The River Cafe’s Ruth Rogers on her latest cookbook which brings food, happiness and sunshine in one place

The new book by Ruth Rogers is a bright, lemon-yellow ode to art, friendship and food. Hannah Twiggs meets the River Cafe founder to talk ‘Squeeze Me’, celebrity friends and why she’s finally opening a less expensive version of London’s most famous restaurant

Ruth Rogers is set to open the River Cafe Cafe, a more affordable sister eaterie (Shutterstock)

When Ruth Rogers was invited to lunch at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for Ed Ruscha’s retrospective, she took the actor Austin Butler as her date. “It was kind of a bit daunting and fancy,” she says, “but he’s the sweetest person in the world.”

Afterwards, she took him to the artist’s LA studio. “They’re very similar,” she adds. “There’s a kind of American way of being down to earth in the best way.” The two have since become good friends. “Which I find very moving,” Rogers says lightly, as if it’s perfectly normal to play cultural matchmaker between an 87-year-old conceptual artist and the star of Elvis.

It’s classic Rogers: charming, offhand and seemingly unaware of how improbable her world sounds to the rest of us.

Few chefs occupy the space Ruth does – somewhere between cultural figurehead and social connector, the quiet centre of an extraordinary Venn diagram that links food, art, architecture and celebrity.

She hosts Ruthie’s Table 4, a podcast where guests from Paul McCartney to Nancy Pelosi to David Beckham talk about the meals that shaped them, and presides over the River Cafe, the one-Michelin-starred west London restaurant she co-founded in 1987 that remains, almost four decades later, both a symbol of serious cooking and a magnet for the A-list.

“Well, I don’t think of them as celebrities,” she says when I ask about her famous friends. “I think of them as interesting people who’ve worked really hard to get where they are.” She bristles slightly at the word – not out of snobbery, perhaps, but principle.

For Rogers, success is clearly something you earn, not inherit. “A lot of them did not grow up entitled, and almost see food as a measure of their success,” she says. “The day they could order a good glass of wine, the day they could go to a restaurant and not be panicked by the price of something – that came not from entitlement, but from hard work.”

Her politics are famously left-wing – she has spoken often about inequality, poverty, sustainability and fairness – but she runs one of the most successful, and least affordable, restaurants in the country.

Rogers with Sarah Jessica Parker, one of many notable guests who have frequented the River Cafe (Supplied)

It’s easy, and perhaps lazy, to paint her as a contradiction: the socialist with the £40 pasta. But the truth is more complicated. She can be wealthy and idealistic at the same time; she can believe in equality and still serve the rich and powerful. The backlash she sometimes attracts says as much about our discomfort with female success as it does about her prices.

That duality – luxury with conscience, glamour with grit – runs through everything she does. Her restaurant, her podcast, even her new book all seem to orbit the same idea: that food can be both rarefied and real, that pleasure and principle aren’t mutually exclusive. Squeeze Me: Lemon Recipes & Art, her collaboration with Ruscha, designer Jony Ive and his wife, poet Heather Ive, is the latest expression of that belief. A radiant yellow ode to lemons.

Ruscha, who rose to prominence in the 1960s for his word-based paintings (OOF, SMASH, HONK), helped define the visual language of American pop art, and became one of the most influential artists of his generation – a fitting partner, then, for a restaurateur who has always seen recipes as “half poetry, half science”.

Rogers has been a fan of his work for years. “I have next to my bed an Ed Ruscha that he did when we were turning 30, eight years ago, and we asked artists to do menus. He did the word ‘YUM’ over one of our menus.” It’s one of her most prized possessions, she says.

An ode to lemons (Rizzoli International Publications)

So this is a different kind of book – part cookbook, part art object – but it has Ruth at its heart in that it encapsulates everything that she is about – and some. “This is a River Cafe book, the recipes are all River Cafe recipes, but it was really done with four friends,” she explains. Ruscha did the art, Heather did the words, Jony did the design, Rogers did the recipes (she requests that I list her last). “It was just a really beautiful experience. I was in London, Ed was in LA and Jony and Heather were in San Francisco. And we just made this book.”

Taking Ruscha’s garden as inspiration – “it’s quite industrial where he is in LA – where he has lemon trees. And so we said, well, let’s take lemon as the ingredient” – the finished book, bright yellow and thick as a small brick, is as distinctive as you’d expect from a team of this calibre. Inside, Ruscha’s photographs of lemons – on soft blue backgrounds – are both painterly and faintly absurd: some whole, some sliced, some zested, some peeled, some squeezed, some entirely bereft of their pips. There are lemons alone and lemons in clusters; lemons with leaves and lemons without; lemons distilled into drinks; lemons that look almost philosophical in their stillness. Around the edges of the images run famous “lemony” quotations and invented aphorisms – Elbert Hubbard’s “When life hands you lemons…” alongside Heather’s “...be the ultimate lemon juggler.” How many times can I write “lemon” in one paragraph?

Rogers with Hollywood actor Austin Butler at a UK gala screening of ‘Elvis’, in which he starred (Getty)

Between these are 47 recipes – lemon risotto with clams and fennel, roast potatoes with lemon peel, bitter greens with capers, lemon almond ricotta cake – scattered without order or logic. There are no tidy sections for starters, mains or desserts. You might find a pork cooked in milk opposite a sorbet, a martini beside a salad. The sequence, Rogers insists, is “dictated by the art”, though she concedes they might keep the book as a coffee table objet as much as they might take the book into the kitchen and make something from it.

It feels less like something to splatter with oil than to admire, perhaps while drinking the martini in question. If her earlier cookbooks were manuals, this one is a mood. “It’s so yellow,” she smiles. “And these days of sort of everybody feeling – I do, anyway – so concerned about the world we’re living in. To have bright yellow and happiness and sunshine is quite nice.”

It also puts friendship at its heart. There’s even a photograph of Drew Barrymore’s daughter Frankie at the end. “That was totally Ed,” Rogers laughs. “From the minute we said we were going to do this, it was like, I want this picture of this little girl who came in and just started eating a lemon.” It doesn’t say who she is, of course – but in Rogers’s world, even the unidentified child polishing off a lemon turns out to be Hollywood bestie royalty.

The River Cafe remains a sought-after spot for London’s fine diners (Universal Images Group/Getty)

Rogers has built her career on this kind of collaboration – from her partnership with Rose Gray, who co-founded the River Cafe with her, to the constellation of chefs who’ve passed through its kitchen: Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Theo Randall. “I’ve chosen to work in a very collaborative way,” she says. “With Rose, from the very first day, we said, let’s not come in with too many notions of what’s right or wrong – let’s achieve it together.”

That culture of kindness, she thinks, is the real secret to longevity. “We try not to do those old-fashioned ways of running a kitchen where people were bullied, or people had to come in super early and stay really late and work seven shifts,” she says. “It’s no different being a chef than being a journalist or a bus driver. I think everyone who works deserves a fair and good life, don’t you?” I agree, obediently.

And yet the River Cafe is, and always has been, a temple of expense-account dining. Antipasti starts at £32, linguine will set you back £38. The Dover sole – wood-roasted with pangrattato, anchovy and lemon zest – is £67. Lovely, undoubtedly, but hardly a midweek bite. Even the book is selling for £35, though at Zara Home it’ll come in a nice matching tote bag. Rogers, who once ran the restaurant as her late husband Richard’s office canteen, isn’t unaware of the criticism. Her answer, she says, is the River Cafe Cafe, the newly opened “more accessible” sister spot across the garden, where you can have “a really delicious meal with River Cafe ingredients” for £35-£40.

Ralph Fiennes was another famous guest on the ‘Ruthie’s Table 4’ podcast (Ruthie’s Table 4)

It’s a clever idea – both a pragmatic nod to the times and a smart way to widen the brand’s reach. “I’m just so excited that it’s opened up to a new group of people who want to have a Nemesis chocolate cake but can’t afford to sit through whatever they do to come into the River Cafe,” Ruth says. “We’re getting people coming in the morning for a piece of polenta cake and a cappuccino,” she says proudly.

If Squeeze Me is her ode to friendship and light, the River Cafe is her living legacy – proof that, even in a city addicted to novelty, integrity still counts for something. “I would hope that it’s because of the very early values that we had and still cling to,” she says. “It’s so important that we have good ingredients, that we find suppliers who care as much as we do about how a vegetable is grown, or how a cow is fed. So it’s all to do with that. It’s just a beautiful space with light, with a view of the river, with kindness.”

And so the conversation ends the way she wants it to – with that photograph of a small child biting into a lemon, face puckered, unapologetically alive. “She just put it in her mouth and started eating it,” Rogers laughs. “And she loves lemons.” It’s hard not to see her in it: still curious, still generous, still squeezing every last drop of joy from a world that’s often far too sharp and serious for many.