October 12, 2021 • 23 mins
In this episode, Ruthie and Cary talk about the Japanese and Swedish food he grew up with, eating spiders in Cambodia, and his favourite River Cafe recipe that reminds him of a dramatic crime scene.
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home.
On River Cafe Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers.
Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks.
Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation.
For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to River Cafe Table for a production of I
Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. A conversation takes place
every Thursday morning between me and Carrie Fucanaga. It begins
like this, what are we going to cook on Sunday night?
You call the dramatic. It does look like a murder scene.
(00:20):
It's like you're trying to hide the body of the fish.
It's somehow been revealed by the elements. It is a
whole fish covered in salt. It's kind of an eccentric recipe,
isn't it. It is kind of weird. Ever since February one,
when Carrie came back to London to direct the series
(00:42):
Masters of the Air, we have cooked dinner together for
the same group of six friends for twenty four Sundays.
I hadn't thought about it as being dramatic before I
picked it, but I suppose there's a whole theatrical element
to it. I remember seeing the way people do it
in Italy, for example, and they sit there and they
crack open the salt. It's the whole process, and then
(01:03):
using the two spoons, you know, slowly pulling off that soft,
juicy flesh that retains all of its moisture. You are
destroying the evidence afterwards, especially you can't say when you
serve it and then you crack it open. Maybe nobody
would know that the destroy the evidence. We destroy the evidence.
Right now, if my voice sounds hoarse, it's due to
(01:25):
celebrating the premiere of No Time to Die, including a
screening in Monaco where we all planned not just what
to wear, where to stay, but what we were going
to eat. Carrie flew onto New York for more bond,
and the first text I received from him was a
photo of a tomato sauce he'd made on arrival. Everyone
(01:47):
knows Carrie is a great writer and a great director.
I know Carrie is a great cook. Your mother was
Swedish and your father Japanese. I mean, my mom was
like a Midwestern Swede essentially, you know, and so like
for her cooking was like I think, very Midwestern, but
(02:09):
like for Christmas, her gift to people would be doing
a Swedish meatball mix, you know, and give this sort
of spice package away to people so they can make,
you know, Swedish meatballs. My dad had kind of his
go to favorites. One of the things like when I
started going to friends houses and seeing other people lived.
It was different. Was that no matter what my dad made,
(02:29):
it could be spaghetti, he still had rice with the meal,
always rice on the side. It was white rice inside
and within the rice maker all the time. And then
in the morning there was always rice fried rice for breakfast.
And did he grew up? Was he born in Japan?
He um? So he's third generation, which makes me fourth generation,
(02:49):
and my grandparents are considered n say, second generation, but
they're kind of a special class because they were sent
back to Japan for their education. So it's a different name,
which was Keybit, and so they're more Japanese. I would
say that American that would speak Japanese to each other
and uh do you speak Japanese? And uh, you know,
like like my dad's generation they understand it, but they
(03:10):
can't speak it. And then my generation, if we speak,
it's because we learned in school. So so I studied
after university and lived in Japan for a while. I
was teaching English and French and snowboarding, so it was great.
I was living in Hokkaido, which was like a really
did you say snowboarding? Snowboarding? You in the ski area
Okaido like northern Northern Ireland. Is it very regional Japanese food?
(03:30):
Would you have a different kind of it's very regionally?
What what was it like that? Well, it's a lot
of fresh vegetables, soba especially, which is a big part
of New Year's Sobau Uni, a lot of uni from Okaido.
So it's just seafood in general. But yeah, I would
say the buckwheat in the Uni or like the two
things I think of when I think of Hokkaido. After Hokkaido,
(03:51):
I think Q Shoe for me has like the next
sort of most distinct sort of food. Where is that
Q Shoes in island in the south. My family is
from the southern part of hans Shoot there from the
last county the bottom of Haunshi, which is Yamaguchi, which
is right next to Hiroshima, and Q Sho is kind
of in that region. And q Sho for example, one
of the things they're known for it is, aside from
(04:11):
also a lot of different fish and produce is horse meat.
For example, horse sashimi is a specialty there. Tastes I
really like it, you know, it's a it comes in
a kind of you dip it in sort of a
sweeter soy sauce sometimes with like you know, green onions.
It's not super tender, but it's also not you know,
(04:32):
it's a similar to beef chuck. I remember I had
this moment the last time I was in Tokyo for work,
where I was at a kind of a group dinner
and there was a guy sitting across from me that
he was half Asian like me, and I think he
was trying to have one of those like who's more
exotic competitions of me, and I didn't realize it was
happening until until he was kind of like, you know,
what's the weirdest thing you'd be eive, e had or eaten?
(04:53):
And I was like, I think the tooth strangest things
I can imagine eating are either like whale blubber or spiders,
and whale blubbers in Alaska, a buddy of mine I
was in film school with who was Inuit, and the
whale blubber when you're on the ice because it actually
has a lot of calories and it keeps you warm.
And the spider was kind of an anomaly that when
I was traveling in Cambodia late nineties, actually with the
(05:15):
Japanese guy that met one of the hostels, we were
motorcycling across the country. He wanted a detour to this
town that was known for its stir fried sort of spiders.
These giant spiders to me tasted like crab crab. I
was gonna say, there's yeah, we crab like spiders, not
a spider like spider. But he wanted to one up
me and he's like, well, have you ever had horse? Oh?
(05:37):
And you said? I said I had, you know, And
he was really satisfied that you're eating a lot of horse,
And I just wasn't sure. Really did he win that competition?
I think he burned that competence. He won that competition,
didn't Maybe I had to say that you might have
lost having played cards with you, that you might have
lost that. What did spiders taste like? The ones that
had in Cambodia were so covered in sauce. They mainly
(05:58):
tasted like the US, with a kind of a crunchy
texture with the white meat of the spider inside of
the legs. The body was pretty gross. I have to
say it wasn't mine. Maybe it's an acquired taste. Welcome
back to River cafe table for I was in Mexico
(06:22):
in January and I was in Nyatte so it was
on the Pacific coast. Do you love the food of Mexico.
I do. Actually, I realized when I was there how
much I missed it. I was shocked by not shocked,
but the only Mexican food that I've had before I
went to Mexico was that kind of Mexican food where
you get so many dishes on a plate and it's
also heavy, and then you go and it's so it's
(06:45):
so clean and fined and and I love the breakfast.
So yeah, when I was so when I made se number,
we were based in Mexico City lot and when we
drive to the studio, a lot of the early morning
sort of commuter would stop at these vendors and get
in line and order this like sort of steaming milky drink.
And I didn't know what it was, and I so
(07:07):
I asked him, you know, our location scout, if we
could stop one time and have this, And it was
a kind of a corn meal drink with cinnamon and
sugar that was just delicious. And from every day on
after that I would stop. My breakfast would be to
have some of that did you cook on set? They
have this thing in Mexico you do with your crews
which is different than the States, which is you work
a six day week, but the six days just a
(07:29):
half day, and at the end of the half day.
It's not a written rule, but it's an expected rule
that you have what's called a snack. And a snack
is not like peanut butter on toast and handing around.
It's beer and tequila and a cook to launch and
the entire crew kind of basically gets drunk together and
hangs out and you sort of it's a bonding moment.
(07:49):
You get your any kind of tension that was building
up out for the week, and then I'm sure a
lot of new relationships started out as well. But the
snack was like one of the best parts of the
filming week. And and you had the rest of Saturday
to recover and Sunday and then start working on Monday.
And you know, usually like the rest of Saturday was
usually driven by pat Our, our production designer, you know,
(08:10):
you know, leading the parade into uh whatever kind of
shenanigans Mexico City offered on a Saturday. It's like really common.
I think in Latin America, tonight dinner until after ten
pm or eleven pm. And I was talking to a
friend of mine about they invited me over for brunch,
and the idea of like breakfast in the between breakfast
and lunch is brunch, and there's lunch, and they had
(08:31):
never heard of the term liner, which is lunch between
lunch and dinner, right, which then got us thinking about
then what's between dinner and breakfast? And then then it
just it's just dick fast. And then we realized that
the dick fist really was the two or three a am.
You know, food you had after going out to a
(08:52):
bar or a club or whatever. And and now, you know,
one year of lockdown, none of us could remember the
last time we had dick fast. When did you have
tick fist? Thus, I really don't think it's got to
be at least three years now, because I was also
just working so hard before before lockdown. But actually that's
not true. On our night shoot to be a tick
fist four or five am meals. But in Mexico, what
(09:14):
I loved was you know, after a hard night out,
you'd go there's a cold place you'd go, so either
like if you're in Guadalajara, you go out and you'd
have tacos made of tongue, like two or three in
the morning, which are just delicious, like really really tender meat,
you know, in a great way to sort of like
cap off, you know, whatever hangover you might have the
next day. But in Mexico City, you'd go to this
(09:36):
place it was like called the Blind Goat or something
like that, and you'd have tac It's a pastor to
be the one that's sort of you'd probably equate it
to the kind of schwarm up you've seen in the
Middle East from the meats cooking on a vertical skewer,
slowly rotating as a pineapple on top. But I think
what really makes it popular it's the sauce they put
on top, and it's kind of a brown sort of
(09:57):
pepper driven chilki pepper driven sauce, and it's just smoking
and delicious and rich with that little bit of pineapple
the meat and that sauce. In the quarnt or teas,
it was like the perfect time and the morning anywhere
from like two to five am, you know, until the
sun was coming up. Do you get to restaurants when
you're filming, do you like it not? Used to come
to the river Kevi could uh, you know, we used
(10:19):
to have a kind of like every now and then
a kind of crew catch up dinner just to get
all the same page while having good pizzas and wine
and yeah, do you work over food to like have
a beal out to just you would do that. But
a lot we had a lot of late dinners at Pinewood,
you know on Bond where the producers and Daniel and
I would be there working on the script and just
(10:41):
trying to sort out all the kind of you know,
dilemma as we had in front of us. Used to
get through it. Other dinner scenes in the movie are
the food scenes in the movie. Is a food scene
in the movie. It was an interrupted food scene because
and Too Detective my favorite of all time. There's a
scene where he's with his wife with Matthew mcgondey and
he isn't he is a diner and there's no food
(11:04):
and they're talking about something really personal about there was
He's out a scene with Michelle on Ahan kind of
deeper in that diner. But early I think in episode one,
he comes over to dinner at Woody Harrelson's character's house. Yeah,
he drinks attle too much or he shows up I
think a little bit drunk um. But what was interesting
about shooting that scene is Woody, for example, doesn't eat meat.
(11:27):
In fact, he's vegan, and we were having spaghetti and
so we had to figure out a different set of
noodles for him, and we ended up using these kind
of spaghetti squash for his But I remember when we
were shooting it and he was chewing and talking. You know,
spaghetti squash has a distinct crunchy sound, you know when
you're eating, and said the scene you have this, Actually
(11:48):
I find it's a really pleasing sound. You know, it
says as what he's eating his food, he's got a
nice kind of like hardy kind of like you know,
jaw cutting kind of sound to it, and everyone else's
kind of that sloppy, neutily sound, you know, as they're eating.
Did Jane I have a food the home economist who
makes the food on a movie And we had an
(12:08):
amazing one on Janereh who made this ham, the sort
of Christmas ham for a scene when Blanche Ingram arrives
with this big party. So the house is sort of
buzz preparing all the food, and they had this ham
there and it was just we're prepping the scene. I
just happened to take a little slice of it just
to see how it tasted him. And it was probably
one of the best hams I've ever had, and over
the course of the scene that I have got smaller
(12:30):
and smaller, stop eating. And I liked it so much.
I literally sought out the economist after we're done, just
to get the recipe to that ham, because it let's
make it. I've never made it, but I want to. Okay,
if you have it somewhere, we could try make it.
I was trying to think about food in movies. I
mean again, it goes back to the drama of the
sea bass and salt, and the drama of feeding people
(12:53):
and the drama watching them respond. You know, your creativity
is there forever. We can watch the first movie ever
made and it lasts. And I often think that I
make something I'm really proud of, and then it's gone over.
It's very different. You cook and new cook and new cook,
and then they eat it and then it's sort of
it's over gone, it's over. You know, there is something
(13:13):
I think more meaningful and things that don't last because
you're forced to appreciate it in the brief moments it exists.
And there's the immortality of film. So if you think
about like Sunset Boulevard, Glorious Wanson walking down the stairwell
saying I'm ready for my close up, she will always
be that age for the people who watch that film.
You know, even if she's long gone. There is something
(13:36):
special about it existing forever. But then because it's it
exists forever, sometimes people may not watch it because they
can just keep pushing off till at a time. Where
it's a great meal, you can't delay that. You have
to appreciate it while it exists. And also it's memoriesn't it.
I mean, just when you were talking about your father
or your mother or going to a restaurant, it's the memories.
(14:05):
I was trying to think when we met and it
was a dinner, it was very the River Cafe was
actually cooking the meal, right, and it was a dinner
for Jake Joan All and it was given by Cartier
and it was a jewelry shop and we were sitting
there and yeah, in this fancy place, and I remember
I was introduced to, and I said, well, how long
(14:28):
do I have to wait until I tell you that
the first season of True Detective changed my life or whatever?
But I think that it's nice that we met over
food and we talked about food, and then I think
the first text message that you sent me was a
photograph of tomato sauce that you've made and the butter
part of it. That's right, which I don't know if
I could say that out lout if that's a family secret. Well,
(14:51):
the secret is dropping in that stick of butter right
before it's being served in the pomdoro sort of pasta
mix in the pot, you know. And I don't know
why it tastes better, but because butter probably better taste it.
But what did that, Judd? You made it when you
used to cook. I've never used butter before. That was
I walked away from that dinner we had, which is
a different dinner, like, oh, I'm going to use this
(15:12):
and I was going to use this again. I actually
asked another common friend I have with Jake, which is
Greta Caruso. Has Greta for advice, like on a little
napkin we're at at also at a dinner, trying to
figure out what's the best shape of the kitchen for
someone like me who's not professional cook by any means
that I like to cook, and I like to have
people over and cook for multiple people. I think during Lockdown,
(15:33):
a lot of people experimented with different kinds of cooking
and baking and whatever. And I remember, as lockdown was
easy and people who come over to the house, I
decided to make ramen like Tom Kotzi ramen, which was
like an eight day process to get that stock and everything,
you know, done by scratch, and then when you actually
serve the raman, you kind of have to do the
noodles right before you're serving a bowl and all these
(15:54):
other sort of ingredients have to go and everything has
to be timed pretty precisely. And I've never done it before,
but I wanted to get it all right. So that
was actually pretty stressful, and like I had just done
Bond and I don't think it ever felt that much
stress as I was preparing that bowl of ramen and
hoping that it and did you how I was it for?
I end up making like eight bowls of ramen. Yeah, yeah,
And then I still had enough like stock for about
(16:16):
thirty more people. I think that kind of killed my
my cooking routine for lockdown that was like that was
like it's like people making a lot of bread and
Lockdown two went't there. I think people made a lot
of food that took a long time, that took the process,
and certainly for the first lockdown here you couldn't buy
flour apparently anywhere because everybody was making bread. Yeah, because
(16:37):
everyone was alone. You try to like do almost like
virtual meals together. Like my dad and I did a
virtual meal where we cooked the same thing, but like
you know, I'm obviously ahead of his time zone, so
it's my dinner, his lunch, and then like India and
I did a pasta for my lunch, her dinner. You know,
when we cook the same things, but it feels like
Willie's got to eat together. But what about your father
and cooking? What was it like growing up? Did your
(16:59):
father cook? Drying up? He was the cook in the family,
and like he was the one. Let me talk about
careers or jobs, right, he always had a job, never
like a career that he loved. And I think he
always dreamed about opening a restaurant one day, which never happened.
But like enjoy cooking and cooking for lots of people.
And one of our sort of like bonding things when
I was a kid was like trying to guess the
(17:20):
ingredients of a meal at a restaurant and so really
to sit there and taste the food and to try
to break down its particulars. There was this Cambodian restaurant
used to go to another kid that had this one
special kind of pork chop that had like the best glaze,
and we're always trying to figure out, you know, what
were the elements, you know, in the sauce that created
that flavor. Do you still do that, try to guess
the flavors? Definitely, Yeah, yeah, because I think there's a
(17:44):
real pal you know, I think of how I mean,
it's interesting even with wine, how people you know that thing.
I used to go and wine tastings with my again
with Rose, and she would say, you know this wine
tastes of chocolate and cigarettes. But it is it's all
to do with the you know, the men and the
associations and the taste of food. And so I think
that when we're you know, talking about sort of being
(18:07):
together and food and memories there's also the sense of
comfort of food, there's excitement. You're such a you're such
an adventurous eater. I mean, I have to say that,
you know, I think you're a pretty adventurous person. But
you certainly are an adventurous eater. You know, spiders and
you know, um whale who don't know. We didn't have
(18:27):
the horse, but I'd like to be your friend on
the scale of adventure. He probably does with but you
are you are an adventurous either, and that's really that's
it's it's fun. I don't know if I do it
for the experience or the clout is definitely from curiosity
as well. I mean I can the whale in particular,
(18:50):
I can. I'll never forget what whale tastes like. What
did it tastes like? Well, there's blubber and then there's
difa kinds of fermented meats as well, you know, and
and one of them is you ferment whether it's seal
or whale me you can ferment it in its blood
and that's probably even funkier, Like the blobber is kind
of mellow compared to that, But that taste of whale blood,
that iron heavy whale blood is so strong that when
(19:11):
I went to Nantucket years later, when I went to
the Whaling Museum in Nantucket, I could smell the blood
on the presses in the museum that hadn't been used
on a hundred fifty years, just because there was enough residual.
You know, if you've never had a whale. But I
don't know if you could connect those sensations, but so
it stays in your stay. That's again back to the memory. Yeah,
(19:32):
but did you like it? When did you? Did you
like the taste something that you thought? This is really
probably not like one of those things where oh man,
I really wish I had some whale blobob right now.
I don't think that that would ever occur, but it
really was. When we were out in negative third or
negative fifty degree environments, it kept you warm and really
you felt the heat coming from inside you. But uh,
(19:55):
I mean yeah, I would still say as adventurous as
those things sound, my every day sort of cravings are
quite normal. I think. I mean, pasta I could eat
almost every day, and I love slashing me and sushi.
I think those two things are what I eat probably
around you know, the course of a week, pretty pretty
(20:16):
often probably too much pasta. And if you said for
comfort for me, it would probably be fried rice. And
it goes back I think too. You know my dad
for breakfast as you know, watching cartoons or something when
you're a kid and having a bowl of fried rice,
and it was the most If I told you the recipe,
it doesn't sound even Asian at all because it involves
catch up. Yeah, and I found out much later. I mean,
(20:41):
for me, that's just what it was, that's fried rice.
But obviously later contextualizing where that came from. What it
came from was so my grandparents were in the internment
camps during World War Two, and my father was born
in the internment camps as well as my uncle's and
so you were given certain rations in the camps. In fact,
my grandpa was a cook one of them, and um, mayonnaise,
catch up. Those kind of ingredients were quite common. So
(21:04):
you make new recipes out of what you're given. You
just make two. So my dad grew up on a
fried rice that wasn't made of soy sauce. It was
made of ketchup. And it was really basic. You use
whatever vegetables or meats you had from the night before.
The rice, put it all together and cook it up.
And my favorite version was just the simplest one, which
was just bacon, onions and then put an egg with
a yolk, you know, still running on top. And that
(21:25):
to me is like the epitome of comfort food. What's
strange that the legacy goes back to an interment camp.
Did you make it now? Yeah? Make it pretty much? Yeah.
I just like, yeah, like even when my dad would
use other vegetables in it, like you do, like the
real proper way of doing fried rice, I still prefer
just the onions and bacon, bacon, So would you would
it be the rice? Just plain rice? So whatever you've
(21:48):
made from dinner night before, you keep that rice. And
this is something else I just in my family, we
just left the rice out, you didn't put it in
the fridge. And the next morning and yeah, someone told
me later on, you're not supposed to restaurant. So it's
like a pig because apparently it's they say the bacteria
and rice is the most worse than anything. But I
think if you grow up eating it does affect you.
So like, you know, I would leave my rice out
all night and the next day, you know, you make
(22:10):
the fried rice, and they usually I said, what do
you do? Put oil in the pan and then you
take that right, I use the fat from the bacon,
so I start off, you know, I cut the bacon
in pieces first, and then I slow cook the bacon
so that the oil doesn't evaporate too quickly, and then
salt and pepper the bacon, and then then add the onions,
and then add the rice, which is usually in big
chunky bits because it's been sitting. Then you squeeze a
(22:32):
bunch of like farting catchup on the top of it,
and then you chop it up and get that going.
And then once it's kind of mixed to a nice
sort of light red pinkish color, boil it up. And
then separately you can just cook some eggs to slap
on top. It's really quick. Okay, Well, now I've got
some expectations of when I come and stay in your
house that we're going to have some facet. Maybe I
(22:58):
could have the raw then we could do that. It
sounds you know, you're you're a great cook, you're a
great director, and you're a great friend. Thank you, Carrie,
Thank you, Ruthie. To visit the online shop of the
River Cafe. Go to Shop the River Cafe dot co
(23:20):
dot UK. River Cafe Table four is a production of
I Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to River Cafe Table for a production of I
Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. A conversation takes place
every Thursday morning between me and Carrie Fucanaga. It begins
like this, what are we going to cook on Sunday night?
You call the dramatic. It does look like a murder scene.
(00:20):
It's like you're trying to hide the body of the fish.
It's somehow been revealed by the elements. It is a
whole fish covered in salt. It's kind of an eccentric recipe,
isn't it. It is kind of weird. Ever since February one,
when Carrie came back to London to direct the series
(00:42):
Masters of the Air, we have cooked dinner together for
the same group of six friends for twenty four Sundays.
I hadn't thought about it as being dramatic before I
picked it, but I suppose there's a whole theatrical element
to it. I remember seeing the way people do it
in Italy, for example, and they sit there and they
crack open the salt. It's the whole process, and then
(01:03):
using the two spoons, you know, slowly pulling off that soft,
juicy flesh that retains all of its moisture. You are
destroying the evidence afterwards, especially you can't say when you
serve it and then you crack it open. Maybe nobody
would know that the destroy the evidence. We destroy the evidence.
Right now, if my voice sounds hoarse, it's due to
(01:25):
celebrating the premiere of No Time to Die, including a
screening in Monaco where we all planned not just what
to wear, where to stay, but what we were going
to eat. Carrie flew onto New York for more bond,
and the first text I received from him was a
photo of a tomato sauce he'd made on arrival. Everyone
(01:47):
knows Carrie is a great writer and a great director.
I know Carrie is a great cook. Your mother was
Swedish and your father Japanese. I mean, my mom was
like a Midwestern Swede essentially, you know, and so like
for her cooking was like I think, very Midwestern, but
(02:09):
like for Christmas, her gift to people would be doing
a Swedish meatball mix, you know, and give this sort
of spice package away to people so they can make,
you know, Swedish meatballs. My dad had kind of his
go to favorites. One of the things like when I
started going to friends houses and seeing other people lived.
It was different. Was that no matter what my dad made,
(02:29):
it could be spaghetti, he still had rice with the meal,
always rice on the side. It was white rice inside
and within the rice maker all the time. And then
in the morning there was always rice fried rice for breakfast.
And did he grew up? Was he born in Japan?
He um? So he's third generation, which makes me fourth generation,
(02:49):
and my grandparents are considered n say, second generation, but
they're kind of a special class because they were sent
back to Japan for their education. So it's a different name,
which was Keybit, and so they're more Japanese. I would
say that American that would speak Japanese to each other
and uh do you speak Japanese? And uh, you know,
like like my dad's generation they understand it, but they
(03:10):
can't speak it. And then my generation, if we speak,
it's because we learned in school. So so I studied
after university and lived in Japan for a while. I
was teaching English and French and snowboarding, so it was great.
I was living in Hokkaido, which was like a really
did you say snowboarding? Snowboarding? You in the ski area
Okaido like northern Northern Ireland. Is it very regional Japanese food?
(03:30):
Would you have a different kind of it's very regionally?
What what was it like that? Well, it's a lot
of fresh vegetables, soba especially, which is a big part
of New Year's Sobau Uni, a lot of uni from Okaido.
So it's just seafood in general. But yeah, I would
say the buckwheat in the Uni or like the two
things I think of when I think of Hokkaido. After Hokkaido,
(03:51):
I think Q Shoe for me has like the next
sort of most distinct sort of food. Where is that
Q Shoes in island in the south. My family is
from the southern part of hans Shoot there from the
last county the bottom of Haunshi, which is Yamaguchi, which
is right next to Hiroshima, and Q Sho is kind
of in that region. And q Sho for example, one
of the things they're known for it is, aside from
(04:11):
also a lot of different fish and produce is horse meat.
For example, horse sashimi is a specialty there. Tastes I
really like it, you know, it's a it comes in
a kind of you dip it in sort of a
sweeter soy sauce sometimes with like you know, green onions.
It's not super tender, but it's also not you know,
(04:32):
it's a similar to beef chuck. I remember I had
this moment the last time I was in Tokyo for work,
where I was at a kind of a group dinner
and there was a guy sitting across from me that
he was half Asian like me, and I think he
was trying to have one of those like who's more
exotic competitions of me, and I didn't realize it was
happening until until he was kind of like, you know,
what's the weirdest thing you'd be eive, e had or eaten?
(04:53):
And I was like, I think the tooth strangest things
I can imagine eating are either like whale blubber or spiders,
and whale blubbers in Alaska, a buddy of mine I
was in film school with who was Inuit, and the
whale blubber when you're on the ice because it actually
has a lot of calories and it keeps you warm.
And the spider was kind of an anomaly that when
I was traveling in Cambodia late nineties, actually with the
(05:15):
Japanese guy that met one of the hostels, we were
motorcycling across the country. He wanted a detour to this
town that was known for its stir fried sort of spiders.
These giant spiders to me tasted like crab crab. I
was gonna say, there's yeah, we crab like spiders, not
a spider like spider. But he wanted to one up
me and he's like, well, have you ever had horse? Oh?
(05:37):
And you said? I said I had, you know, And
he was really satisfied that you're eating a lot of horse,
And I just wasn't sure. Really did he win that competition?
I think he burned that competence. He won that competition,
didn't Maybe I had to say that you might have
lost having played cards with you, that you might have
lost that. What did spiders taste like? The ones that
had in Cambodia were so covered in sauce. They mainly
(05:58):
tasted like the US, with a kind of a crunchy
texture with the white meat of the spider inside of
the legs. The body was pretty gross. I have to
say it wasn't mine. Maybe it's an acquired taste. Welcome
back to River cafe table for I was in Mexico
(06:22):
in January and I was in Nyatte so it was
on the Pacific coast. Do you love the food of Mexico.
I do. Actually, I realized when I was there how
much I missed it. I was shocked by not shocked,
but the only Mexican food that I've had before I
went to Mexico was that kind of Mexican food where
you get so many dishes on a plate and it's
also heavy, and then you go and it's so it's
(06:45):
so clean and fined and and I love the breakfast.
So yeah, when I was so when I made se number,
we were based in Mexico City lot and when we
drive to the studio, a lot of the early morning
sort of commuter would stop at these vendors and get
in line and order this like sort of steaming milky drink.
And I didn't know what it was, and I so
(07:07):
I asked him, you know, our location scout, if we
could stop one time and have this, And it was
a kind of a corn meal drink with cinnamon and
sugar that was just delicious. And from every day on
after that I would stop. My breakfast would be to
have some of that did you cook on set? They
have this thing in Mexico you do with your crews
which is different than the States, which is you work
a six day week, but the six days just a
(07:29):
half day, and at the end of the half day.
It's not a written rule, but it's an expected rule
that you have what's called a snack. And a snack
is not like peanut butter on toast and handing around.
It's beer and tequila and a cook to launch and
the entire crew kind of basically gets drunk together and
hangs out and you sort of it's a bonding moment.
(07:49):
You get your any kind of tension that was building
up out for the week, and then I'm sure a
lot of new relationships started out as well. But the
snack was like one of the best parts of the
filming week. And and you had the rest of Saturday
to recover and Sunday and then start working on Monday.
And you know, usually like the rest of Saturday was
usually driven by pat Our, our production designer, you know,
(08:10):
you know, leading the parade into uh whatever kind of
shenanigans Mexico City offered on a Saturday. It's like really common.
I think in Latin America, tonight dinner until after ten
pm or eleven pm. And I was talking to a
friend of mine about they invited me over for brunch,
and the idea of like breakfast in the between breakfast
and lunch is brunch, and there's lunch, and they had
(08:31):
never heard of the term liner, which is lunch between
lunch and dinner, right, which then got us thinking about
then what's between dinner and breakfast? And then then it
just it's just dick fast. And then we realized that
the dick fist really was the two or three a am.
You know, food you had after going out to a
(08:52):
bar or a club or whatever. And and now, you know,
one year of lockdown, none of us could remember the
last time we had dick fast. When did you have
tick fist? Thus, I really don't think it's got to
be at least three years now, because I was also
just working so hard before before lockdown. But actually that's
not true. On our night shoot to be a tick
fist four or five am meals. But in Mexico, what
(09:14):
I loved was you know, after a hard night out,
you'd go there's a cold place you'd go, so either
like if you're in Guadalajara, you go out and you'd
have tacos made of tongue, like two or three in
the morning, which are just delicious, like really really tender meat,
you know, in a great way to sort of like
cap off, you know, whatever hangover you might have the
next day. But in Mexico City, you'd go to this
(09:36):
place it was like called the Blind Goat or something
like that, and you'd have tac It's a pastor to
be the one that's sort of you'd probably equate it
to the kind of schwarm up you've seen in the
Middle East from the meats cooking on a vertical skewer,
slowly rotating as a pineapple on top. But I think
what really makes it popular it's the sauce they put
on top, and it's kind of a brown sort of
(09:57):
pepper driven chilki pepper driven sauce, and it's just smoking
and delicious and rich with that little bit of pineapple
the meat and that sauce. In the quarnt or teas,
it was like the perfect time and the morning anywhere
from like two to five am, you know, until the
sun was coming up. Do you get to restaurants when
you're filming, do you like it not? Used to come
to the river Kevi could uh, you know, we used
(10:19):
to have a kind of like every now and then
a kind of crew catch up dinner just to get
all the same page while having good pizzas and wine
and yeah, do you work over food to like have
a beal out to just you would do that. But
a lot we had a lot of late dinners at Pinewood,
you know on Bond where the producers and Daniel and
I would be there working on the script and just
(10:41):
trying to sort out all the kind of you know,
dilemma as we had in front of us. Used to
get through it. Other dinner scenes in the movie are
the food scenes in the movie. Is a food scene
in the movie. It was an interrupted food scene because
and Too Detective my favorite of all time. There's a
scene where he's with his wife with Matthew mcgondey and
he isn't he is a diner and there's no food
(11:04):
and they're talking about something really personal about there was
He's out a scene with Michelle on Ahan kind of
deeper in that diner. But early I think in episode one,
he comes over to dinner at Woody Harrelson's character's house. Yeah,
he drinks attle too much or he shows up I
think a little bit drunk um. But what was interesting
about shooting that scene is Woody, for example, doesn't eat meat.
(11:27):
In fact, he's vegan, and we were having spaghetti and
so we had to figure out a different set of
noodles for him, and we ended up using these kind
of spaghetti squash for his But I remember when we
were shooting it and he was chewing and talking. You know,
spaghetti squash has a distinct crunchy sound, you know when
you're eating, and said the scene you have this, Actually
(11:48):
I find it's a really pleasing sound. You know, it
says as what he's eating his food, he's got a
nice kind of like hardy kind of like you know,
jaw cutting kind of sound to it, and everyone else's
kind of that sloppy, neutily sound, you know, as they're eating.
Did Jane I have a food the home economist who
makes the food on a movie And we had an
(12:08):
amazing one on Janereh who made this ham, the sort
of Christmas ham for a scene when Blanche Ingram arrives
with this big party. So the house is sort of
buzz preparing all the food, and they had this ham
there and it was just we're prepping the scene. I
just happened to take a little slice of it just
to see how it tasted him. And it was probably
one of the best hams I've ever had, and over
the course of the scene that I have got smaller
(12:30):
and smaller, stop eating. And I liked it so much.
I literally sought out the economist after we're done, just
to get the recipe to that ham, because it let's
make it. I've never made it, but I want to. Okay,
if you have it somewhere, we could try make it.
I was trying to think about food in movies. I
mean again, it goes back to the drama of the
sea bass and salt, and the drama of feeding people
(12:53):
and the drama watching them respond. You know, your creativity
is there forever. We can watch the first movie ever
made and it lasts. And I often think that I
make something I'm really proud of, and then it's gone over.
It's very different. You cook and new cook and new cook,
and then they eat it and then it's sort of
it's over gone, it's over. You know, there is something
(13:13):
I think more meaningful and things that don't last because
you're forced to appreciate it in the brief moments it exists.
And there's the immortality of film. So if you think
about like Sunset Boulevard, Glorious Wanson walking down the stairwell
saying I'm ready for my close up, she will always
be that age for the people who watch that film.
You know, even if she's long gone. There is something
(13:36):
special about it existing forever. But then because it's it
exists forever, sometimes people may not watch it because they
can just keep pushing off till at a time. Where
it's a great meal, you can't delay that. You have
to appreciate it while it exists. And also it's memoriesn't it.
I mean, just when you were talking about your father
or your mother or going to a restaurant, it's the memories.
(14:05):
I was trying to think when we met and it
was a dinner, it was very the River Cafe was
actually cooking the meal, right, and it was a dinner
for Jake Joan All and it was given by Cartier
and it was a jewelry shop and we were sitting
there and yeah, in this fancy place, and I remember
I was introduced to, and I said, well, how long
(14:28):
do I have to wait until I tell you that
the first season of True Detective changed my life or whatever?
But I think that it's nice that we met over
food and we talked about food, and then I think
the first text message that you sent me was a
photograph of tomato sauce that you've made and the butter
part of it. That's right, which I don't know if
I could say that out lout if that's a family secret. Well,
(14:51):
the secret is dropping in that stick of butter right
before it's being served in the pomdoro sort of pasta
mix in the pot, you know. And I don't know
why it tastes better, but because butter probably better taste it.
But what did that, Judd? You made it when you
used to cook. I've never used butter before. That was
I walked away from that dinner we had, which is
a different dinner, like, oh, I'm going to use this
(15:12):
and I was going to use this again. I actually
asked another common friend I have with Jake, which is
Greta Caruso. Has Greta for advice, like on a little
napkin we're at at also at a dinner, trying to
figure out what's the best shape of the kitchen for
someone like me who's not professional cook by any means
that I like to cook, and I like to have
people over and cook for multiple people. I think during Lockdown,
(15:33):
a lot of people experimented with different kinds of cooking
and baking and whatever. And I remember, as lockdown was
easy and people who come over to the house, I
decided to make ramen like Tom Kotzi ramen, which was
like an eight day process to get that stock and everything,
you know, done by scratch, and then when you actually
serve the raman, you kind of have to do the
noodles right before you're serving a bowl and all these
(15:54):
other sort of ingredients have to go and everything has
to be timed pretty precisely. And I've never done it before,
but I wanted to get it all right. So that
was actually pretty stressful, and like I had just done
Bond and I don't think it ever felt that much
stress as I was preparing that bowl of ramen and
hoping that it and did you how I was it for?
I end up making like eight bowls of ramen. Yeah, yeah,
And then I still had enough like stock for about
(16:16):
thirty more people. I think that kind of killed my
my cooking routine for lockdown that was like that was
like it's like people making a lot of bread and
Lockdown two went't there. I think people made a lot
of food that took a long time, that took the process,
and certainly for the first lockdown here you couldn't buy
flour apparently anywhere because everybody was making bread. Yeah, because
(16:37):
everyone was alone. You try to like do almost like
virtual meals together. Like my dad and I did a
virtual meal where we cooked the same thing, but like
you know, I'm obviously ahead of his time zone, so
it's my dinner, his lunch, and then like India and
I did a pasta for my lunch, her dinner. You know,
when we cook the same things, but it feels like
Willie's got to eat together. But what about your father
and cooking? What was it like growing up? Did your
(16:59):
father cook? Drying up? He was the cook in the family,
and like he was the one. Let me talk about
careers or jobs, right, he always had a job, never
like a career that he loved. And I think he
always dreamed about opening a restaurant one day, which never happened.
But like enjoy cooking and cooking for lots of people.
And one of our sort of like bonding things when
I was a kid was like trying to guess the
(17:20):
ingredients of a meal at a restaurant and so really
to sit there and taste the food and to try
to break down its particulars. There was this Cambodian restaurant
used to go to another kid that had this one
special kind of pork chop that had like the best glaze,
and we're always trying to figure out, you know, what
were the elements, you know, in the sauce that created
that flavor. Do you still do that, try to guess
the flavors? Definitely, Yeah, yeah, because I think there's a
(17:44):
real pal you know, I think of how I mean,
it's interesting even with wine, how people you know that thing.
I used to go and wine tastings with my again
with Rose, and she would say, you know this wine
tastes of chocolate and cigarettes. But it is it's all
to do with the you know, the men and the
associations and the taste of food. And so I think
that when we're you know, talking about sort of being
(18:07):
together and food and memories there's also the sense of
comfort of food, there's excitement. You're such a you're such
an adventurous eater. I mean, I have to say that,
you know, I think you're a pretty adventurous person. But
you certainly are an adventurous eater. You know, spiders and
you know, um whale who don't know. We didn't have
(18:27):
the horse, but I'd like to be your friend on
the scale of adventure. He probably does with but you
are you are an adventurous either, and that's really that's
it's it's fun. I don't know if I do it
for the experience or the clout is definitely from curiosity
as well. I mean I can the whale in particular,
(18:50):
I can. I'll never forget what whale tastes like. What
did it tastes like? Well, there's blubber and then there's
difa kinds of fermented meats as well, you know, and
and one of them is you ferment whether it's seal
or whale me you can ferment it in its blood
and that's probably even funkier, Like the blobber is kind
of mellow compared to that, But that taste of whale blood,
that iron heavy whale blood is so strong that when
(19:11):
I went to Nantucket years later, when I went to
the Whaling Museum in Nantucket, I could smell the blood
on the presses in the museum that hadn't been used
on a hundred fifty years, just because there was enough residual.
You know, if you've never had a whale. But I
don't know if you could connect those sensations, but so
it stays in your stay. That's again back to the memory. Yeah,
(19:32):
but did you like it? When did you? Did you
like the taste something that you thought? This is really
probably not like one of those things where oh man,
I really wish I had some whale blobob right now.
I don't think that that would ever occur, but it
really was. When we were out in negative third or
negative fifty degree environments, it kept you warm and really
you felt the heat coming from inside you. But uh,
(19:55):
I mean yeah, I would still say as adventurous as
those things sound, my every day sort of cravings are
quite normal. I think. I mean, pasta I could eat
almost every day, and I love slashing me and sushi.
I think those two things are what I eat probably
around you know, the course of a week, pretty pretty
(20:16):
often probably too much pasta. And if you said for
comfort for me, it would probably be fried rice. And
it goes back I think too. You know my dad
for breakfast as you know, watching cartoons or something when
you're a kid and having a bowl of fried rice,
and it was the most If I told you the recipe,
it doesn't sound even Asian at all because it involves
catch up. Yeah, and I found out much later. I mean,
(20:41):
for me, that's just what it was, that's fried rice.
But obviously later contextualizing where that came from. What it
came from was so my grandparents were in the internment
camps during World War Two, and my father was born
in the internment camps as well as my uncle's and
so you were given certain rations in the camps. In fact,
my grandpa was a cook one of them, and um, mayonnaise,
catch up. Those kind of ingredients were quite common. So
(21:04):
you make new recipes out of what you're given. You
just make two. So my dad grew up on a
fried rice that wasn't made of soy sauce. It was
made of ketchup. And it was really basic. You use
whatever vegetables or meats you had from the night before.
The rice, put it all together and cook it up.
And my favorite version was just the simplest one, which
was just bacon, onions and then put an egg with
a yolk, you know, still running on top. And that
(21:25):
to me is like the epitome of comfort food. What's
strange that the legacy goes back to an interment camp.
Did you make it now? Yeah? Make it pretty much? Yeah.
I just like, yeah, like even when my dad would
use other vegetables in it, like you do, like the
real proper way of doing fried rice, I still prefer
just the onions and bacon, bacon, So would you would
it be the rice? Just plain rice? So whatever you've
(21:48):
made from dinner night before, you keep that rice. And
this is something else I just in my family, we
just left the rice out, you didn't put it in
the fridge. And the next morning and yeah, someone told
me later on, you're not supposed to restaurant. So it's
like a pig because apparently it's they say the bacteria
and rice is the most worse than anything. But I
think if you grow up eating it does affect you.
So like, you know, I would leave my rice out
all night and the next day, you know, you make
(22:10):
the fried rice, and they usually I said, what do
you do? Put oil in the pan and then you
take that right, I use the fat from the bacon,
so I start off, you know, I cut the bacon
in pieces first, and then I slow cook the bacon
so that the oil doesn't evaporate too quickly, and then
salt and pepper the bacon, and then then add the onions,
and then add the rice, which is usually in big
chunky bits because it's been sitting. Then you squeeze a
(22:32):
bunch of like farting catchup on the top of it,
and then you chop it up and get that going.
And then once it's kind of mixed to a nice
sort of light red pinkish color, boil it up. And
then separately you can just cook some eggs to slap
on top. It's really quick. Okay, Well, now I've got
some expectations of when I come and stay in your
house that we're going to have some facet. Maybe I
(22:58):
could have the raw then we could do that. It
sounds you know, you're you're a great cook, you're a
great director, and you're a great friend. Thank you, Carrie,
Thank you, Ruthie. To visit the online shop of the
River Cafe. Go to Shop the River Cafe dot co
(23:20):
dot UK. River Cafe Table four is a production of
I Heart Radio and Adam I Studios. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Ruth Rogers
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