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London, United Kingdom; Paris, France
M:
Lovely to see you.
R:
Yes, it's been so long.
M:
How is the restaurant going?
R:
Good, it's been crazy because the weather was great — and also Art Basel was crazy. I'm glad it's over. We [catered for] 600 people – we missed you, Margot! – in the museum, with no water.
M:
Oh, wow. [Laughs] Can you remember – how many were we for Paul Smith? How many did we do? That was little, wasn't it?
R:
That was 100.
M:
That's the first time I met you, was when we went to Paris to look at this site, where we were doing a Paul Smith dinner — and then we had lunch at your studio.
R:
We stayed five hours together, until your train departure and then, of course, I started to gift you, like, five liters of olive oil, one meter of cinnamon – and you took everything on the train. I don't know how you did it.
M:
I think I've got some of the cinnamon here! But, anyway, what makes a great party?
R:
What makes a great party is the host.
M:
The host. The hostess with the mostest. What makes a great host?
R:
What makes the great host is generosity.
M:
That's what I was going to say. Generosity, warmth, somebody who's relaxed.
R:
You’ve got to lose it a little bit. at one point you can't control it anymore, you just let go. Then the team in the kitchen is like, “Okay… she left us. And now we just have to clean up.” [Laughs]
M:
Do you have lots of dinner parties at home?
R:
Yes, a lot —when I see things or I have an idea of “I want to cook this”, I call people. I think it's because, in my childhood in Thailand, we shared food a lot. It's the thing we share the most: food. When you go to a restaurant, you never order your dishes just for you.
You know, my father never ate alone in his whole life. I don't know how he did it.
Dinner would start at 6:30, and when the food arrived on the table, he would start to call people. Sometimes we’d end up with 20 people that we didn’t even know, like a friend of a friend of a friend. He would start calling one person like, "Hey, there's food on the table. Come here." Then we end up playing poker — every night like that.
If he had to eat alone, he didn’t eat, he’d go to his bedroom and he’d watch television.
M:
At home things can go wilder, obviously because it's more private than an event— but I think what you're trying to do at an event is bring that relaxed feeling of home.
R:
But the energy of working on the food is the same. But, you have a little bit more freedom [at home] and, like you said, it's more wild, and you can really get into it and enjoy it.
M:
When it's an event, I'm always trying to get them to eat the food that I think they should have! [Laughs] Say an artichoke or something like bone marrow: that action of when you're pulling and placing things and moving things around, I think that relaxes and breaks up that stiffness.
Architects, I think, are the best to feed. They love food. They always eat everything.
R:
Really?
We do [a closing party] every year for Thomas Ostermeier. Last time was King Lear at the Comédie-Française—amazing. We fed them – like all the musicians, actors, and costume designers – and every time we did a party for them, after the last show, we always ended up with the police.
[Laughter]
They make so much noise.
M:
Do you feed them Thai food?
R:
Yes!
M:
In Shakespeare's time, instead of plates they had trenchers, which is like a bread plate — and we've made them before. You make this flat dough and then you'd have your beef and its dripping on top, and that's what you eat. They're like a sandwich. I suppose they were the first sandwiches, but it's called a trencher.
R:
Maybe we should try to do curry with a trencher.
M:
The days of bad dinners at events are over, aren’t they?
R:
Yes, exactly.
M:
I think that has changed a lot over the last 10 years, hasn't it?
R:
Yes, because they wanted to be safe, and they also wanted a buffet table full of flowers, there was no space for food.
M:
Flowers. Get rid of the flowers! I don't like flowers to be too tall either, because you have to — It's all about conversation and food, isn't it?
You don't want the tables too wide. We cooked in Vienna a few times, at a big gallery there, and when we first arrived, they used to do all their dinners on these huge round tables and they said that the guests would text each other on the phone because they couldn't hear each other, so they just talked to each other on their phones.
So, we got long, thin tables, much more like feasting tables. I think that really can bring more atmosphere and excitement to a room as well.
R:
Oh, so nice. I like long tables more than round tables.
M:
Yes, I do too. Yes.
R:
It's elegant. It's nice.
M:
More of a… feast. It has a grand feel as well.
R:
If you see all the old paintings, it’s always a long table. There's never a round table.
M:
Hmmm, and what goes wrong?
It's all about solving problems. You want things to be “effortless.” I think we both cook simple food, that's not over complicated so that things like that work.
R:
For me, something always goes wrong, always. Like you say, we are here to solve the problem. It's teamwork. It's never 100% synchronized, because we don't have a rehearsal, it's improvisation in a way — It always goes wrong.
M:
Are you going to open another restaurant?
R:
No, but I'm looking for space to do something like an atelier kitchen where I can make jam — like the one I used to have in rue Vieille-du-Temple. I want to have a kitchen for private dinners.
M:
Lovely. I'm opening a pub in Somerset. Not yet, in February.
R:
Yeah, I'm coming!
R:
When are you coming to Paris, Margot? [Laughs]
M:
All our friends are living in Paris now. Paris is hot.
R:
Come. You will stay at my house, you’ve always got a room here.
M:
We would love that. Lots of love.
R:
Lots of love.
M:
Bye!
