After more than four decades of serving up chargrilled squid, creamy wild-mushroom risotto, and rich chocolate nemesis cake on the Thames waterfront, Ruth Rogers has made becoming an institution seem effortless. Even when it has been, in fact, the opposite.
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“My children will call me up and say, ‘Are you doing anything this Friday night?’” Ruth Rogers jokes. To this she’ll typically respond with a warm “of course not,” always keen to find time for ice cream with her grandkids. In reality, the cofounder and chef of the River Café is busy. Like, really busy. Always. Apart from her Michelin-starred London institution, she has coauthored six highly acclaimed cookbooks, has several culinary-focused television shows under her belt, and is the host of her own star-studded podcast, Ruthie’s Table 4—think Will Ferrell talking about his love for white truffles or Wes Anderson reading a recipe for roast pigeon stuffed with cotechino.
Yet, somehow she makes the time—like right now. The 76-year-old multihyphenate chef is calling me from a cab in London as she heads to her home in Chelsea after a busy day at the restaurant. Though she’s an entire ocean away and we have never once met, our conversation feels like two girlfriends catching up over coffee. I can’t say that I am entirely surprised; we’re talking about a woman who makes tomato sauce at her house with Jake Gyllenhaal and calls Glenn Close one of her best friends.
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Lovingly known as “Ruthie”—also endowed with the title Baroness Rogers of Riverside and appointed to the Commander of the Order of the British Empire as of 2020—Rogers has a warm smile and fine strawberry-blond hair, with wispy bangs that frame the sharp blue eyes of a detail-oriented chef who is not afraid to take risks. Her transatlantic accent carries her history: Born and raised in upstate New York, she settled in the U.K. at 19. Soon after she landed across the pond, she met and fell in love with her late husband, Richard Rogers, an Italian-born architect whose legacy includes the iconic Millennium Dome and Centre Pompidou. As the story goes, sharing meals became a central point in their relationship. “We always worked over food,” she tells me. “We met friends over food.” Rogers became enamored of the home-cooked dishes of her new in-laws. To this day, she spends August in Tuscany with Richard’s side of the family and always has tomatoes, olive oil, and garlic at home.
In the early 1980s, Richard’s firm, then called Richard Rogers Partnership, took on a modern overhaul of a former industrial compound at Thames Wharf—and out of this an opportunity arose that would become a life-defining venture for the young chef. “There was this little space, teeny tiny,” she recalls, “and he said, ‘Why don’t we put a little place there where people can meet?’” So, with the help of her husband and best friend, the late chef Rose Gray, Rogers opened the River Café in 1987 on the ground floor of the new complex. At the time, the renovated warehouse space on the waterfront with its seasonal Italian dishes was an anomaly in London’s food scene, and Rogers had almost no restaurant experience to boot. But she had a clear vision. Through the sheer tenacity of its founder, the café, slowly but surely, grew in reputation and size. “We started small, and then we grew,” Rogers fondly remembers. “When we began we were eight, maybe 10 tables. And we had restrictions—we were only allowed to open at lunch, Monday through Friday, because we were in a residential community. And most of all, we were not allowed to open to the public. It had to be a kind of a canteen for the people who worked in the community,” she says, counting locals, construction workers, and architects among those who frequented the tables in the early days.
The welcoming nature of River Café also owes to Rogers’ attitude toward her patrons, whether they number in the dozens or the hundreds. “Life is about stories and conversation, and food is a magnet, a connector to those stories,” she says. “I often say ‘Every table has a story…’ There are so many things that happen to people before they sit down at a table.” Alongside the communal atmosphere, the influence of Italian traditions around food extends to her overarching approach to preparation. She describes her ethos as the “simplicity of complexity,” referring to how simple recipes, properly executed, can yield sophisticated flavors.
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As for her own story, there’s a new chapter still in the making: Last summer, for the first time since her culinary debut 38 years ago, Rogers embarked on opening a new spot, the River Café Café. Steps away from the main restaurant, the more casual dining experience is housed in what had been the headquarters of Richard’s firm, which rebranded as RSHP after his passing.
While our back and forth is riddled with positivity and steady willingness, it’s not lost on me that running the same highly successful restaurant empire for almost 40 years has certainly been punctuated with personal loss. In 2010, Gray died from a brain tumor. The year after, Rogers suffered the loss of her son, Bo Rogers, then her husband passed away in 2021. Today, she finds different ways to include each of them in our conversation. One story after the next. “I have no advice to give about grief,” she shares. “Everybody finds their own way. There’s no right way, and there’s no wrong way. For me, right now, being active is the path I’ve taken.”