Ruthie's Table 4This week on Ruthie's Table 4, we're going back to the archives to relive a memorable conversation with Oscar-winning actress, and successful entrepreneur, Gwyneth Paltrow.
Two friends, talking about food, family and love.
Ruthie’s Table 4 is made in partnership with Moncler.
You were listening to Ruthie's Table four. In partnership with Montclair.
Gwyneth Paltrow worked for a day in the River Cafe kitchen. She arrived early, dressed in professional chef whites, ready to cook. Gwyneth is the only chef ever to have vast, clean and cook fresh anchovies, and for three hours she did.
I learned a lot that day. I mean, you know, just when you're a home cook, you don't think about precision and like repetitively turning out something that's perfect and exactly the same over a course of many hours.
Didn't Jamie Oliver come in when you were there? I think, you know, what is Gwynneth? Quite a few people say, what is Gwyneth Paltrow doing in your kitchen? We said, she's frying anchovies, so that it was. This memory speaks to how professional Gwyneth is. An Oscar winning actor, she built Coop from a simple newsletter her into an influential and uplifting business with energy, elegance and strong values. Another memory ten years ago, just after the death of our son BeO, I asked Gwyneth if she might surprise the River Cafe team and sing one song for them at our Christmas party to thank them for their care and concern for me. Gwyneth not only said yes, she sang four songs, danced with everyone, and stayed to the very end. In the River Cafe history, we still talk about the time Gwyneth Paltrow came to sing. I admire Gwyneth for being a brave, smart entrepreneur. I respect Gwyneth as a writer of recipes. Most of all, I love Gwyneth for being there with me that night and here with me today.
Oh boy, I wasn't expecting that. That was so beautiful.
Thank you, Gwyneth. Would you like to read the recipe?
I would love to one of my favorites from the River Cafe. Zucchini free tea five hundred gram zucchini, one liter sunflower oil for the batter, one hundred and fifty grams of plain flour, three tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, three tablespoons warm water, three egg whites organic. Cut the zucchini into five millimeter thick ovals, then cut them into thick matchsticks. For the batter. See the flour into a bowl, make a well in the center, pour in the olive oil, and stir to combine lusinetting enough warm water to make a batter the consistency of double cream. Heat the oil in a high sided pan to one hundred and ninety degrees celsius. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold into the batter. Dip the zucchini in the batter. Fry in batches in the hot oil until golden and crisp. Serve immediately.
So when you make do you make zucchini do fry? Do you do zucchini free tea.
All the time? Yeah, it's Apple's. One of Apple's favorite foods is zucchini free tea. And they're so good, especially when the one thing also you can do with zucchini. They're slightly larger, I think because the way we do it of cutting it into rounds and then cutting into strips may make it easier.
Do you grow them here?
No, we're getting back east on Long Island in the summer. We have tomatoes and zucchini for days and days and days and flowers. They're so delicious. Except I have to say, and I'm probably this is probably really unpopular, but I like mozzarella in them more than ricotta in them.
I don't put any cheese in them. No, I'm never have I just love having them absolutely, just the flower and the kids fry them and then you hold them by the stem and you just eat them. So, if we were going to start at the beginning, what is the beginning? Where were you born? Where did you grow up?
I was born here in Los Angeles, in Hollywood. We kind of went back and forth between New York City and Santa Monica a lot. I did a lot of preschool in New York City, and I did first and third grades in New York City while my mother was on Broadway, and then the bulk of the rest of elementary school here, and then moved permanently to New York City when I was eleven. Can you remember?
The kitchens were perfect food could described the kitchen, but they're very different.
The LA house and the kitchens were very different. So our kitchen and in Los Angeles here had a brick floor, red brick floor and a tile counter, sort of like very country kitchen. Lots of windows and you could see the backyard and the pool, and we were in there a lot. I mean, I think with every house you're in the kitchen more than anywhere. Our New York kitchen was on the ground floor. We grew up in a townhouse, almost no windows, but we had a big fireplace in the kitchen, which was really nice, and it was more of a modern kitchen. It had been done by a Swedish architects. It was kind of minimal and who cooked well. When I was little, I remember, I mean my mom cooked. My dad started cooking a lot, but that was later. He got very into cooking kind of when we were older teenagers. But we had we had a no pair that would cook. My mom would cook. It was kind of like a group effort in the kitchen. But my mom was always like, she loves food, but she would get sort of stressed cooking, you know, whereas my dad was like thought it was really fun. My mom, I don't think she found it so relaxing.
And also you just mentioned that she was in theater nice, so what was that luck?
So she would come home late after the theater, which when I was older was really nice. I remember when I was in high school and she would finish a plane come home and I would still be awake and we would kind of have a chat, which was some of my favorite memories of growing up in New York and or she was doing Shakespeare in the Park and I would walk down Central Park to go visit her and watch her. So it was really a wonderful thing having a mother so steeped in the arts in New York and with all of the friends and you know, the artists singing around the piano, and you know, it was really a great way to check it.
Would he have eaten? Do you think? I often ask actors who are acting in a play. Do they eat before the play? Do they eat after the play? Do they d And everyone varies.
Yeah, I think she would generally eat before unless she had friends coming. It's sort of an occupational hazard to eat after. I did a play in London, I think in maybe two thousand and two, and I ate every night after the play, and I gained about fifteen.
There is also that thing when you go to see somebody in a play and then they go, you know Ray Fines does it. It's always dinner afterwards, and you do see the kind of fatigue and then letting go and probably eating too much late at night, but then eating before you might go on. Did you feel stuffed when you went on to them?
Yeah? I couldn't. I couldn't eat before. I was too nervous to eat before, so I would always end up eating after and go to Jay Chiky and he have a bottle of wine and French fries and some kind of oyster.
And back to New York and back to growing up with a mother who was acting, And what was your father doing?
He was making TV shows, So he was making shows here in New York and doing a lot of traveling back and forth, and then and then kind of settled in New York. And that was great when he was with us all the time, And but I don't remember him really being in the kitchen until he had kind of slowed down how prolifically he was making TV shows. And when he kind of slowed turned everything down a notch is when he really got into cooking.
And would you have meals around the table together with you and Jake? Oh, my parents sit down? What were they like?
They were really nice, I mean, and it was I think we felt special being included at the dinner table, even though it was a nightly event. It felt, you know, like if they had friends over. We sat with them at the table and had long conversations. It's something that I've carried on with my kids as well. You know, we always have dinner all together as a family, no phones allowed at the table, and you get into great discourse with them and hear what they think about things. And I think my father made me feel that I was valuable during those dinners because he really elicited our opinion. He asked questions, and my brother and I were very much a part of the conversation.
That was his background.
Well, it's interesting, you know because touching on what you were saying, before he grew up without money. He grew up on Long Island, and they were you know, they were kind of a working class moving trying moving up into middle class Jewish family, but they didn't have a lot of disposable income, and they didn't they didn't go out to eat. So and my father finally made it, you know, like his and he loved food and all the beautiful things in life. You know, he loved beautiful fabrics and paintings, and you know, he would take me to every museum in the world and we would walk for hours. And I think food for him was really an expression of life's beauty and our blessings and good fortune to be able to eat something that was fresh and delicious and really well conceived and thought about. And he was so proud that, you know, we ate oysters and you know, things that he hadn't come across until really later in his life. And I always remember, and I wrote about this in my first book, that when we would get into the car to go out to dinner, like, no matter how many times we had gone it like, he was so excited. It was like the greatest thing of all time that we were going out to dinner.
I think that it's interesting because people that I've talked to, many of them measure their success in the ability to eat well. It's fascinating that people, you know, when they were able to go to restaurants and choose something that they weren't worried about how much it costs, or you know Paul McCartney saying that he always thought wine was terrible because he only had really really cheap wine. And then when he was able to go to a restaurants somebody bought him a fabulous bottle of wine, he kind of understood what it had meant to work hard and what he could do and even just going to restaurants, so that going back to your dad, what were his parents like?
They were New Yorkers. They had so my grandfather's grandfather had come from Poland. They were from a long line of rabbis, and they were all Ashkenazi Jews from Poland and Russia kind of Belarusian, and they were, you know, had grown up. My grandfather had grown up in a tenement on the Lower East Side and fought his way into military school so he could, you know, have three square meals a day and learn. He craved discipline and order, and so he was very proud of himself that he had put himself, you know, had gotten himself in that position. And they were great. And my grandmother, my dad's mom, was a great I mean I loved eating at her house.
Grandmother's are really important.
Yeah. Food, I mean she made brisket and that it was like the best brisket in the world. And then she also let us have junk food, which we were not allowed from my mother. So you know, we would go to stay with them and there would be fruit loops and I would be out of my mind, you know, Jake and I would be eating wonderbread with frenches mustard and a slice of tomato and lettuce, and we thought it was the most delicious thing of all time.
So we have a recipe for brisket I do. And what about your mother's mother.
My mother's mother was a fantastic cook and entertainer. She a really scary person, but she made the best food. She I'll never forget the things that, you know, really sort of like fifties food that she made all throughout the eighties, you know. So her the best deviled eggs in the whole world, the best Christmas dinners, her stuffing in her and her spreads would be this whole table full of the most delicious food. And it was only her, you know, on her own chopping and cooking, and her food was amazing. She was a great, a really great cook.
The River Cafe Cafe, our all day space and just steps away from the restaurant, is now open in the morning and Italian breakfast with cornetti, chiambella and cristada from our pastry kitchen. In the afternoon, ice creamed coops and River Cafe classic desserts. We have sharing plates Salumi, misti, mozzarella, brisquetta, red and yellow peppers, Vitello, tonado and more. Come in the evening for cocktails with our resident pianist in the bar. No need to book. See you here. You grew up in this house where your father loved to take you to restaurants and to eat, and your mother cared for you and came home after theater stories and then you left home. And did you cook after you left home for yourself or did you go home to eat.
Or I that's when I really started to learn how to cook. I went I graduated from school in New York City, and I went to UC Santa Barbara, all the way across the country, and my father was in Santa Monica a lot, and I would come home for weekends or you know, for some good food, and we would cook together a lot. And that's when we both really started cooking. And that's when the Food Network was just amazing and really instructional and tactical. And we would watch you know, the food the Food Network and learn things and try them out, and or we would go out to there was a restaurant in Venice that was kind of legendary called seventy two Market Street, and we would go there, and or sheen Wah on Maine, which is a Wolfgang Puck French fusion Chinese rustaurant that I still love to this day. So there's like a couple places that he would that he loved that we would go to. But we also cooked a lot.
And so do you do that with your children? Do you cook with them?
I do?
I love both of them.
Are I cook for both? I cook? You know, Apple's really interesting because now she's kind of very independent and she likes to cook for herself a lot so, and she's vegetarian, and she has like really specific food ideas which is so great and I love. I would say what she asked me to make still for her the most is lemon pasta. She went through a real like fetichini, alfredo face and breakfast potatoes. She asked, that's probably what she asked me to make the most these days. And then moses, you know, during the week, I don't. I don't have time to cook very much. But I cook kind of all weekend long, and I really love it, especially Friday nights. It's like how I transition from my week to being like a woman in a body.
And did they cook with you or do they?
Yeah, they do?
They cook for them.
I mean, Apple will definitely cook with me. Moses will help, yeah, but I mostly cook for them. I mean, I think they like being especially because when we were living in London and I was before I started Goop, I cooked all the meals and so they really they have nostalgia around me cooking them all the meals, and so I think there's I think especially Moses. Sometimes she's like, why are you making me food?
You just love? Do you think that you're interested in cooking for them? Does come from your own childhood or I do?
Because it was such an unabashed expression of my father's love for us, like there was no denying it. And when someone is so excited about like the seer on their baby back ribs, you know, and like look at this, Look what I did. You know, it's so imbued with love that you can't It's undeniable, and so you learn it as a love language. I just had this weegind I at a house fuld of people at our house in Santa Barbara, and I was making all these different breakfasts and you know, my friends are like, oh my god, we feel so terrible, and I was like, no, you don't understand, Like this is my love language. Like I'm so happy doing this.
Did you travel with your parents, did you go to Italy or Spain.
Or we never went to Italy until you know, the first time I ever went to Italy with my father he was when he died.
He died in Florence, he.
Died, he died in Rome, and we were doing our first kind of road trip after my thirtieth birthday. And yeah, he kind of died on me, which complicated the trip.
Does it complicate Italy for you?
It did complicate Italy for me for a long time. I didn't go back for ten years. And when we were on our road trip and I found out that he was sick and he had been coughing up blood, and I said, we have to go to the hospital. You know, he'd been hiding it for me because he didn't want He really wanted to finish our trip. And I was like, this is so, we're going to the hospital. And he was like, no, we got to get to the Splendido. He really was trying, and I was like, we're not going to the like, we're going to the hospital. And he ended up dying. And then I had a real aversion to Italy for a long time, and then very sweetly Chris Martin, my first husband, on my fortieth birthday ten years later. And I was having a lot of anxiety about it anyway, because I think turning forty, I I'm about to turn fifty and I kind of don't give a but forty I was like, really had so much anxiety about it. And he by that point, I had the two kids, and we got on a plane and I didn't know where we were going, and we all of a sudden, I realized we were landing in Genoa and that we were going to the Splendido, which was so sweet. It was such a nice surprise. So it was like a completion, but it was. But Jake was with me, and my two best friends Mary and Julia, who've been my best friend since one since I was four and one since I was eleven. They were with me and they my father was like a father to them too, So it was it ended up being a really beautiful experience that we all got to be there and kind of come full circle. And now I'm you know, we bought a little farmhouse in Umbria, so just south of the Tuscan border. Great food, Yeah.
Black tuffles in the fall. You have Lentils some you know, boar, it's great.
I know, it's really it's a really special place. So I'm excited to spend more time there and to learn some Italian.
But what about Spain of.
France, Spain so France. Well I kind of told this like now and now it's kind of a famous story about my dad taking me. My mom was doing a filming something in London when I was ten. We still lived in Los Angeles, and we all made the trip over to visit her. And then my dad took me to Paris for the weekend and just he and I, and we stayed at the Ritz, and we went to the Pompeou, We went to the Louver, we went to all museums, and my main thing was that I wanted to eat French fries, like actual French fries. So that was the first thing we did when we checked into the hotel, is that I ordered French fries. And he took me all around, you know, we were eating all kinds of things. And on the way back to London, he said, do you know why I took you to Paris, just you and I? And I said no, and he said, because I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who will always love you no matter what.
So sweet. I mean, what you've been talking about is memories of a man who loved food, loved you, wanted to take you and indulge in new experiences to do with eating and cooking and spending time with you. And I think that you know, that is about what we do. Food is memory and food is love. You know, it's really and that's what you're doing with your children and what we keep doing. And your grandmother. So many people I've talked to really talk about their grandmothers, you know, because I think, again, I do it with my grandchildren. I know that you know, if you're working mother, you're trying to get through the day or it's like a struggle, and the can mother is a place you want them to remember your food. You want them to you want to spoil them and give them loops fruit loops and also a recipe that they'll cook they're gone.
It's true. I often think about that, think about the food legacy of a family and what dishes go from generation to generation. And there's also seems to be such a specific flavor profile. You know, It's like if I cook something. You know, my kids like the way I cook something as opposed to anybody else, even if it's you know, like there were all following the same recipe.
Of course, should we just talk about the food that you're cooking with Google that you want a soul because you have had such an influence on the way we eat, the way we live, the way we buy, the way we collect, the way we treat ourselves.
Yeah, I mean, it's been probably the steepest learning curve of my life. And it's also a marathon. You know, it's been years of building a business and not having any idea what I was doing, not knowing how to monetize a business, and you know, been through so many highs and lows and learnings and incredibly painful mistakes and real triumphs that you know are little but meaningful to us. And so but I do think that the cultural impact is it's an important thing to contribute, right if you feel whatever you're trying to do in the world, that you authentically are trying to, you know, connect somebody to something good or that will be beautiful or uplifting, it's very fulfilling job in a lot of ways. To have and so it's really fun right now because we're we kind of in this last year launched something called Goop Kitchen, which is I'm only still here in Los Angeles, but I think we're going to expand quickly, which is not a restaurant, it's just being able to deliver on those brand values of getting really high quality, organic, local, seasonal food to people's plates, because the quickest road to feeling better is just watching the quality of the food that you're eating, like is it nutrient dense? Is it minimally processed? I mean, you know, that's why you're such a big inspiration to me, is everything you make is so ingredient driven and so delicious. I remember when I first started coming to the restaurant so many years ago, gosh, twenty five years ago, I mean so long ago, and just thinking, oh my gosh, there's you can see everything, like the beauty of you know that dish, I forget the name of it, but you have the sort of fava beans and art of chokes and it's like femal yes Roman yeah, and it's like, oh my gosh, it's all so visible and you just you see it in your mind coming straight from the garden right onto the plate and just enhancing all of the beautiful aspects of nature and great olive oil and there you go.
You know, I always think that if you cook with few ingredients that we do, and I think in Italy you do. I love going to Paris and having a bourb blanc over a piece of turbot with spinach and morale mushrooms. But there's something about going to Italy and having a grilled piece of fish with three herbs and a bit of olive oil, or as you say, the vegetables which just depend on themselves. You can't mask it.
I mean, what was it like for you to open the River Cafe in London at that time where you know it wasn't like that. I mean, there wasn't an ingredient forward food culture.
And when Mose and I started, she had lived in Luca for five years. And Richard's mother was a cook from Trieste who then went to Florence and then came to London probably thirty nine. And we always say that she's wander around London coming from Florence looking for a view. She was always trying to find the Piazza Michelangelos somewhere in London. She's a woman who said to me once on her deathbed, she said, Ruthie, I want you to put She had amazing skin, and she said, I want you to put more cream on your face and less herbs on your fish.
You know, that was her her last year.
And every time I put herbs on my fish, I was like, not too many, and every night I put more cream. But the I think that that rose and I thought, why can't we have the kind of food that we cooked and ate in Italy but in London and it was challenging. You know if we served a Papa pomodoro and it had tomatoes and bread and basil, and that was it. And somebody would say in those days and by paying four pounds fifty for a bit of bread and tomato. But now I always put you know, the travel people traveled more and more to Europe, and you know Freddy Laker with his planes where you could go cheaply or whatever they were.
Opened up Europe.
Unfortunately, right now, because if you want me to be political, Brexit is closing the doors. But in those days we're all going and opening the doors and seeing what food was like. And so I think that really changed things.
So it was quite iconoclastic, that kind of simplicity of Yeah, I think, well, I think other people were doing it, you know, Rollie Lee and Kensington Place did a more French version of it, and Alisterlittle and people also changed restaurants. I think everywhere.
I think give credit to Wolfgang Puck, you know, going from Mammy's on to making pieces at Spargo. It's like you could either dress up and go to a restaurant and be terrified, or you could but eat very well, or you could go to the local Greek or treachery and not eat very well but have a great time. We thought, why can't you come and have a great time and eat well, you know, And I think a lot of people.
Were doing that.
So we learned what we started knowing nothing, So you know, we learned as we grew. There's a lot to do with food. It's love, it's history, it's memories, it's politics, but it's also comfort. Yeah. And so if I were to ask you for our last question in this beautiful room, on this beautiful day, what Gwyneth, would be your comfort food?
Pasta?
Ah?
I love pasta and I love that it can be the most laborious, you know, hand rolling out and stuffing something that you are pureting like most intense all day episode. Or it can literally be a sauce that you make in the time it takes for the water to boil and cook. The pasta which are my favorite, some garlic, anchovy, you know, chili oil's oil. But it always has the same result, which is just tastes delicious and it makes you feel so good. It makes you feel full. But also I don't know, there's also an elegance to pasta, and I find it really just the perfect meal, pasta and a glass of red wine.
Well, I'm waiting for you in London. Okay, you don't have to fry on Chewes postage.
But I want to get back behind that Briar.
Aren't you back in the kitchen, Come back in the kitchen. We miss you though.
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