Ruthie Rogers Explores Food, Memory, and Life in New Conversations Book

Actor Austin Butler can barely leave the house some mornings. Anxiety pins him down until one thought cuts through: get to The River Cafe. "Once you get here, suddenly there's life around you and it sort of buzzes," Butler writes in an excerpt from Ruthie Rogers' new book, "Table 4 at The River Cafe: Conversations about Food and Life," published by Gallery Books. "You feel humanity wash over you, things that are happening outside of your own experience. And you eat delicious food. That really helps."

Butler's contribution is among the most personal in the collection, which Rogers built from her podcast Ruthie's Table 4 after conducting more than 200 interviews with public figures across film, music, art and politics. The book features conversations with Nigella Lawson, Tina Fey, Greta Gerwig, Alice Waters, Tracey Emin, Kamala Harris, Al Gore, Sir Paul McCartney, Elton John, David Beckham and Jake Gyllenhaal, among others.

Butler recalls a sunrise breakfast in Australia with director Baz Luhrmann after finishing the film "Elvis": eggs, asparagus, spinach, tomatoes, Parmesan and torn bread, eaten as morning light spread across them. "It's one of the most glorious memories of my life," he writes. His comfort food is more humble. His mother died when he was twenty-three, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich still carries her back to him. "It brings back that comforting sensation," he said.

Rogers herself connects food most directly to simplicity. Her personal comfort dish involves tomatoes, pasta and butter, which she described in a recent interview: "I toss it through the pasta. And then I toss the tomato in it. And so it makes it just a bit more connected." Her dessert preference runs equally plain. "I love vanilla ice cream," she said. "I just love it if it's good."

Rogers co-founded The River Cafe in London in 1987 alongside the late chef Rose Gray. The restaurant has held a Michelin star since the late 1990s and Rogers still arrives each morning to write a new menu from scratch, changing into chef whites before the day begins. Her Chelsea home, designed by her late husband, the architect Richard Rogers, holds an orange Brompton bicycle propped against a living room column, kept, she has said, as sculpture rather than transport.

"Table 4 at The River Cafe: Conversations about Food and Life" is available in hardcover and ebook from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.