Ruth Rogers profile. The Age
Kitchen royalty doesn’t come more august and influential nor, as it turns out, more down to earth than River Cafe co-founder Ruth Rogers. Rogers and the late Rose Gray opened their produce-driven Italian restaurant in London, on the northern bank of the Thames, in 1987. The motivation, at least partly, was to feed Ruth’s ‘‘starchitect’’ husband Richard Rogers, whose offices are next door. But Rogers and Gray always cooked with rigour and a sense of abundance and the River Cafe was never just a staff canteen. Its alumni include April Bloomfield, Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and, closer to home, Jesse Gerner, Tobie Puttock and many more. I nabbed ‘‘Ruthie’’ Rogers during the recent Melbourne Food and Wine Festival to ask her about her cooking musts and must-nots.