The River Cafe, a bustling London restaurant, has kept its Michelin star since the late ’90s. Ruthie Rogers is not just co-founder, owner and chef; she is maestra of this Italian restaurant, conductor and, on the floor of her blue-carpeted, celebrity-filled world, connector.

“I love talking to Wyclef Jean; that was really spontaneous,” she said. “And he just loves food. And within 10 minutes he was just talking, and talking, and talking.”

What could be dismissed as name-dropping (“And when Tina Fey came with her husband…”) is, for Rogers, just genuine chat about people in her orbit.

“I mean, you know, to have Francis Ford Coppola, he used to come here quite often; he lived near here. He really was honest and open,” she said. “We both have sons who died. My son died when he was 26. And so, we talked about that. We talked about how, when I was told about the death of my son and everyone came home, I said, could somebody put some tomato sauce on? I need to smell something cooking, which was not because I was hungry, but it needed to feel a sense of continuity, and comfort.”

Those talks – she always asks about comfort food – have been compiled into a new book, “Table 4 at the River Cafe,” featuring folks like Elton John and Sarah Jessica Parker, and surprising links: Martha Stewart, Mel Brooks and Frank Gehry all had mothers who kept live carp in the bathtub, to keep it fresh before it became dinner.

Rogers said, “When you look through the lens of food and you talk to people, you find memories that you might not have found otherwise. I think if I had said to Paul McCartney, ‘I’d like to do an interview with you about The Beatles,’ or if I’d said to David Beckham, ‘Can we do an interview about football,’ they would’ve said, ‘Ruthie, you know, we’ve kind of been there and done that.”

The book is born from her podcast, a COVID-era desire to connect over food.

Chef Jamie Oliver came to record, despite trying to open a restaurant on the same day. (He’s in the book, too.) “I love her so much,” he said, “and she has, like, hundreds of me. I’m gonna be opening a restaurant today. I’ve got 100 people that need me. Ruthie phones up, I’m here. ‘What do you need?’ ‘I need you up a mountain, Timbuktu.’ ‘I’ll be there, with bells on.'”

After all, the American-born Rogers, and her late business partner, Rose Gray, hired Oliver early on. Then, a documentary shot here led to him being discovered, and turned into a star as “The Naked Chef.”

Oliver said, “Every day when I’m cooking, I’m thinking, ‘How do I do this? What’s the best way to express this for this audience at this price?’ And there’s always Rose and Ruthie. She’s with me every day.”

Late husband Richard Rogers, who along with fellow architect Renzo Piano designed Paris’ Pompidou Center, needed a canteen in his new London architecture firm. “So, we thought we’d open a little cafe here. I just remember I said to Richard, ‘You know, maybe I’ll do it.'”

So, she phoned her friend Rose Gray, and they began with six tables serving a simple lunch. Rogers had no cooking background at all. “Only home, domestic,” she said.

Sian Wyn Owen is one of the head chefs now: “Coming to the River Cafe where it was two women – it was Rose and Ruth – and to see how you could run a kitchen with what Ruthie always said, hope rather than fear.”

She showed how their lemon tart is finished in the wood burning oven – fun, and a bit of drama. “Exactly. Just like the River Cafe!” she laughed.

It has been on the menu for most all of her 26 years here. She’s relatively new: managers Vashti Armit and Charles Pullan have been here for 31 and 35 years, respectively.

Pullan says the spirit of the restaurant starts with Rogers: “And then it comes from the staff who work here, and it all rubs off on each other. And so, when people come in, hopefully there’s always a sense of that excitement.”

You’re lucky to get a table – luckier if you’re not paying the bill – in this restaurant which feels a bit more like a salon of the 17th century, a place filled with personality … and personalities.

Rogers pulled English soccer legend and sports broadcaster Gary Lineker into the podcast (she’d run into him eating the night before), and since I was standing there, she pulled up a chair for me.

Ruthie Rogers is always pulling up a chair for someone: “Connecting is huge,” she said. “That’s why I love a restaurant.”

And that’s why she believes restaurants should be on any list of what makes a city like London great.

READ AN EXCERPT: “Table 4 at The River Cafe” by Ruthie Rogers

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Story produced by Erin Lyall and Jon Carras. Editor: Jason Schmidt.

The River Cafe in London has had a Michelin star since the late 1990s, thanks to co-founder, owner and acclaimed chef Ruthie Rogers. Seth Doane talks with the American-born Rogers about her fabled Italian restaurant, her new book, “Table 4 at the River Cafe,” and her podcast, all of which celebrate the connections brought about by conversations and comfort food.

If you had a television set in the 1950s, there’s a better-than-even chance that each week you were watching comic Sid Caesar. “I don’t think there’s anybody comparable now, and I don’t think there’s ever been anyone comparable,” said writer David Margolick, the author of “When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy.”

And he was! As many as 20 million people tuned into Caesar’s live weekly variety series, “Your Show of Shows.” “If you had a store that was open on Saturday night, or you were staging live shows on Broadway, you were very unhappy with ‘Your Show of Shows,’ and you complained to NBC about it,” Margolick said. “The whole culture really changed.”

And get a load of Caesar’s writing staff: Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen and Neil Simon all wrote sketches for “Your Show of Shows,” or, later, for “Caesar’s Hour.” 

In 2001 Neil Simon told “Sunday Morning,” “He picked maybe the best group of writers, I think, that ever appeared on one show together. Almost everyone who came out of that show went on to write theater and films and television, and be successful in all of them.”

But while much has been said about Caesar’s writers, all these future legends, Caesar’s talent has not really been appreciated. “Sid Caesar has become his writer’s room, and in a way, he’s been eclipsed by his disciples,” Margolick said.

Which is why it’s time to put the spotlight back on the guy who brought them together.

Stand-up comedian and actor Robert Klein was nine years old in 1951, when his family got their first TV, and watched “Your Shows of Shows.” “Sid Caesar, when he did a sketch, he was 100 percent in that moment,” Klein said. “He was totally committed to it. … You know, acting to me basically is pretending you’re someone else. In that sense, he was certainly a great actor.”

He called Caesar’s show much classier than the program starring the other early TV comedy superstar, Milton Berle, who was all schtick. “Berle had already worn out a little,” Klein said. “This was spectacular. This was a Broadway revue brought to television. It was more sophisticated. And one could say intelligent in its silliness.”

With Caesar and his costars, including the great Imogene Coca, you got parodies of Hollywood classics like “From Here to Eternity” … a pantomimed marital spat to the score of Beethoven’s Fifth … and a range of sharply-drawn characters opposite writer/straight man Carl Reiner.

Caesar was also an accomplished saxophonist. “There’s music in everything he did, and not only musical sketches; there’s a kind of rhythm,” Klein said.

We talked with Margolick at the legendary restaurant Barney Greengrass on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Barney Greengrass represents a milestone in Sid Caesar’s career,” Margolick said. “He told me, when I interviewed him, that when he knew he could come to Barney Greengrass and have as much sturgeon as he damn-well pleased, even though it was $5 a pound, he knew that he had really arrived.”

A rare pleasure for a man who didn’t seem terribly happy. He was, according to Margolick, an angry man: “He often talked about his childhood. Caesar was the fourth and final, and maybe unwanted, son of an unhappy marriage.”

Caesar’s parents ran a luncheonette in Yonkers, New York, where young Sid learned to mimic the accents of the European immigrants who ate there.

But 39 episodes a season took its toll. “Caesar started drinking early, and became an alcoholic,” Margolick said. “And when the alcoholism and the strain of the show kept him up, he started taking pills to knock himself out at night.”

And tastes had changed. When Caesar debuted on the small screen, television set owners were disproportionately wealthier and more educated. “So inexorably, television spread into areas where Caesar’s comedy was not going to be as appealing,” said Margolick. “And when the audience became less highbrow, people thought that Caesar was talking down to them, and they actually resented him.”

The death knell was sounded by bandleader Lawrence Welk over on ABC; Welk drowned him in the ratings with his champagne music, despite Caesar’s best efforts (and even a wicked parody of Welk). “It’s amazing to watch Sid with his fangs exposed,” Margolick said.

Caesar’s reign had lasted less than a decade. A later generation knew him primarily as the guy who played the coach in the movie “Grease.” “This is a great pity, that that’s the only thing that people know,” Margolick said. “Caesar was really through by the early ’60s. He was barely 40, and the comic community tried to keep him going.”

Sid Caesar eventually got sober. He died in February 2014 at the age of 91.

Here’s what the man himself said on “Sunday Morning” in 2001: “When I finally became friends with myself, that’s when I could enjoy life. Everything became easier.”

READ AN EXCERPT: “When Caesar Was King” by David Margolick

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Story produced by Jay Kernis. Editor: Jason Schmidt. 

Comic Sid Caesar (1922-2014) was a master of humor, slapstick and accents, whose 1950s series “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour” rewrote the rules of comedy in the new medium of television. Correspondent Mo Rocca talks with David Margolick, author of the biography “When Caesar Was King,” and with comedian Robert Klein, about the unique gifts of Caesar (whose reputation has been eclipsed by the writers he hired, including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen and Neil Simon); and how the hard work of seemingly effortless laughs took its toll on the comedian.

Robert Therrien (1947-2019) arrived during the emerging L.A. art scene in the early 1970s, and became best known for his over-sized objects – tables, chairs and household fixtures that dwarf the viewer. He’s now the subject of a larger-than-life exhibition currently at the Broad in Los Angeles, called “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story.” Luke Burbank takes the measure of an art world giant.