Slowly and carefully, The River Cafe is coming back to life.
When I arrive at the restaurant on the banks of the Thames in Hammersmith, the blue-metal-framed doors are wide open. Four chefs are at work in the open kitchen, discussing broad beans and snipping basil leaves, a pile of masks on the counter. There is so much activity that a woman pokes her head in and asks if she can book a table. The answer is not yet, they are waiting for more Government guidance. But in the meantime they’re busy with a new venture.
The River Cafe has opened an online shop, sending its much-loved Italian food to people’s homes. The restaurant’s cobalt-blue carpet is strewn with boxes waiting to be sent out, and at the centre of the action is its co-founder Ruth Rogers, fielding calls, handwriting labels and giving her verdict on new dishes before they are photographed for the newsletter she set up in lockdown.
“People keep saying you must be dying to open,” says Rogers, 71, who is known as Ruthie and still speaks with a hint of an upstate New York accent. “I want to open when it is safe.” She decided to stay in London after meeting her husband, architect Richard Rogers, in 1969, and founded the River Cafe with Rose Gray in 1987. Jamie Oliver and many other chefs cut their teeth here, and actor Steve Martin says it has the best Italian food in the world.
Rogers is tanned, in a girlish white sundress, espadrilles and pink lipstick; a purple and black flower -print mask hung around her neck like a piece of jewellery. “It’s a gift from Erdem,” she says, pulling it out from her tangle of gold necklaces. A young chef brings over a salad for Rogers to inspect. “That’s nice,” she says. “But I don’t like the rocket stalks, they look like they might stab you.” She yanks them off and folds them, adding: “No detail is too small.”
The Covid guidelines “feel so arbitrary”, she continues. “Why is it safe one day then unsafe the next? Why is two metres safer than one metre? You read about surges in Sweden. And it feels Trumpian to say things like you want to get back to work.” Boris Johnson announces the easing of the two-metre rule at the end of our interview and Rogers shouts the news back to the kitchen. They are discussing masks, how they affect human interaction, if they will take people’s temperatures on arrival, and the possibility of people looking at the menu before arriving. But will we still want to go to restaurants if we have to take all these precautions?
“Restaurants are part of culture, they aren’t just a place you go to eat,” she says. “There have been times when I’ve had a teeny budget and you still think of restaurants as places you go to find out about a city. But the virus is serious. Too many have died. I want people to feel they are in the safest place they could be. That was the case even before.”
In many ways The River Cafe is lucky — they have outside space. Rogers has been comparing notes with fellow restaurateur Jeremy King. “His challenges are different. He has nine restaurants, I have one. But we are both concerned about staff and customers. It’s an uncertain time, many restaurants won’t reopen.” Before Covid, The River Cafe was on course for its best year yet. They catered a big wedding in September for designer Misha Nonoo and Mike Hess, where the Duchess of Sussex gave a reading. “We sent 23 chefs to Rome and cooked this fantastic dinner.”
At the start of March, anxiety began to build as they heard the news from China and Italy. “On 10 March, I came here with a friend who is an actor and everybody came to the table to say hello. One of the great things about having a restaurant is when it becomes a place where people are surprised, they see people they haven’t seen for years. But that day they kept their distance. Nobody shook hands, nobody kissed. That Sunday the manager called me to say staff were anxious.”
The senior team met the next day, before lockdown was announced. “We decided to close. We didn’t know how long for. It felt like the right thing but it was upsetting; a shock.” That night, Rogers googled how to break bad news to staff, and followed Harvard Business Review guidelines. “You tell them the facts, then you tell them the plan, and we told them we would take care of them.”
Rogers’ accountant suggested that all 95 staff go on furlough, but she had other ideas. “The thought of having April, May, June doing nothing…” she trails off, unable to contemplate it. “You can deal with anything as long as you can plan, but this is unlike anything else, because the future is so uncertain. All you can do is live in the present and create something.” That was the shop, which evolved out of an idea they had before closing called The River Delivers.
“Deliveroo-ing our meals didn’t feel right. The ambition was to give people our food so they could cook it at home. We will cook the peas for you — they are popular because no one wants to shell peas — and all you have to do is put the lamb on the grill. It will be the best quality. If it’s green beans they will be in season, and if not we’ll stop doing them. Lockdown has shown people, quite a few of them men, how fun cooking is.” Sustainable packaging is the next project.
“If you’d asked me a year ago if I could do a shop I’d tell you, ‘No, I’m a chef, I love people, I love the energy of a restaurant.’ I don’t even like sending food from the kitchen to the other end of the restaurants, so the thought of sending it across London...but the shop kept us all going. Never waste a crisis.” Her proudest moment was when the shop was so busy that they were able to unfurlough people. “We could pay some of our debt. The turnover has been good, although we don’t have a profit yet.”
She has wondered what the River Cafe’s co-founder, Rose Gray, would have made of this pandemic. The last time the restaurant closed was when Gray died from cancer in February 2010. She was 71, and the next day friends and family gathered in the closed restaurant to remember her. “When we closed after Rose died a man who had booked a table wrote to me,” says Rogers. “He said Rose would not have wanted the restaurant to close. I thought, ‘How do you know what Rose would have wanted?’ One of the great things about Rose was that she was unpredictable. But I think she would have been careful about lockdown. Why wouldn’t she be?”
Is Rogers considering retirement? “Definitely not. We’ve had no break but we are all dying to work.” Every morning she has an espresso — no breakfast — and gets on with the day. During our interview she flits around, bringing over people who helped to put the shop together in record time. She is keen to credit chefs Joe Trivelli and Sian Owen and managers Vashti Armit and Charles Pullan.
Rogers has spent lockdown at home in Chelsea with her husband. “One of the joys is that I’ve had more time with him,” she says. “We go for walks.” Does he cook? “No. He had a very Italian mother who cooked for him. But all my sons cook.” She and Richard have two sons, Roo and Bo, who died from a seizure aged 27. They also have two step sons and 13 grandchildren, who have been riding their bikes over for socially distanced meetings.
As well as cooking vats of tomato sauce for the shop, Rogers has “gone back to my American roots and baked chocolate chip cookies”. As with everything she does, she is exacting about them. “They’re thin. I’ll make them for you someday.”
Two weeks before lockdown she broke two bones in her pelvis on a skiing holiday, but has recovered and is back to her usual regime of yoga. She has been too busy to listen to Bob Dylan’s new album. Rogers met Dylan in a cafe when she was a teenager in Woodstock. He wrote her a note inviting her to watch him practise; she said no, which she regrets. They have been listening to Mexican music, though — they went last year, although Richard had a fall while they were there.
There are no “silver linings” to lockdown. “There are so many people ill, unemployed, children not at school. Those people who say they love lockdown in their beautiful houses I find difficult. It has taught us about fragility and how lucky we are; about values and priorities.”
From inside the restaurant, questions are fired at Rogers about the shop. “The shop is the future,” she says. It is an extension of the restaurant that so many love. “We have the greatest profession,” she tells me. “Because we are involved in such a brilliant thing to do for a city.”
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