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Ruthie Rogers is much more than the co-founder and chef behind the Michelin-starred River Café in London. She also hosts the podcast Ruthie’s Table 4, in which she invites famous names to share their food memories.

And now, she has incorporated those interviews into a new book: “Table 4 at The River Cafe: Conversations about Food and Life” (published by Gallery Books), which features actors, musicians, artists, athletes and politicians reminiscing about the comforts of food.

Read an except below from Oscar-nominated actor Austin Butler, and don’t miss Seth Doane’s interview with Ruthie Rogers on “CBS Sunday Morning” March 22!

“Table 4 at The River Cafe” by Ruthie Rogers

Austin Butler

Shortly after he completed filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, Austin arrived in London to shoot the World War II series Masters of the Air. This was in the period when the Covid-19 lockdown had only just been lifted and people were reacclimating to socializing. My friend Kadee Robbins decided to start a new tradition, hosting a small group of friends for a weekly Sunday dinner. We did so for twenty-nine weeks. Austin, a Californian far from home, became part of this group. He is family to me now.

It was challenging trying to decide which chapter of this book Austin Butler should be in. Tradition? This would be fitting and in honor of our ritual dinners and card games. Or Family? Because Austin truly is a part of mine. When he comes to visit, we don’t go out much, mostly shopping, cooking, and eating together, as family does. But in the end we chose this chapter: Discovery. Because, quite simply, being with Austin is, for me, always a discovery.

When he returned to The River Cafe for the podcast, he read our recipe for Grilled White Peaches with Amaretto.

***

I was born in Anaheim, right near Disneyland. We had grapefruit trees and an orange tree in the backyard. So the smell of fresh fruit evokes memories of my mom picking lemons and grapefruit and bringing them into the kitchen.

When I was born, she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom; she was a dental hygienist at the time. But my parents divorced when I was seven. She ended up starting a day care out of the house—she’d watch the children of the mothers who taught at the elementary school around the corner that I eventually went to. We always had little children in the house and she had to make meals that were really quick and easy. Things you’d get in the freezer aisle, like fish sticks and corn dogs. Nothing really gourmet at all.

As the years went on, she became vegetarian and then vegan. She got really into making things like portobello mushrooms and bell peppers stuffed with couscous. But when I was growing up, it wasn’t extremely healthy in the house. It was efficient meals. She was working so much. When I started going to elementary school, I would walk home every day for lunch and she’d have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich waiting for me. We’d watch this home decorating show called Surprise by Design and come up with things that we were going to do around the house. We’d get inspired by the show and lay a brick path in the backyard or plant little flowers. I just remember how excited I was to walk home every day and eat the sandwich that she’d made for me.

My dad moved into the garage of a person he worked with. It had a little miniature fridge where we kept all our groceries. We slept on air mattresses at night and pulled them up during the day to make room for a table. There was a treadmill in the corner. We shared our landlord’s kitchen, but otherwise, we had just this one room.

I started cooking as a kid because my dad had to work. He would say, “Hey, I’ll pay you $2 if you cook dinner tonight.” It became a way for me to stock up money as a kid. We’d go to Costco and buy food in bulk. I’d make burritos with Dennison’s chili beans out of a can and some sour cream and cheese. A special occasion would be getting a $5 pizza from down the road. Years later, coming to a place like The River Cafe or the French Laundry, I felt out of my element, because $5 sounded like a lot for a meal when I was a kid.

I moved out when I was seventeen. I started wanting to learn how to make food and how flavors fit together. So when I started to make money, I started trying restaurants in L.A. and New York.

There hasn’t been a lot of continuity in many areas of my life since I was young, because I travel a lot. Even the nature of doing a film or a TV show, you make a family of the entire cast and crew and then it splits up. Through therapy, I realized that I was almost reliving my childhood—you have a family and then it splits up. So I’d seek out ways of having stability and consistency. So when I’m on location, whether in Vancouver or New Zealand or Australia or London, I find a restaurant that becomes my second home and I get to the point where I go there every day, and the staff knows me and I know them.

Suddenly, it feels like there is this thing separate from my work that feels like home. Even if I’ve woken up with anxiety or I feel sad or overwhelmed, I go to a restaurant. I’ll come with a book so I get to read, and I know the people who work there. This morning, I could hardly leave the house. I just felt anxious for some reason. Then I thought, “I’ve got to get to The River Cafe.” Once you get here, suddenly there’s life around you and it sort of buzzes. You feel humanity wash over you, things that are happening outside of your own experience. And you eat delicious food. That really helps.

For a time, I lived in a beautiful house in Los Angeles that had belonged to Gary Oldman. He had built a pizza oven and I became obsessed with learning how to make the perfect pizza, using a specific type of wood. I got one of those laser temperature gauges so I could make it a thousand degrees. Learned how to make the pizza sauce and the dough from scratch. The first couple of pizzas came out kind of rough. Then I started to get really into a zone. It’s amazing to me how fast you can cook a pizza, in thirty or forty five seconds.

Then I thought, “What else can I cook in this fire?” There’s a restaurant in Laurel Canyon called Pace that makes this salmon on a cedar plank. I thought, “I want to learn how to make that.” So I got these cedar planks. You soak them in water and put the salmon on top, seasoning it and sticking it in the wood fire. It came out incredibly.

One of the best trips I ever took was to Italy, probably four years before Elvis. Spent a month just road-tripping with my girlfriend at the time. We started in Milan, drove to Portofino, and went to Cinque Terre and hiked between the little villages and visited the vineyards.

Then we drove to Florence, and after that, to a little bed and breakfast in Tuscany. It was run by this beautiful Italian woman and her husband. They had two daughters. One of the daughters would play piano in the afternoon and you’d hear it reverberating through the vineyard. The woman would bring focaccia up and we’d eat it around the pool in the afternoon. One night, her husband had caught a wild boar, so she prepared it for us and it was just absolutely divine. One of their daughters was dating a young man who was eighteen years old, half Israeli and half Italian. He told me, “You know, I’m a pilot. I can fly you if you want me to.”

I said, “Wow, that would be cool.” But I was thinking, “I’m not putting our lives in this eighteen-year-old kid’s hands.” The next night, his mom came to dinner and she was in the Israeli Air Force. She said, “You know, he’s actually a very good pilot.” So I thought, “You only live once.” He offered to fly us to Elba, where Napoleon was exiled. I said, “Let’s do it. I’ll pay for gas. I’ll pay for the plane.”

We ended up getting in the car. Turns out he couldn’t drive a car, though he could fly a plane. So I drove us all: me and my girlfriend, him and his girlfriend. We drove up to the little private area of the Florence airport. He went to a garage and pulled out, by hand, a four-seater Cessna. We went through all the preflight checks and took off. It felt like riding in a go-kart. I couldn’t hear him at all. It was static in the headphones and I saw panic over his face. I was thinking, “He’s the only person who can land this plane.”

But it was only that he couldn’t figure out how to switch a certain switch so that we could hear each other. Once he figured that out, peace came upon the airplane. Then he told me, “It’s a dangerous landing place in Elba because you have to fly in this zigzag pattern.” So I went back to thinking, “Oh, God, we’re trusting this eighteen-year-old.”

We ended up zigzagging through the mountains of Elba and landing safely, thankfully. We ate pasta with him and his girlfriend that day for lunch. They flew back. We stayed and rode around on Vespas and ate pasta at all these different beaches on Elba. Went to the vineyards that Napoleon used to go to. He came back three days later, picked us up on the plane, and we flew back to Florence. It was magic.

I did Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with Quentin Tarantino. On one night shoot, at about three in the morning, he had this amazing crepe-maker come and make crepes. As we were eating them, he said, “Austin, you know what my thing is? I want to give everybody such a good experience on this job that their next job sucks.”

So every night, there would be some new food thing that he would organize, to give you something to look forward to. The other thing that he did was, after every hundred rolls of film, he’d throw a party and it would have a theme. So grappa would come out, or there would be margaritas and a mariachi band.

When we wrapped Elvis, Baz and I were at his house in Australia with a small group. It was the first time that he and I were both able to go, “Ah, we did it.” We put on vinyl records, danced, ate oysters, and just lived life.

Then the sun started to come up and Baz looked out. He said, “Should we go swim in the ocean right now?” We ran across the street and jumped in the ocean, around five in the morning. I said, “Baz, I can’t believe I was going to go to sleep tonight!” He started singing “Nessun dorma” to me and going, “No sleep tonight. No sleep tonight.” I hadn’t heard that opera so he told me its story. Then he said, “I’ll play it for you when we get back to the shore.”

I took a second for myself in the ocean. I watched the sun rise and processed all that we had done. Then, as I slowly walked back to shore, I saw Baz holding a speaker above his head like John Cusack in Say Anything. He was playing “Nessun dorma,” the Pavarotti version, blaring at 5:30 in the morning on the beaches of the Gold Coast. It was so magical and cinematic.

Then we made breakfast. We looked in the refrigerator and thought, “Okay, what can we make?” There’s this thing about filming where you have so many responsibilities that other people end up almost treating you like you’re a child. They walk you to the bathroom. They walk you to your trailer. You’re very spoiled in many ways, but there’s something relieving about that moment when you’re finally able to do something for yourself.

So Baz and I at breakfast—that was our moment. We opened the refrigerator: “Okay, we got eggs, we got asparagus, we got some spinach, we got some tomatoes, we got some Parmesan cheese.” We made this great breakfast and cut off bits of a loaf of bread. Just a delicious meal. Then we just sat there as the morning sun laid down on us. It’s one of the most glorious memories of my life.

Austin, what is your comfort food?

My mother’s no longer here. She passed away when I was twenty-three. After a big week, or if I’m feeling really overwhelmed, I’ll make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It brings back that comforting sensation.

     
Excerpted from “TABLE 4 AT THE RIVER CAFE” by Ruthie Rogers. Copyright © 2025 by Atomized Studios Limited and The River Cafe, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. 

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