Celebrated chef Ruth Rogers dishes up the dining secrets of Elton John, Tony Blair and David Beckham

Restaurateur, author and widow of star architect Richard Rogers, Rogers set up London’s fabled River Café restaurant in 1987 with her friend, the chef Rose Grey. It began as a staff canteen for her husband’s architecture practice and in the decades that followed it has gained a Michelin star and lost Gray, who died in 2010.

The restaurant by the Thames at Hammersmith has long been favoured by what used to be called the international jet set, politicians, Hollywood actors, musicians. It means Rogers can, without affectation, drop into our conversation lines about ex-Prime Ministers’ food choices. “When Tony Blair comes to the River Café, he often has sea bass,” she tells me. “He’s a real fish person.”

Their relationship goes back to the 90s heyday of Cool Britannia. Before Blair was elected in 1997, Rogers oversaw a soirée at the future PM’s house and took along a young apprentice to make the rotolo di spinaci. "We cooked for him at a dinner party when he was running for office and the chef I asked to go to his house was Jamie Oliver, who was a very junior chef at the time."

Blair is also a guest on the new series of a podcast that began when lockdown obliged Rogers to shut the doors of River Café. Now in its fourth series, Ruthie’s Table 4 has a simple concept: guests talk about food and dishes that matter to them, encouraged by Rogers who will often ask what their favourite comfort food is. “Michael Caine said it used to be potatoes, now it’s caviar.” For Austin Butler, the actor who played Elvis Presley in the 2022 film Elvis, it was, “a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which he’d shared with his mother before she died”.

The 76-year-old also asks guests to read out recipes and in the new series the film director Guillermo del Toro obliges with the recipe for pizza with artichokes. And Elton John? “Elton did risotto with mushrooms, because it’s kind of seasonal now.” John also allowed Ruthie into the family home in Windsor that he shares with his husband David Furnish, which is usually off limits.

“I first asked them three years ago, and Elton said, ‘Ruthie, I have to finish the album.’ Or ‘Ruthie, I have to go to Las Vegas.’ Or ‘Ruthie, I’m on a tour. We will, we will, we will.’ Then he had a hard time with his eyes in the summer [the musician has suffered from a severe eye infection this year], so there was always something. But David wrote to me and said, ‘Elton’s free next Wednesday. How about it?’”

Ruthie’s Table 4 could be seen as canny self-promotion, but the podcast has stumbled across a particularly effective way of talking about the power of food and its centrality to our lives. For example, Tony Blair was able to lay out the limits of political power, simply by considering what he has eaten over the past few decades.

“We talked about his mother’s garden, growing up and being sent to boarding school,” says Rogers. “And we talked about when he moved into Downing Street in 1997. You have to buy your own lunch; you have to cook your own food. They actually have to go to Waitrose and get some shopping and then come back and be Prime Minister. It’s kind of crazy.” There’s not a chef there? “There is, but for state dinners – not full time. Alastair Campbell told me that a working lunch at No 10 was somebody going down to Pret a Manger and getting some sandwiches.”

Rogers, a Francophile who lived in Paris when her husband was working on the Pompidou Centre, expresses surprise at the way “Britain sees the role of food and their Prime Minister”. A French leader at the Élysée Palace, she points out, would suffer no such indignity. “I would think there are five chefs downstairs making a soufflé for President Macron. For the office of the President, it’s a priority.”

She is clearly fascinated by the way good food and good wine allows people to re-invent themselves; especially working-class people who achieve riches and fame. Paul McCartney told her about the first time he drank wine, in Paris with John Lennon. “He said, ‘We had no money and so we only had the cheapest, cheapest wines. So we thought wine was rubbish. And then I came back and Brian Epstein, after our first album, took us to L’Escargot [restaurant in London] and we had an amazing glass of wine. We discovered wine.’”

Newly wealthy footballer David Beckham, who Rogers says is “obsessed by food”, found the confidence to not simply pick the most expensive when dining with his partner. “He told me, ‘I took Victoria out and we didn’t have to look at the right side of the menu. We could just order what we wanted.’”

Another great footballer offered a very different dining revelation. “Ian Wright almost didn’t know how to use a table setting. He said that he ate at home from a tray watching television. And that’s not because he had bad parents, it was because they were both out working.”

Some interviewees have faced occasions when they have been too poor to eat, like artist Tracey Emin. “Tracey said she was so poor, she had to sometimes think, ‘What can I do to get food?’, which is quite extreme.”

But like a good meal, a successful podcast must combine the sweet and the salty. There should be room for serious conversation but also time for fun – something that Guillermo del Toro is happy to provide in the new series. “Guillermo is Mexican,” she says. “I have a very strong attachment to Mexico and we both have a very strong attachment to tequila. So we were drinking lots of different tequilas at 12 noon last Sunday. It’s a very jolly podcast.”

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