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Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray opened the River Cafe in 1987 in a former warehouse beside the Thames in Hammersmith. Gray had run kitchens in New York and lived in Italy, and they shared a conviction: the Italian food they had eaten themselves had no equivalent in Britain.
So they went and brought it back. They travelled through Italy region by region, sought out individual producers and brought home olive oil, Parmesan, anchovies, tomatoes and beans that could not be bought in London. A large part of the work was first getting hold of the right ingredient and then doing as little as possible to it.
The food looks accordingly. Grilled squid with chilli and rocket. Tagliatelle with butter and sage. Whole fish baked with lemon and oregano. And Chocolate Nemesis, their chocolate cake that has become one of Britain's most widely made desserts and is notorious for going wrong the moment you change the slightest thing.
The restaurant received its Michelin star in 1998 and is still fully booked. Rose Gray died in 2010 and Ruth Rogers continues to run it. The book has remained in print since 1995.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 320
Language: English
First published: 1995
The Kitchen Lab Selection
The recipes are short to the point of rudeness. Four ingredients, three lines, done. It sounds like laziness until you realise that is the whole point. If the ingredient is not good, there is nowhere to hide. The restaurant also began as a staff canteen for an architectural practice in Hammersmith, which may explain why nobody there cared much about how a cookbook was supposed to look.
That it worked is easiest to see in who stood in their kitchen. Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, April Bloomfield and Theo Randall, all of them before they became anything. It is an improbable list from a single restaurant.
In 1995, Italian in Britain still meant spaghetti bolognese and a candle in a chianti bottle. It did not take long after this book before it stopped meaning that.
