Ruth Rogers - River Cafe London: Thirty Years of Recipes and the Story of a Much-Loved Restaurant: A Cookbook

Reinhard Voigt

Change is timeless. A good restaurant is alive. It lives, it grows and so do its recipes.

In the twenty-two years since we wrote our first cookbook or the blue book, as it has become known, much has changedthe way we eat, the way we shop and the way we cook. There has been an explosion in the availability of ingredients. Vegetables arrive daily from the Milan market, mozzarella is flown in from Naples, people grow herbs in their window boxes and salad leaves in their gardens.

Everyone is a chef.

Our first book, The River Cafe Cookbook, was written originally to be a manual for our own chefs to follow. But, as chefs, we have grown as well. We have traveled all over Italy, from Piemonte to Sicily, discovering new ingredients, new methods and, most of all, new people to expand our knowledge of the food we love. So, in thirty years, our book has changed.

To celebrate our thirtieth birthday, we returned to our first recipes in the blue book. Here we share our knowledge and experience of how we have refined those classic dishes.

Mixed in with the revisited classics are more than thirty new recipes created through our work and travels together: Mezze Paccheri, Black Pepper and Langoustine, an eccentric combination of langoustines with Pecorino; White Asparagus with Bottarga Butter, a variation on the classic anchovy sauce; and Crab and Raw Artichoke Salad.

The design of River Cafe London, by Anthony Michael and Stephanie Nash, is inspired by the bold art, architecture and bright colors of the restaurantthe pink wood oven, the yellow pass, the blue carpet. The Joseph Albers font, throughout the book, reflects these qualities.

Matthew Donaldson photographed the food on sunny days in our garden. Jean Pigozzi, who took the dynamic black-and-white photographs of the restaurant in action for our first book, returned to capture the customers, chefs and waiters who are the River Cafe family.

River Cafe London is the story of a restaurant that began with two unknown chefs and a space large enough for nine tables.

We have grown. We have a new vision, but the same conclusion: with good ingredients and a strong tradition, change and recipes can be timeless.

In 1991, Ellsworth Kelly drew a still life on the

back of a River Cafe menu and, on another,

a self-portrait, looking in the mirror of the

mens bathroom.

Cy Twombly, in his distinctive hand, wrote

I love lunch with Ruthie on a menu, after a

long Sunday lunch celebrating his exhibition

at the Serpentine Gallery in 2004.

For this book, we asked the artists in the

River Cafes extended family to draw or

paint on a menu.

There is a connection between art and

food, and these works are unmistakably an

expression of each artist.

We love cooking for them:

Peter Doig, Susan Elias, Damien Hirst,

Brice Marden, Michael Craig Martin,

Ed Ruscha, Reinhard Voigt, Jonas Wood.

We thank them for making River Cafe London

a more beautiful book.

Richard Bryant

The River Cafe

So, how did it all begin thirty years ago?

In March of 1987, Rose Gray and I met for a coffee. I wanted to tell her about a space that had come up in Thames Wharf where Richard Rogers and Partners had just bought a group of warehouses to convert into offices for their architectural practice.