February 21, 2023 • 30 mins
In 2014, the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg opened an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. His speech at the Pavilion, to about 300 people, urged us all to support the arts and true to his word, he has done just that.
What I found most memorable about the speech was the ending “Come to New York City” he said, “and if you want to have coffee or lunch, just call me, this is my number.”
I did go there soon after, number in hand but never made that call, something I'll always regret. But here I am almost ten years later, having the coffee with Mike Bloomberg – founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies - ready to talk.
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 Ruthie’s 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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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Ruthie's Table for a production of I Heart
Radio and Adami's Studios. A few years ago, Serpentine, a
small museum in the center of Hyde Park, gave a
party to celebrate its new chairman, Mayor of New York,
Michael Bloomberg. There must have been three hundred people in
the pavilion and we listened to the Mayor say, when
(00:22):
government can't do everything, private philanthropy has to step in.
Which is lucky enough to be able to step in?
A true dictum? But what I remember most from his
moving speech was the ending come to New York City
and if you do and want to have coffee or lunch,
just call me. This is my number. I did go
(00:43):
to New York City soon after, number in hand. I
never made that call, something I'll always regret. But here
I am, almost ten years later, having the coffee with
Mayor Bloomberg, ready to talk, Ready as are? Would you
like to read the recipe? I would be happy to Okay,
(01:05):
serves six two tablespoons. You need to say h and
I started that who's running this? I think you both
are linguini with fresh and dried oregano. And since I
have not had lunch. Yet this is a perfect time
(01:26):
to focus on it. The size of this is it
serves six unless I eat two portions. How do you
do it? Two tablespoons fresh oregano finally chopped, one tablespoon
dried a regano crumbled. Don't be obsessive. Here twelve red
cherry tomatoes, twelve yellow cherry tomatoes. Hundred mill elite is
(01:51):
extra virgin olive oil, one tablespoon red wine vinegar, three
hundred grams of linguini. I want me to tell you
how to put combine these things? Okay, Well, you mix
the fresh and dried a regano together. Step one, step
to chop the tomatoes and combine with the olive oil,
the red wine vinegar, sea salt, and black pepper. Three
(02:17):
you set it aside to marinate, which means time to
go do something else. Then next step is you cook
the linguini in a generous amount of boiling salted water,
then drain and return to the pan. And last step
you toss with the oregano mixture and the marinated tomatoes
(02:37):
over a high heat and then serve on very hot plates.
Don't touch the plates. You need to have a hot
plate because the sauce isn't hot, it's tossing. Always do
it that way. When I make a regano at home,
always make it. My mother cooked everything in a pressure
(02:58):
cooker or straight out of the can. My mother never
saw a kitchen she liked. One time I did come
home from boy Scout camp and I said the food
was better at boy Scout Camp then at home. And
she said, why don't you go back? Oh? Okay? And
so did she. What did you eat at home? Then?
What would you have? It was Delmonti peas straight out
(03:19):
of the can, cooked in the water that comes with
the peas. It was brisket or chicken biscuit. So she
made biscuit, Yeah, you know, in a pressure cooker or something.
I don't remember, but it the recipes that she used
were good enough to get her to a hundred and
two years in perfect health. Yeah. And to give you
(03:40):
an appreciation of food or did that come later? If
you grew up with this food? What was it like?
Food was relatively plain. Most things that I see on
her menu today, she wouldn't have known what they were
and certainly didn't serve them. But the food and the
process brought us together and There was my sister and
(04:02):
I just a two years younger mother and father. Father
worked as a bookkeeper, made six thousand dollars the best
year of his life. But he was born in oh five.
I was born in forty two, So this is let's
say fifties, early fifties. And we had a rule. We
my mother's rule. We waited for my father to come home.
(04:25):
And they didn't travel in those days, so it was
always together. But we waited. We sat as a family.
Six o'clock is my sister and I set the table.
My father helped in clearing the table and doing the dishes.
My mother did the cooking and the dishes, and we
sat around and my father had a procedure. He'd pick
(04:47):
on somebody of any one of the four, including himself,
and that person had to spend two minutes saying what
they did that day, and then the conversation had to
be everybody else and chiming in about that conversation about
that subject of what they did, and then we go
to the next person. And we did it virtually every
at night, and I tried to do it with my daughters,
(05:08):
but everybody traveled, including me, and it just didn't work. Out.
Would you be thinking about what you were going to
say about your day? But did you know you had
to think about it? Because yeah, well, here's a good
rule for everybody, and if they followed this rule, the
world would be a lot better place. Don't do anything
that should be ashamed to tell your kids about when
you went home at night. And if everybody followed that rule,
(05:32):
we'd have a lot less problems. Would you continue this
conversation or every dinner that until you left home? Maybe
we missed it occasionally, I don't remember, but yes, basically,
it also teaches you to listen, doesn't It teaches you
how to defend yourself, teaches you how to speak to others. Yeah,
it's interesting because I've in the last few weeks, I've
(05:53):
talked to Nancy Pelosi. I've talked to President Biden's sister,
who has just written a book about her vow Biden.
She worked in the campaign, and she's just written a
book called Growing Up Biden. Because when his children, you know,
his son and his wife were killed, she kind of
moved in to take care of the two two children
and cooked for them. Aged twenty six. But she said,
(06:16):
you know, there is a lot of description from that
generation of family meals of sitting around a table. Do
your children are your grandfather? I have three grandkids, eight
year old boy who hits a golf ball almost as
far as I candidate a j D. A seven and
three quarter year old granddaughter who's learning Mandarin, and a
(06:42):
ten week old grandson. And do they have family meals
the way you did with your parents or is it
a different Yeah? I think so. I don't think it's
quite as organized. Um. And you know, today families come
and go around the table. We do not have what
I call the Norman Rockwell families anymore. Norman Rockwell used
(07:04):
to paint the pictures on the cover of the Sad
Day Evening Post was a seven post, and he one
of his most famous pictures was a father, a mother,
a boy and a younger daughter, the traditional family with
a turkey in the middle or some of the table.
(07:26):
And the way I describe it, we don't very few
kids are lucky enough to have a no Iman Rockwell
family in this day and age. Too many single families,
too many broken families, too many people having to do
two jobs, are working night shifts. And but society is different,
you know, we think that the zoom replaces the water
(07:47):
cooler at work. It does not. And we think that
families can come and go without serious conversations between parent
and child, and parents are unwilling to face difficult issues
with their children, confront them, help them, guide them. Is
(08:08):
more of an attitude of Oh, education is responsible. Is
the responsibility of teachers. No, education is the responsibility of parents.
Teachers can help, and that's why some cultures where there's
a premium in the culture on education, the parents work
(08:28):
with their kids, sometimes still two in the morning, helping them,
guiding them, giving them advice, listening to them, working out,
helping them work out problems, social problems or mathematical problems,
whatever it is. But I also think you invested in education,
and I think that if we do invest in educating
people who will be parents, then they will also be better. Well.
(08:51):
If you want to solve the problems of poverty and
crime and discriminate Asian, those things can only be done
if we worked together. If your father was born in
(09:16):
nineteen o five, where was your grandfather born? Someplace in
eastern Europe, so they emigrated. He wasn't even sure where
he came from. Both your mother and your father's parents immigrated,
they were immigrants. My mother's parents were one generation earlier.
And did they bring the culture of food that they
grew up with, do things that they have Eastern I
(09:37):
don't remember anything. Well, no, because keeping mind my parents
were born in America. So were your grandparents around at
all in your life? Grandfather grandmother on one side, grandfather
on the other. But in those days, coming from overseas,
you tried to strip out and throw away all the culture,
(10:00):
whether it's food or clothing, or religion or even names.
We anglicized our names. Today it's the reverse. I'm a
Dominican American, I'm an Italian American. In the olden days,
you would say I'm an American. In the great migration
(10:21):
waves in the twenties, it was become as American as
you could possibly, melting melting. Sometimes it was comical because
they didn't really understand what they were doing, or that
they thought Americans were doing something they weren't. But it
all worked out, and those were the days when America
really added an enormous amount to its culture because it
(10:43):
came from all around the world. And the food culture
of New York, you know, it is identified by Chinatown
about little absolutely another Tokyo, Korea. Chinatown is down to
one street, and on either side of those streets there
are other cultures that have n cities that have moved in,
and the Chinese population has spread themselves around the city
(11:06):
or out in the suburbs without being interested in as
being as close to others of the same ethnicity. There's
still areas where people go a story of Queens, for example,
it's all immigrants and they live in tight communities, but
their children are going to schools with other kids of
(11:27):
other ethnicities and they will live outside of those communities.
They tend not to stay in them. And in terms
of the culture food, when I've talked to a lot
of people who are children of immigrants, it seems like
the grandmother kept the food, you know, the mother assimilated
and the children totally rejected. And the children never speak
(11:48):
the language. When they say they speak it, it's a joke.
They don't really. America, somebody once said to me, is
the death of foreign languages. And that's basically true. And
I don't think that the world understands how isolated America is.
Something like two thirds of the members of Congress in
the Senate don't have passports. George Bushton only had a
(12:12):
passport because his father was the ambassador to China? Isn't
that right? Think about that? And so and they vote
on things that impact the world. Very scary, scary. What
about when you moved from your mother's house and father's house.
Did you went to college in Baltimore? Johns Hopkins? Then
I went to Harvard Business School and I lived in Cambridge,
(12:33):
fifteen minutes away from where my mother was living. My
father was deceased already, and if my mother hadn't lived close,
I never would have gotten through because she had to
type my papers. I can't type and I can't spell
for sure, much to her embarrassment to Harvard Business School,
she she was a yeah, what did you eat on campus?
Did you go to rest did you start? They had
(12:55):
lunch at all? We eat there. I certainly never money
to go out to many restaurants. Did your parents ever
take you to a restaurant? Yes? We went to Carol's
Diner in Medford Square, uh, and one restaurant in Malden.
And I met somebody recently whose family owned Carol's Diner.
It's just one was that? Yeah? The only Dina, Did
(13:16):
we ever go to a fancy restaurant? Probably never, at
least I certainly don't remember a miniscule number of times
when you moved to New York with you when I
was When I got to New York, I cooked all
my own meals for the first two or three meals
three years. Baked beans and hot dogs and that sort
of stuff. I remember On uh Sundays, I'd make French
(13:40):
toast and read the newspapers and eat an enormous amount
covered with maple sugar, syrup and salt. Did you use
cookbooks or did you? No? I did have some cookbooks.
I must have been interested, because I did have it,
and they're still on bookshelves someplace in my house now.
But I look at the pictures and then they probably
never get around to doing it. I didn't know there
(14:00):
were two kinds of a regano. We didn't know there
was dry to record now you crumble and fresh negg.
Now you know. But that's what restaurants before, and and
then now I go out virtually all the time. So
what girlfriend likes to cook? My attitude is. There are
twenty five thousand restaurants in New York City each one
probably has twenty different things on the menu. So that's
(14:25):
an awful lot of uh thousand. Double This fifty thousand
plus zero is five hundred thousand, five hundred thousand possibilities
if I go out one if I stayed at home.
Did you always know that you wanted to have food
creating a company like Bloomberg? Well, when I started at
Solomon Brothers. For the fifteen years I was there, we
(14:47):
did not have food. They might have been coffee, but
I don't even remember that. But when I started the company,
it was in a one room the first day, two
rooms a second day, um, and we got I went
and bought the first day, I was the only one
in the company. Second day I added three other people.
But the one thing I did is I went and
(15:08):
I bought a small refrigerator and a coffee pot. And
it was from a department store which was on the
same spot as my current building. There was ripped down
and they built a building and then we took that space.
My job is to get people together. It's the synergy
of working together that makes you uh successful, I think,
(15:28):
or increases the odds and being successful. It's hard to
manage people if they're not together. It's hard for people
to be their best if they can't run ideas by
other people and learn from other people. How do you
get them together, Well, you have a building where they
have to come to the first rules. Second rule is
the extent possible. You don't have walls, you have open spaces.
(15:53):
And this building, the design from Norman was to not
put the elevators in the middle, to have a big
open space and put the elevators on the outside and
all of the infrastructure on the outside, the plumbing and
that sort of thing. So it's exactly reverse of the
buildings you're seeing on the horizon. Here. They put the
(16:13):
least important people, the older executives who are on their
ways to retirement. They give them the best offices on
the outside. And never never made any sense to me.
Those are the people you should put in the middle
and they can help people, and then put the younger
people out. But food is another thing. It gets you
to sit together, and we all entertained together, our families
(16:36):
get together with foods. The thing that it's not so
much the food, it's that it forces you to be
there and touch it and share it, and you're doing
the same thing that the other person is, now, if
the food is good, that's also benefit healthy, you seem
I don't know. I would take a boarshead artwork and
bust and baked beans over anything. Well, they said. When
(16:59):
I just went outside and talked to two people, I
went up to them, and you know, I said, okay,
can I just ask you what you like about sitting here?
And she said, well, we hardly knew each other. We're
working in the same department I've just started, and uh,
sitting here in this space makes us want to get
to know each other, talk talk about our work. And
(17:20):
I think, as any question, does it work? Yeah, I
know they love it. If the CEO walls her or
himself off, what kind of a CEO? I don't want
that person in my company. I have the same size
desk right in the middle of a bullpen like everybody else.
And I came back from twelve years in city hall,
(17:42):
and I had had an agreement with New York City.
I wouldn't go to the company or visit them and
talk to them about it. I was totally separate. I
get back and I'm talking some people and I we
had a rule no offices, no private offices, and There
weren't any private offices when I came back, but there
were a dozen people who had a desk right by
(18:03):
a glass in conference room where they had their family
pictures in it. On Monday, they came back in the walls,
the offices were gone. I had them taken down over
the weekend, and then I realized that they had bigger
desks as well. You know what happened the next Monday.
That's I'm a believer. You treat everybody, the person just
(18:25):
starting out, it's just as important as the one that's
really re replaceable. I like to cook, and Diana likes
to cook, which is that our lives are there is
in time into shake and baked chickens. The last thing
(18:49):
I made. You get this stuff in a bag, you
put the chicken in it and shake it and then
broil it in a frying pan. And I put an
extra amount of it the bottom to soak up all
the grease and burn it. And that's what I eat.
Not good for your waistline or your cholesterol, but it's
really good for you that I mean, what about what
(19:12):
when you used to take her off, did you cook
for But I don't remember cooking. Maybe I did, but
I don't remember taking a woman out to we grew
out to a restaurant. Told Sam that you went on
the Staten Island ferry and ate hot dogs. Yeah, yeah,
And I used to go when I was a mayor.
I spent a fifth of my time in each of
(19:33):
the borrows. And I was on Staten Island a lot.
And it's very different than the rest of the city.
Not that there's a couple of fancy restaurants, but much
more plain kind of food. But I loved it. And
the people on Staten Island were as nice as you
could possibly be. The smaller restaurants would serve wine out
of paper cartons. You know, the people that drink elegant
(19:58):
wines these days make fun of them, but I'll tell
you they was nice as people if you ever want
to meet. And the wine wasn't that bad either. I
have not had a drink in two and a half years,
and I keep saying I'll go back because I love
white wine and red wine and beer. Yeah, and I
didn't drink a lot of hard liquor. But I don't
(20:18):
know if i'll go back. I'll see. And so what
do you look for in a restaurant. Is it the food?
Is it the atmosphere? Is it the food? Food? Yeah,
I could go to a divy place. I love diners
um where everything comes in five minutes, no matter what.
They got fifty things on the menu. How they do that,
I don't know, but it all tastes good. And I'm
(20:40):
not fancy. But if I go to a really great restaurant,
I appreciate the food and I like it. Can you
tell something about a person when you go to a
restaurant with them? Do you think can you tell what
they're all? Yeah? I think if I if I had
lunch of job interview at lunch and if they had
an alcohol I like drink at lunch, it would sort
(21:01):
of turn me off a little bit because just wine's
appropriate with dinner, not at lunch. Just in my mind,
maybe that's the way I grew up or something. When
you told me that when we had dinner last time,
it was quite funny because you said, if I interviewed
somebody and they ordered a glass of wine, I might
not want to hire them. And Norman Foster said, if
(21:23):
I interviewed somebody and they didn't order a glass of wine,
that's what makes the market right there, this room for everybody.
But I think that I asked my children and they said,
you know, they drink wine. They said, we would never
have a glass of wine if we were being interviewed.
Do you notice the way they treat a waiter or
which knows how people treat each other, so you have
(21:46):
if they were snapped at the waiter and went nasty
or something like that, I would notice that that would
be a turn off. And as mayor as a political
passing through and through as an own of business. What
do you feel about government and food? What is your
you know, how do we look at the poverty, the insecurity? Well,
(22:06):
I think, you know, government has some responsibilities. One is,
if people I don't have enough food, they've got to
find ways to get it to them, particularly children. Um.
I think government has a responsibility to make sure that
the food that's sold in stores is not dangerous. UM.
(22:29):
And I do think they should warn against certain things
and point out the calories. BC. Two things that will
really kill you very are two biggest causes of death
I think in America, certainly smoking and obesity, and the government.
(22:50):
I don't think they should force you to not smoke,
but I think they should certainly tell you about the dangers.
And in New York we have a rule you can't
smoke in a place where people work, so nobody has
to choose between their job and their health. But you
can go outside and smoke, and you can buy cigarettes,
(23:11):
and I would defend your right to do that. Um
not for kids, because kids can't and should aren't able,
no matter what they say, to make those kinds of
health decisions in America. The other day America band jewel
these fake cigarettes. And I think we should keep kids
(23:32):
from buying cigarettes. I would agree with and and force,
but not against adults being letting you smoke where other
people have to choose between the health and the career.
Waiters or waitresses, cooks know that you should not be
allowed to smoke. And that's the law that I had
passed in New York City protected the workers. So if
(23:55):
you went to a place where the volunteer waiters, you
could smoke because they weren't technical was under your administration
first for the first big thing to do? And what
about obesity? What did you do? Wes mayor too? Well,
you can't and I don't think you should stop people
from eating, but we tried to have much healthier food
(24:15):
in the schools and have warning labels, and then you
know me, they used to joke about the big gulp
when I wanted to have people get smaller cups of
soda when they bought it. You could still buy as
many as you want, to drink as much, but just
a smaller cup. Your chances are you wouldn't go back
(24:37):
for the second cup, so you would drink less. Mexico
at that time was the most obese city and the
and the maybe still is. I don't know, but they
had a maximum size permitted in cups and it did
help them. So I think government has some responsibilities, but
in the end, you are responsible for yourself, and I
(25:00):
don't have a problem if you're not very responsible, you
just paid the penalty. But when it's your children, then
I think we do have a societal interest in not
taking away your responsibility, not telling you what to do,
but making sure the kids are treated with the best
science that we have at the time. Your generosity and
feeding and taking care of the people who work here
(25:23):
is extraordinary. Um, but there was a time when you
had to close your office and food was not available.
What did you do during the pending. One of the
things we did we um, you know, all our employees
got paid, but we also paid the companies that provide services.
We use outside services electricians and plumbers and some cleaning
(25:48):
and security functions. Companies would tend to outside uh, and
we made sure we continued to have those people paid
while we were closed. So if you had worked here
for another company, we didn't pay the company we paid,
had them send the money directly to the employees. Yeah,
and so food is something we do to encourage people
(26:11):
to come to work, do feed them well, to feed
our citizens. Well, it is also delicious, and it's exciting,
and it is family. But it also has comfort, isn't
it In times when we sort of think about what
would make us feel better in ourselves. If you're down,
if something has happened, you might turn to music for comfort.
(26:34):
You might turn into art for comfort. But you also
might turn to food and use the word nibble nibble.
So I was going to ask you what would be
your comfort food. Well, I'm addicted to popcorn with probably
too much salt, although the doctor says I have little
book pressure. So he said, you don't have to stop cheese.
It's are an American little discard, probably not good for you.
(26:57):
But I could eat bags of cheese, it's love it,
jelly beans, those kinds of things, and try not to
eat too much fattening stuff. And I do watch my
weight very fit. Um. The last couple of days I've
eaten more than I should have. Is that because you
go out for I was just where the food was
(27:20):
good and stuck in front of you. The conversation wasn't boring,
but other people were eating, and so I went. But
I would I don't eat a lot of red meat anymore.
I'd love a big American steak, but I wouldn't have
one very often, maybe once every two months or something.
(27:40):
Hamburgers and hot dogs, love those, but a lot of
times I would have a piece of chicken or fish
just because of lower calories. Well, we're going to see
each other on Thursday night where we celebrate you, and
I asked what the menu is. Might be a surprised,
but it might involve a lot of vegetables and pasta
to start, And then you know, I'm sort of slightly
(28:01):
going off the idea of a big main course. And
also we're not eating till nine, so I think we'll
keep it kind of light. Do you like that idea? Sure?
Do you have suggestions? What would you like? No, I'm
going to have a hot dog in Hamburger before I leave. No,
looking forward to it, and thank you, and then I'm
getting a plane and going back to dealing with American cooking.
(28:24):
And then you'll come back to us. I used to
come here an awful lot, stopped during the virus. Starting again.
I've been here three times in the last two months. Well,
London is a better city when you're here, come back that.
But I think London is a wonderful city. My former wife,
(28:45):
who is still one of my best friends, is a
brit father was in the r a F. She grew
up around here. Mother came from York, father from the
Isle of Wight. And I don't know that she cooked
British food, but I do remember when we first when
we got married, she had a hot water bottle only
the breads, and I didn't know anybody did that. Thank
(29:08):
you very much, nice, my pleasure, Thank you, and looking
forward to dinner. I know I have a nice time. Thanks.
The River Cafe look book is now available in bookshops
and online. It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated
with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book
(29:29):
has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a
host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted
for new cooks. The River Cafe Look Book Recipes for
Cooks of All ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production
(29:50):
of I Heart Radio and Adami Studios. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your face rich shows.
Welcome to Ruthie's Table for a production of I Heart
Radio and Adami's Studios. A few years ago, Serpentine, a
small museum in the center of Hyde Park, gave a
party to celebrate its new chairman, Mayor of New York,
Michael Bloomberg. There must have been three hundred people in
the pavilion and we listened to the Mayor say, when
(00:22):
government can't do everything, private philanthropy has to step in.
Which is lucky enough to be able to step in?
A true dictum? But what I remember most from his
moving speech was the ending come to New York City
and if you do and want to have coffee or lunch,
just call me. This is my number. I did go
(00:43):
to New York City soon after, number in hand. I
never made that call, something I'll always regret. But here
I am, almost ten years later, having the coffee with
Mayor Bloomberg, ready to talk, Ready as are? Would you
like to read the recipe? I would be happy to Okay,
(01:05):
serves six two tablespoons. You need to say h and
I started that who's running this? I think you both
are linguini with fresh and dried oregano. And since I
have not had lunch. Yet this is a perfect time
(01:26):
to focus on it. The size of this is it
serves six unless I eat two portions. How do you
do it? Two tablespoons fresh oregano finally chopped, one tablespoon
dried a regano crumbled. Don't be obsessive. Here twelve red
cherry tomatoes, twelve yellow cherry tomatoes. Hundred mill elite is
(01:51):
extra virgin olive oil, one tablespoon red wine vinegar, three
hundred grams of linguini. I want me to tell you
how to put combine these things? Okay, Well, you mix
the fresh and dried a regano together. Step one, step
to chop the tomatoes and combine with the olive oil,
the red wine vinegar, sea salt, and black pepper. Three
(02:17):
you set it aside to marinate, which means time to
go do something else. Then next step is you cook
the linguini in a generous amount of boiling salted water,
then drain and return to the pan. And last step
you toss with the oregano mixture and the marinated tomatoes
(02:37):
over a high heat and then serve on very hot plates.
Don't touch the plates. You need to have a hot
plate because the sauce isn't hot, it's tossing. Always do
it that way. When I make a regano at home,
always make it. My mother cooked everything in a pressure
(02:58):
cooker or straight out of the can. My mother never
saw a kitchen she liked. One time I did come
home from boy Scout camp and I said the food
was better at boy Scout Camp then at home. And
she said, why don't you go back? Oh? Okay? And
so did she. What did you eat at home? Then?
What would you have? It was Delmonti peas straight out
(03:19):
of the can, cooked in the water that comes with
the peas. It was brisket or chicken biscuit. So she
made biscuit, Yeah, you know, in a pressure cooker or something.
I don't remember, but it the recipes that she used
were good enough to get her to a hundred and
two years in perfect health. Yeah. And to give you
(03:40):
an appreciation of food or did that come later? If
you grew up with this food? What was it like?
Food was relatively plain. Most things that I see on
her menu today, she wouldn't have known what they were
and certainly didn't serve them. But the food and the
process brought us together and There was my sister and
(04:02):
I just a two years younger mother and father. Father
worked as a bookkeeper, made six thousand dollars the best
year of his life. But he was born in oh five.
I was born in forty two, So this is let's
say fifties, early fifties. And we had a rule. We
my mother's rule. We waited for my father to come home.
(04:25):
And they didn't travel in those days, so it was
always together. But we waited. We sat as a family.
Six o'clock is my sister and I set the table.
My father helped in clearing the table and doing the dishes.
My mother did the cooking and the dishes, and we
sat around and my father had a procedure. He'd pick
(04:47):
on somebody of any one of the four, including himself,
and that person had to spend two minutes saying what
they did that day, and then the conversation had to
be everybody else and chiming in about that conversation about
that subject of what they did, and then we go
to the next person. And we did it virtually every
at night, and I tried to do it with my daughters,
(05:08):
but everybody traveled, including me, and it just didn't work. Out.
Would you be thinking about what you were going to
say about your day? But did you know you had
to think about it? Because yeah, well, here's a good
rule for everybody, and if they followed this rule, the
world would be a lot better place. Don't do anything
that should be ashamed to tell your kids about when
you went home at night. And if everybody followed that rule,
(05:32):
we'd have a lot less problems. Would you continue this
conversation or every dinner that until you left home? Maybe
we missed it occasionally, I don't remember, but yes, basically,
it also teaches you to listen, doesn't It teaches you
how to defend yourself, teaches you how to speak to others. Yeah,
it's interesting because I've in the last few weeks, I've
(05:53):
talked to Nancy Pelosi. I've talked to President Biden's sister,
who has just written a book about her vow Biden.
She worked in the campaign, and she's just written a
book called Growing Up Biden. Because when his children, you know,
his son and his wife were killed, she kind of
moved in to take care of the two two children
and cooked for them. Aged twenty six. But she said,
(06:16):
you know, there is a lot of description from that
generation of family meals of sitting around a table. Do
your children are your grandfather? I have three grandkids, eight
year old boy who hits a golf ball almost as
far as I candidate a j D. A seven and
three quarter year old granddaughter who's learning Mandarin, and a
(06:42):
ten week old grandson. And do they have family meals
the way you did with your parents or is it
a different Yeah? I think so. I don't think it's
quite as organized. Um. And you know, today families come
and go around the table. We do not have what
I call the Norman Rockwell families anymore. Norman Rockwell used
(07:04):
to paint the pictures on the cover of the Sad
Day Evening Post was a seven post, and he one
of his most famous pictures was a father, a mother,
a boy and a younger daughter, the traditional family with
a turkey in the middle or some of the table.
(07:26):
And the way I describe it, we don't very few
kids are lucky enough to have a no Iman Rockwell
family in this day and age. Too many single families,
too many broken families, too many people having to do
two jobs, are working night shifts. And but society is different,
you know, we think that the zoom replaces the water
(07:47):
cooler at work. It does not. And we think that
families can come and go without serious conversations between parent
and child, and parents are unwilling to face difficult issues
with their children, confront them, help them, guide them. Is
(08:08):
more of an attitude of Oh, education is responsible. Is
the responsibility of teachers. No, education is the responsibility of parents.
Teachers can help, and that's why some cultures where there's
a premium in the culture on education, the parents work
(08:28):
with their kids, sometimes still two in the morning, helping them,
guiding them, giving them advice, listening to them, working out,
helping them work out problems, social problems or mathematical problems,
whatever it is. But I also think you invested in education,
and I think that if we do invest in educating
people who will be parents, then they will also be better. Well.
(08:51):
If you want to solve the problems of poverty and
crime and discriminate Asian, those things can only be done
if we worked together. If your father was born in
(09:16):
nineteen o five, where was your grandfather born? Someplace in
eastern Europe, so they emigrated. He wasn't even sure where
he came from. Both your mother and your father's parents immigrated,
they were immigrants. My mother's parents were one generation earlier.
And did they bring the culture of food that they
grew up with, do things that they have Eastern I
(09:37):
don't remember anything. Well, no, because keeping mind my parents
were born in America. So were your grandparents around at
all in your life? Grandfather grandmother on one side, grandfather
on the other. But in those days, coming from overseas,
you tried to strip out and throw away all the culture,
(10:00):
whether it's food or clothing, or religion or even names.
We anglicized our names. Today it's the reverse. I'm a
Dominican American, I'm an Italian American. In the olden days,
you would say I'm an American. In the great migration
(10:21):
waves in the twenties, it was become as American as
you could possibly, melting melting. Sometimes it was comical because
they didn't really understand what they were doing, or that
they thought Americans were doing something they weren't. But it
all worked out, and those were the days when America
really added an enormous amount to its culture because it
(10:43):
came from all around the world. And the food culture
of New York, you know, it is identified by Chinatown
about little absolutely another Tokyo, Korea. Chinatown is down to
one street, and on either side of those streets there
are other cultures that have n cities that have moved in,
and the Chinese population has spread themselves around the city
(11:06):
or out in the suburbs without being interested in as
being as close to others of the same ethnicity. There's
still areas where people go a story of Queens, for example,
it's all immigrants and they live in tight communities, but
their children are going to schools with other kids of
(11:27):
other ethnicities and they will live outside of those communities.
They tend not to stay in them. And in terms
of the culture food, when I've talked to a lot
of people who are children of immigrants, it seems like
the grandmother kept the food, you know, the mother assimilated
and the children totally rejected. And the children never speak
(11:48):
the language. When they say they speak it, it's a joke.
They don't really. America, somebody once said to me, is
the death of foreign languages. And that's basically true. And
I don't think that the world understands how isolated America is.
Something like two thirds of the members of Congress in
the Senate don't have passports. George Bushton only had a
(12:12):
passport because his father was the ambassador to China? Isn't
that right? Think about that? And so and they vote
on things that impact the world. Very scary, scary. What
about when you moved from your mother's house and father's house.
Did you went to college in Baltimore? Johns Hopkins? Then
I went to Harvard Business School and I lived in Cambridge,
(12:33):
fifteen minutes away from where my mother was living. My
father was deceased already, and if my mother hadn't lived close,
I never would have gotten through because she had to
type my papers. I can't type and I can't spell
for sure, much to her embarrassment to Harvard Business School,
she she was a yeah, what did you eat on campus?
Did you go to rest did you start? They had
(12:55):
lunch at all? We eat there. I certainly never money
to go out to many restaurants. Did your parents ever
take you to a restaurant? Yes? We went to Carol's
Diner in Medford Square, uh, and one restaurant in Malden.
And I met somebody recently whose family owned Carol's Diner.
It's just one was that? Yeah? The only Dina, Did
(13:16):
we ever go to a fancy restaurant? Probably never, at
least I certainly don't remember a miniscule number of times
when you moved to New York with you when I
was When I got to New York, I cooked all
my own meals for the first two or three meals
three years. Baked beans and hot dogs and that sort
of stuff. I remember On uh Sundays, I'd make French
(13:40):
toast and read the newspapers and eat an enormous amount
covered with maple sugar, syrup and salt. Did you use
cookbooks or did you? No? I did have some cookbooks.
I must have been interested, because I did have it,
and they're still on bookshelves someplace in my house now.
But I look at the pictures and then they probably
never get around to doing it. I didn't know there
(14:00):
were two kinds of a regano. We didn't know there
was dry to record now you crumble and fresh negg.
Now you know. But that's what restaurants before, and and
then now I go out virtually all the time. So
what girlfriend likes to cook? My attitude is. There are
twenty five thousand restaurants in New York City each one
probably has twenty different things on the menu. So that's
(14:25):
an awful lot of uh thousand. Double This fifty thousand
plus zero is five hundred thousand, five hundred thousand possibilities
if I go out one if I stayed at home.
Did you always know that you wanted to have food
creating a company like Bloomberg? Well, when I started at
Solomon Brothers. For the fifteen years I was there, we
(14:47):
did not have food. They might have been coffee, but
I don't even remember that. But when I started the company,
it was in a one room the first day, two
rooms a second day, um, and we got I went
and bought the first day, I was the only one
in the company. Second day I added three other people.
But the one thing I did is I went and
(15:08):
I bought a small refrigerator and a coffee pot. And
it was from a department store which was on the
same spot as my current building. There was ripped down
and they built a building and then we took that space.
My job is to get people together. It's the synergy
of working together that makes you uh successful, I think,
(15:28):
or increases the odds and being successful. It's hard to
manage people if they're not together. It's hard for people
to be their best if they can't run ideas by
other people and learn from other people. How do you
get them together, Well, you have a building where they
have to come to the first rules. Second rule is
the extent possible. You don't have walls, you have open spaces.
(15:53):
And this building, the design from Norman was to not
put the elevators in the middle, to have a big
open space and put the elevators on the outside and
all of the infrastructure on the outside, the plumbing and
that sort of thing. So it's exactly reverse of the
buildings you're seeing on the horizon. Here. They put the
(16:13):
least important people, the older executives who are on their
ways to retirement. They give them the best offices on
the outside. And never never made any sense to me.
Those are the people you should put in the middle
and they can help people, and then put the younger
people out. But food is another thing. It gets you
to sit together, and we all entertained together, our families
(16:36):
get together with foods. The thing that it's not so
much the food, it's that it forces you to be
there and touch it and share it, and you're doing
the same thing that the other person is, now, if
the food is good, that's also benefit healthy, you seem
I don't know. I would take a boarshead artwork and
bust and baked beans over anything. Well, they said. When
(16:59):
I just went outside and talked to two people, I
went up to them, and you know, I said, okay,
can I just ask you what you like about sitting here?
And she said, well, we hardly knew each other. We're
working in the same department I've just started, and uh,
sitting here in this space makes us want to get
to know each other, talk talk about our work. And
(17:20):
I think, as any question, does it work? Yeah, I
know they love it. If the CEO walls her or
himself off, what kind of a CEO? I don't want
that person in my company. I have the same size
desk right in the middle of a bullpen like everybody else.
And I came back from twelve years in city hall,
(17:42):
and I had had an agreement with New York City.
I wouldn't go to the company or visit them and
talk to them about it. I was totally separate. I
get back and I'm talking some people and I we
had a rule no offices, no private offices, and There
weren't any private offices when I came back, but there
were a dozen people who had a desk right by
(18:03):
a glass in conference room where they had their family
pictures in it. On Monday, they came back in the walls,
the offices were gone. I had them taken down over
the weekend, and then I realized that they had bigger
desks as well. You know what happened the next Monday.
That's I'm a believer. You treat everybody, the person just
(18:25):
starting out, it's just as important as the one that's
really re replaceable. I like to cook, and Diana likes
to cook, which is that our lives are there is
in time into shake and baked chickens. The last thing
(18:49):
I made. You get this stuff in a bag, you
put the chicken in it and shake it and then
broil it in a frying pan. And I put an
extra amount of it the bottom to soak up all
the grease and burn it. And that's what I eat.
Not good for your waistline or your cholesterol, but it's
really good for you that I mean, what about what
(19:12):
when you used to take her off, did you cook
for But I don't remember cooking. Maybe I did, but
I don't remember taking a woman out to we grew
out to a restaurant. Told Sam that you went on
the Staten Island ferry and ate hot dogs. Yeah, yeah,
And I used to go when I was a mayor.
I spent a fifth of my time in each of
(19:33):
the borrows. And I was on Staten Island a lot.
And it's very different than the rest of the city.
Not that there's a couple of fancy restaurants, but much
more plain kind of food. But I loved it. And
the people on Staten Island were as nice as you
could possibly be. The smaller restaurants would serve wine out
of paper cartons. You know, the people that drink elegant
(19:58):
wines these days make fun of them, but I'll tell
you they was nice as people if you ever want
to meet. And the wine wasn't that bad either. I
have not had a drink in two and a half years,
and I keep saying I'll go back because I love
white wine and red wine and beer. Yeah, and I
didn't drink a lot of hard liquor. But I don't
(20:18):
know if i'll go back. I'll see. And so what
do you look for in a restaurant. Is it the food?
Is it the atmosphere? Is it the food? Food? Yeah,
I could go to a divy place. I love diners
um where everything comes in five minutes, no matter what.
They got fifty things on the menu. How they do that,
I don't know, but it all tastes good. And I'm
(20:40):
not fancy. But if I go to a really great restaurant,
I appreciate the food and I like it. Can you
tell something about a person when you go to a
restaurant with them? Do you think can you tell what
they're all? Yeah? I think if I if I had
lunch of job interview at lunch and if they had
an alcohol I like drink at lunch, it would sort
(21:01):
of turn me off a little bit because just wine's
appropriate with dinner, not at lunch. Just in my mind,
maybe that's the way I grew up or something. When
you told me that when we had dinner last time,
it was quite funny because you said, if I interviewed
somebody and they ordered a glass of wine, I might
not want to hire them. And Norman Foster said, if
(21:23):
I interviewed somebody and they didn't order a glass of wine,
that's what makes the market right there, this room for everybody.
But I think that I asked my children and they said,
you know, they drink wine. They said, we would never
have a glass of wine if we were being interviewed.
Do you notice the way they treat a waiter or
which knows how people treat each other, so you have
(21:46):
if they were snapped at the waiter and went nasty
or something like that, I would notice that that would
be a turn off. And as mayor as a political
passing through and through as an own of business. What
do you feel about government and food? What is your
you know, how do we look at the poverty, the insecurity? Well,
(22:06):
I think, you know, government has some responsibilities. One is,
if people I don't have enough food, they've got to
find ways to get it to them, particularly children. Um.
I think government has a responsibility to make sure that
the food that's sold in stores is not dangerous. UM.
(22:29):
And I do think they should warn against certain things
and point out the calories. BC. Two things that will
really kill you very are two biggest causes of death
I think in America, certainly smoking and obesity, and the government.
(22:50):
I don't think they should force you to not smoke,
but I think they should certainly tell you about the dangers.
And in New York we have a rule you can't
smoke in a place where people work, so nobody has
to choose between their job and their health. But you
can go outside and smoke, and you can buy cigarettes,
(23:11):
and I would defend your right to do that. Um
not for kids, because kids can't and should aren't able,
no matter what they say, to make those kinds of
health decisions in America. The other day America band jewel
these fake cigarettes. And I think we should keep kids
(23:32):
from buying cigarettes. I would agree with and and force,
but not against adults being letting you smoke where other
people have to choose between the health and the career.
Waiters or waitresses, cooks know that you should not be
allowed to smoke. And that's the law that I had
passed in New York City protected the workers. So if
(23:55):
you went to a place where the volunteer waiters, you
could smoke because they weren't technical was under your administration
first for the first big thing to do? And what
about obesity? What did you do? Wes mayor too? Well,
you can't and I don't think you should stop people
from eating, but we tried to have much healthier food
(24:15):
in the schools and have warning labels, and then you
know me, they used to joke about the big gulp
when I wanted to have people get smaller cups of
soda when they bought it. You could still buy as
many as you want, to drink as much, but just
a smaller cup. Your chances are you wouldn't go back
(24:37):
for the second cup, so you would drink less. Mexico
at that time was the most obese city and the
and the maybe still is. I don't know, but they
had a maximum size permitted in cups and it did
help them. So I think government has some responsibilities, but
in the end, you are responsible for yourself, and I
(25:00):
don't have a problem if you're not very responsible, you
just paid the penalty. But when it's your children, then
I think we do have a societal interest in not
taking away your responsibility, not telling you what to do,
but making sure the kids are treated with the best
science that we have at the time. Your generosity and
feeding and taking care of the people who work here
(25:23):
is extraordinary. Um, but there was a time when you
had to close your office and food was not available.
What did you do during the pending. One of the
things we did we um, you know, all our employees
got paid, but we also paid the companies that provide services.
We use outside services electricians and plumbers and some cleaning
(25:48):
and security functions. Companies would tend to outside uh, and
we made sure we continued to have those people paid
while we were closed. So if you had worked here
for another company, we didn't pay the company we paid,
had them send the money directly to the employees. Yeah,
and so food is something we do to encourage people
(26:11):
to come to work, do feed them well, to feed
our citizens. Well, it is also delicious, and it's exciting,
and it is family. But it also has comfort, isn't
it In times when we sort of think about what
would make us feel better in ourselves. If you're down,
if something has happened, you might turn to music for comfort.
(26:34):
You might turn into art for comfort. But you also
might turn to food and use the word nibble nibble.
So I was going to ask you what would be
your comfort food. Well, I'm addicted to popcorn with probably
too much salt, although the doctor says I have little
book pressure. So he said, you don't have to stop cheese.
It's are an American little discard, probably not good for you.
(26:57):
But I could eat bags of cheese, it's love it,
jelly beans, those kinds of things, and try not to
eat too much fattening stuff. And I do watch my
weight very fit. Um. The last couple of days I've
eaten more than I should have. Is that because you
go out for I was just where the food was
(27:20):
good and stuck in front of you. The conversation wasn't boring,
but other people were eating, and so I went. But
I would I don't eat a lot of red meat anymore.
I'd love a big American steak, but I wouldn't have
one very often, maybe once every two months or something.
(27:40):
Hamburgers and hot dogs, love those, but a lot of
times I would have a piece of chicken or fish
just because of lower calories. Well, we're going to see
each other on Thursday night where we celebrate you, and
I asked what the menu is. Might be a surprised,
but it might involve a lot of vegetables and pasta
to start, And then you know, I'm sort of slightly
(28:01):
going off the idea of a big main course. And
also we're not eating till nine, so I think we'll
keep it kind of light. Do you like that idea? Sure?
Do you have suggestions? What would you like? No, I'm
going to have a hot dog in Hamburger before I leave. No,
looking forward to it, and thank you, and then I'm
getting a plane and going back to dealing with American cooking.
(28:24):
And then you'll come back to us. I used to
come here an awful lot, stopped during the virus. Starting again.
I've been here three times in the last two months. Well,
London is a better city when you're here, come back that.
But I think London is a wonderful city. My former wife,
(28:45):
who is still one of my best friends, is a
brit father was in the r a F. She grew
up around here. Mother came from York, father from the
Isle of Wight. And I don't know that she cooked
British food, but I do remember when we first when
we got married, she had a hot water bottle only
the breads, and I didn't know anybody did that. Thank
(29:08):
you very much, nice, my pleasure, Thank you, and looking
forward to dinner. I know I have a nice time. Thanks.
The River Cafe look book is now available in bookshops
and online. It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated
with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book
(29:29):
has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a
host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted
for new cooks. The River Cafe Look Book Recipes for
Cooks of All ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production
(29:50):
of I Heart Radio and Adami Studios. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your face rich shows.
Host
Ruth Rogers
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