thing.

26:03Speaker 1:We've designed schools. As you were saying, Maggus centers, have you a kind of interstinct of a feeling about restaurants, We.

26:14Speaker 2:Should start by saying, I think your restaurant is the most beautiful restaurant in the world. And I have spent a bit of time with Dad and kind of designing and helping you have your life you are, and I think Dad's clarity of vision on that, you know, this notion of the reflection, the open kitchen, and the way that it's scaled up over the years, and yet the absolute DNA has never changed, and I find that really fascinating. We might adding a few extra objects, but you've gone from forty covers to hundred and twenty covers, you know, I think, I mean, I had the great privilege to work with Heston on a few projects, and we did the Little Chef, transforming the kind of most grotty foodery into this kind of super cool fast restaurant. We'd go to the toilet and the toilet was saying to you about eating food, and we were converting people that would go to use toilet and not eat in the restaurants.

27:02Speaker 2:And then we designed the fact up for Heston, and you know, in designing that that's fascinating because we took this very high end restaurant and we lost covers. We went from forty two to forty covers, and we you know, I had staff that would go there and just stand in the room and just watch the different services going on. Because it's such a precise thing and each guest is going to be there for four hours, we said there should be no art to the artist, the food. We need you focusing on the table. We made sure we had perfect access between the kitchen for their staff to perform, and then we made this chair. And this chair needed to support you for four hours of dining and four hours you need to keep your dive from open, so you're going to eat thirteen courses. And this chair also had to work for different sized people. So Yosky in my office is Japanese and tiny, and the designer we were working with is kind of very very large and stuck, so we would test the chair on them, and it was really about this kind of aductive design, you know, it is all about the meal. We had this light that would changed through from warm to cold and gover

28:04Speaker 2:a whole spectrum. So as we went through the twenty four hour cycle in the fact ups thirteen courses, the kind of light would change and focus on it, and it was just about pulling the people together and the chairs, you know, would sit there and you know differently when we designed Pizza Express again, we'd spent three four days working as pizzolas there and kind of looking at how the system worked, and we really bought the chef into the center of the space. And one of my proudest things that we got him at ten percent pay rise, because now the pizzola is not a guy at the back of the rest was. He was much more a performer and he needs to be more proud. And we already dealt with the acoustics and the complexibility of the space.

28:45Speaker 2:We made it brighter and the whole transformation between you know, bright daylight and coming cozy at night, you know, And we we created these little boosts so you could have your own party inside. And I know you know, I love that you never play music, but people would go there. They could have their own party on these boosts. Plus I remember that I pod in and the next door person wouldn't hear. Acoustics for me are really interesting how we can play with acoustics with Kylo, with texture. We want the murmur, yeah, maybe the murmur is too loud.

29:16Speaker 2:Want we don't want silence.

29:21Speaker 1:Did you ever think of doing one or the other? You know that well, obviously would be a designer, an architecture and cook. But did you ever think that actually, maybe this would be something you'd want to do all the time.

29:34Speaker 2:And I think as a passion it's quite nice a lot to commercialize it. And I have to say, when I've done kind of restaurant projects, I haven't I find the transactional part complicated. I find it because I love the kind of whole generosity. I love doing this, designing these projects, and at the end of them saying to me, well, you you know, we did a gallery in Lisbon. At the end of it, and he asked us to to do the opening of his of his his gallery, and he's had like sixty people in a square. Sixty became seventy, seventy became one hundred and fifty. So I say, okay, well then you need to give me some labor that I had his you know, his wife, SARU's an amazing art historian, a brilliant glass artist and a steel artist.

30:14Speaker 2:And then my scientist friend and the five of us cooked, and the scientist friend Ash who works with the mind, and he's a neuro scientist and a neurologist, and he's very precise, so he does the meringue. The artists are very labor focused, so they can cut, cut, cut Chul made mayonnaise with sixty eggs done by hand, not a single one curd, you know, sixty eggs, sixty yolks of stirring. And the menu was, you know, we started with a sparagust. We wanted people to when they peed after the meal to remember the the whole idea, the idea of the sparagust.

30:47Speaker 2:We then made this kind of very black stew of cuttle fish with a little bit of rice in a kind of Spanish style. And so you had these kind of these very smart artists from Adagoo, which is the gallery eating and they will get black drops on their shirts and they're kind of the black and the white and this, you know, and they're black lips that you get. And then we did the kind of meringue and fruit scenario which you're kind of performed and came with a big knife and crashed. So, yeah, is that for me more than comparing it to actors. It's kind of art is that, you know, and it's it's like the design, it's it's that same. But I think with food we can we can handle everything. We can go to the supplier, we can go to the to the you know, to the kitchen. We can control everything. We're designed. We're sending out drawings and we have to control everything, but we're controlling it in a more remote way. It's less instinctive in your.

31:38Speaker 1:Work of art. When you're designing Last Richard's buildings, Last, do you feel that the impermanence of all that time and all that you do to cook would make you want to keep doing things that do last?

31:51Speaker 2:I love the emphemeral elements of design, and when we do the festival we design, you know, we spend all year kind of designing. It lasts for four days, and the key to it is it kind of evaporates because we don't want to lead chunks of steel knocking around. We want to create structures which kind of the term might's come along and they eat them and it disappears and they we're talking about sustainability, which is such an important part of cooking and our designing and our world and our future, you know, Sodiope, Dad, In certain ways we need to look about kind of reversible structures. So I really enjoy the ephemeral nature of architecture. You know, I really don't believe necessarily in permanence at the moment.

32:24Speaker 2:I don't know, you know, permits is such a big word. I think we need to design with cathedral thinking. We need to be designing long into the future. But we need to be aware of our you know, of things needing to disappear at certain points, and want you know, how what is the future of this material? You know, concrete, plaster bore, they never go anywhere they did. The world ends up just full of old sheets of NDF and plaster board and concrete. So we need to work with the more sensitive materials that when it's life, you know, like Stuco in Mexico or in America, we have to keep it up, keep it continually. As soon as we stop up keeping it, it returns to the earth. And I really love that kind of that metaphor.

33:04Speaker 1:And what about when you had children? Did that change some of your ideas of how you wanted to communicate with your children through food?

33:11Speaker 2:And when I had Jay, it was covid and she was like three, and I would sit on the floor and cook with her, and she liked to eat everything, you know, And now she eat lots of things she won't eat, but she still really cooks with me, and we would we'd make pasta with her. I would get her to separate an egg and make a mayonnaise. She can do that and stir around and kind of emulsify. And I think there's something really enabling and empowering and going back to the kind of this thing of getting or found me to cook together, because as a kids, you want a purpose, you want a job, and to suddenly be responsible for cutting the eels or cutting the counts or whatever it is, it makes you feel part of this performance if you're going to go back to the part of this creation of art. And I think you know, I'm not the easiest of cooks, but I love cooking with my kids. Now, Ella Lula, we'll go to call More for two weeks and we'll do tell us about that book. I mean, we'll wake up in the morning and talk about what we're going to eat, and we'll spend the day getting the food and driving around, going off in the boat, barbecuing. It's something it will

34:11Speaker 2:make things as difficult as possible. And I think I also learned that from ros Why make it easy when you can make it more difficult because you know, it's not about shortcutting corners, it's about you know, really devoting the time. And I think that's also true of design. And if a design I really believe that we need to design more and build less. We need to think more, we need to kind of go through the process of the intellectual process of what it is that we're doing and how we're going to do it. And it's that kind of labor that I think is great results, be it in food or in design.

34:43Speaker 1:We go to food for different different reasons. But if you did need and as your stepmother, I hope you don't need it very often. If you think about the kind of food that if you need comfort, what in all your life of food, of your memories or what you're doing now, is there a food that you would go to for comfort?

35:02Speaker 2:I mean, I think a piece of toast cold with butter so it's concealed and cantabrin anchovies on top. You know, you had this crunch and you have this salt and you have the softness of the butter, and there's a chemistry between that which I find phenomenon.

35:18Speaker 3:Should go have some? Yeah, thank you? Verus Ruthie's Table four was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton, and Zad Rogers, with Andrew Sang and Bella Selina. This has been an atomized production for iHeartMedia.