Forget ‘clean eating’
River Cafe chef wants us to enjoy food again
Ruth Rogers wants me to eat and, given the circumstances, it seems rude to refuse. “You’ll have something, won’t you?” she says, electric-blue eyes fixing on mine.
We are sitting at a table in the River Café, the west London restaurant she founded in 1987 with her friend, the late Rose Gray. It went on to redefine Italian food in Britain, with its emphasis on simple, seasonal, delicious fare, while the eponymous cookbooks made the duo household names and sent us all rushing out to find borlotti beans and aged pecorino.
“We’ve got lemon tart, strawberry and almond…” Rogers is saying, even though I’ve told her I’ve already had lunch. A lemon tart duly arrives. Rogers, 67, doesn’t have much time for people who don’t eat. She’s increasingly concerned about the trend for “clean eating” epitomised by the glossy-haired food bloggers and self-proclaimed lifestyle experts who advocate banning processed foods, spiralising courgettes and supping on bone broth.
“Suddenly, it’s anti-gluten, anti-carb, anti-dairy,” she says. “It’s a way of living: if you reject these foods, they sell it on being healthier. You’ll be thinner but you’ll be happier, you’ll be a better mother, you’ll be a more energetic person, and I think that puts a kind of pressure on women to achieve something through saying no, rather than saying go and study the subject you love, or live in a place that makes you happy, or learn a language.”
The clean- eating movement – popularised by proponents such as the Hemsley sisters, Jasmine and Melissa, as well as the food writers Ella Mills and Madeleine Shaw – has recently come under fire for setting impossible ideals and encouraging disordered eating. This month the Great British Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh criticised the Hemsleys for giving advice based on “bad science”; while Dr Norelle Reilly, a paediatric gastroenterologist at Columbia University Medical Centre, warned that people without coeliac disease who cut out gluten could be damaging their health.
Last week it was reported that viewing figures for the Hemsleys’ Channel 4 cooking show have plummeted, and Mills, in her latest blog, distanced herself from the term “clean eating”.
Part of Rogers’s worry is that food is being thought of as something to be fearful of. There have been times in Rogers’s life over the past few years when food has been a necessary source of comfort. And there have been other times when she has been unable to cook at
all. Her son Bo died of a seizure at the age of 27 in 2011. “Normally [cooking] makes me feel better, but I found I couldn’t cook – it was the slowness of it...” she breaks off. When her stepson Ab visited (her husband, the architect Lord Rogers, has three children from his first marriage), she asked him to make tomato sauce: “I said, ‘Ab, I need to smell tomato sauce being cooked.’ So there was this kind of grief, shock [in the] family and it was: ‘Make something we can smell that makes this house feel like a home.’ ” By contrast, when Rose Gray died of a brain tumour at the age of 71, six years ago, one of the first things that the River Café staff did was to cook a breakfast of fried eggs and anchovies. “We were so determined to make this restaurant a tribute to her,” says Rogers.
To this day, a venture that started out with two women at the helm still has a 50 per cent female workforce and a female head chef, Sian Wyn Owen – a notable achievement in a field dominated by men. Many of the staff are foreign, which is at least part of the reason that Rogers declares herself “100 per cent in favour of staying in Europe”. Rogers has three grandchildren and nine step-grandchildren, 10 of whom are girls. She worries about women growing up in a world where they might feel “a sense of failure” for not looking like the lean, glowing lifestyle bloggers on Instagram. “One of the things that does concern me is young women promoting a way of eating as a way of making yourself better without any degree of nutrition or without having studied nutrition as a science,” she says. “I don’t know what you have to do to call yourself a nutritionist. It’s a bit like calling yourself ‘a therapist’. I mean, could you be a nutritionist?” My mouth is too full of lemon tart to answer, so probably not.
Rogers is relaxed about what she eats – usually it’s a poached egg for breakfast, with prosciutto if they have any lying around (because that’s the kind of thing you have lying around if you’re Ruth Rogers) and then grilled fish or veal for lunch and supper.
The key to healthy eating, she says, is lots of vegetables and seasonality, but she’s aware that all this comes at a cost. Not everyone can afford the money or the time it requires to whip up an artichoke risotto. “There’s no doubt that people who are less well off are heavier because they’re not eating the right vegetables,” Rogers says. “This could be a class issue.” She grew up in New York, the daughter of second-generation immigrants – her father was a doctor whose family emigrated from Hungary; her mother the child of Russian emigrés – and says her parents “didn’t have a clue” about food. Mealtimes were chances for discussion about politics and the food was secondary.
It wasn’t until she met Richard Rogers in 1969 and travelled to France and Italy with him in the Seventies that she discovered the importance of seasonal, local produce and a good quality olive oil.
In Florence, she tasted the first thing that blew her gastronomic mind: a piece of bread soaked in Italian olive oil and brushed lightly with garlic. She couldn’t believe there were only three ingredients and it opened her eyes to the perfect simplicity of Italian food. A few years later, the River Café was born, originally as a staff canteen for her husband’s architectural practice on the embankment at Hammersmith.
Throughout the Nineties, the River Café was the place to be seen: all light-filled ambience and boldly coloured feature walls. Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall started their careers here. It’s still difficult to get a table.
Has there been a change in the kind of food clients order over the past three decades? Wyn Owen says there are far more customers claiming to have dairy allergies “… and you think maybe it’s just intolerance”. Has Rogers ever used a spiraliser? She looks at me vaguely. “No. Do you know, I’ve never had it. Have you?” Rogers shouts over to a group of bright young things getting ready for tonight’s service.
“Have any of you tried spiralising things?” she asks.
Joseph, the other head chef, is summoned over to share his views.
“If I had a spiraliser, would you be upset with me?” he asks Rogers.
He then admits to owning an apple corer.
“How interesting,” Rogers murmurs, in much the same way one might say an ugly baby has character.
Somehow, I don’t think spiralised zucchini will be on the River Café menu any time soon.