You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.

A week ago, we were at the Tape Modern cooking a sit down dinner for seven hundred people to celebrate their twenty fifth birthday.

I'm here today with Sean Owen and Joseph Tavelli, executive chefs of the River Cafe, to tell us how they did it.

I can say that I was there twenty five years ago for the opening date when the Queen opened it.

It was such an amazing I did to have this new museum in the Turbine Hall, you know, to have a museum that was a fixture of London, and it was a power plant on the south bank of the Thames, far from the Tape, far from the National Gallery, and it has become now an incredibly successful, happy place to go to look at great art.

So they wanted to celebrate their birthday.

They wanted to have a sit down dinner for seven hundred people.

I remember when we had that we were going to be cooking for seven hundred thinking that I should put my poke face on and just think, yeah, of course we can do it, Yes, yes, we could definitely do it.

And it was you know, just a really fun different challenge.

I think for char and I was quite nice.

We've been working here for about twenty five years, just about as long as the thing wouldn't have been open, and obviously it's like framed a lot of our experience in London being able to go there.

So it was an honor of course, massive ones there was.

I think we wouldn't necessarily done at seven hundred sit down to it for many people, but for the Tape, they just think we have to do this, you know.

And they also came saying that they really wanted us to do it.

You know.

They felt a connection with the Tape between the River Cafe.

They all late here.

Richard was chairman of the Tape for five years in the eighties, and I think there's a deep connection, you know.

So yeah, one of the first meetings when we sat down, they were really keen on having something that was very like pure River Cafe, strong colors.

They were they were looking at it through their lens of how they see art, I guess, and had planned the room and how the room was going to look, and they wanted a menu.

I was saying to the waiters on the night of the event, that the starter was basically red, the main course was basically green, and the.

Dessert was basically yellow.

It was like very strong colors.

So the red was tomatoesto, the green was a sea bats plate with sousa verde and spinach and peas, which are phenomenal at the moment.

And then the dessert was lemon tar.

And not to forget our special what we're really known for at the River Cafe cannopes.

Italian, very Italian.

What is the Italian word for a cannope.

One of the first challenges we came up with was how to do bite sized cannopes that people in a smart event would want to eat without spilling food on them.

And we're obviously because we're mostly known for robust sort of cooking, it's not doesn't lend itself to canopies per se.

What was really nice about the cannapase is we were told, you know, you need, you know, half the amount of cannopes that there are people because people just don't take cannape.

They come round, you know how it is, and you just don't take it.

But we just kept sending them and they kept going, you know, which was a really nice beginning.

To the event.

It's like, so we we we're going to make three hundred of everything.

The first one we definitely send out at least for five hundred of them, and it kept kept going.

That was the first one we did was a smash brawl beans that we normally would serve on a mozzarella plate at the River Cafe on a brisket, but we we made it like micro sized.

We made some ponisse, which is like a chickpea pancake similar to farinata that you can deep fry, cut it into a tiny disc about the size of a twenty p piece maybe tiny, maybe a little bigger tempe, and then we piped was very on the River Cafe.

We piped broad beans onto the top that was like a post that we did some polenta that we made solid polenta, and then we cut that out into more discs that were bite size and spooned devil crab that was marinated with lemon juice and chili olive oil, fennel seeds on that.

We did a pizza setter with Ledgo playing Teledgo and time because it's had to be kind of neat, and then we.

Did presciutto with figs.

That was.

It seemed like an easy cando pey, but maybe with retrospect we might be wasn't the most seasonal item we've ever tried to dive.

And also, you know, the things were good.

I was worried being June instead of August, but they were good.

Their things were ripe and the saltiness and then you're able to have something that wasn't.

We just had to order them two weeks before so that to make sure they were put perfect.

We had to stand by peaches if the figs weren't going to be good enough.

But O be good.

Okay.

Some people asked me had we ever done seven hundred before?

And I think the largest sit down we did probably was about three fifty when we went to Rome to be a wedding, and so the well, when would you say you started feeling the challenge of it?

When when would you say that before we.

Go after food?

Yes, yes, exactly, and when it was a process for getting ready, how did you feel that?

So we were trying to One of the things we were trying to work out was how to starff it because in trying to think of the numbers we had to I would how we'd do any event from one hundred, two hundred, three hundred would be to break it down into manageable chunks and then multiply it back up again.

And so I was thinking that for every hundred people you might cook for, you might need seven chefs.

But so we realized then we needed a six chefs, wasn't it.

We needed forty forty two chefs.

So we needed forty two chefs to do it comfortably with panache and make it look easy, because.

That's how we roll.

We need forty two chefs.

So okay, and bearing in mind the River Cafe was also open and functioning.

You come with a cafe as well, we were like, okay, that's our entire brigade.

So fortunately we've got our River Cafe luminous pink telephone with all our x chef's numbers on.

So we started instantly texting old chefs that we not that they're old, are all young still, but to see if they were available to help us, and really nicely, I would say, all of the twenty people we asked all came back and said they'd help.

So then we realized that we had our little logo hashtag getting the Band back together, not that you can search it on any social media.

If that would be really organized.

But we realized we were going to have forty two chefs from twenty five thirty years at the River Cafe, which.

Is really nice.

One of them said, Michelle said to me, you know r you when I worked with you.

It was in two thousand and three and I was single and I was kind of, you know, running around London, and she said, I now have a child in university.

So you know, it's the idea that two thousand and three was twenty two years ago and she was there.

But I thought one of the very moving things was to see how happy they were to be together, you know that they was just like a reunion.

It was a.

Serene but it was like generations of yeah, you know that charl and I was the only people that worked with everyone, and then all of a sudden, and it was actually really nice to do a reunion around an activity.

You know.

The activity was cooking for seven hundred people.

It's amazing, so happy, really happy.

All the photographs.

So if I was listening to this and I thought, Okay, I'm going to do a sit down dinner for seven hundred.

People, ask us.

Yeah, what was the process?

How did you you were sitting up in an office, what would you say one day a week, for the last two days a week, you know, the time that you spent from the beginning, what was the process that you would say that you could tell us a good story.

Well, I went into my kind of classic sort of form, which is to go into list writing, which was really like taking it to another level.

There was one point where I had so many pieces of paper that I was panicking trying to understand the amount of paper that we had.

And so then we were like maybe someone was like, maybe you should type it up, but I was like, I can only read my own handwriting was so me and Joseph, we we tried to break down each dish to start with and think about how much for usosso we'd need to make.

So we had to make you know, one bag of rice makes fifteen portions approximately at the River Cafe, and we one needed to have a standard recipe.

So then we knew that if we.

Needed to make seven hundred portions, we'd need to make forty five bags of rice, which is forty five.

Kilos of rice.

So it's a kind of small light person's weight in rice, and then we needed two hundred and forty jars of samazano tomato used to.

Do it, which was like a lorry load.

And just seeing these things because you can plan it all out and you can be like, okay, so it's.

Sixty grams of peas each.

You know.

The way we don't actually work like that here is just you know, we eyeball everything really, but we knew that we had to be more precise for this amount of covers.

But then you don't know what I mean, two hundred kilos of spinach looks like, you know, would it would fill this room easily?

You know, So then we had to then we had to arrive here the day before and work out how to manage that, where to put it well.

And twenty six hundred and twenty six kilos of pieas that needed to be part.

I remember when I did say to.

You peace, you know, and you said you know, you both said yeah, we're doing peas.

And so there was no sense of let's do something and a shortcut to get it done in an easier way.

I mean, was it there was?

We were Yeah, we were helped massively by our suppliers that's the truth.

And I think those relationships that are very old really paid off.

You know, so especially the Toura particularly tell us about what we first tell people with Natura is our main badge supply vegeable supplier.

And we've worked with Natura since they began, haven't we.

Yeah, that's right, yeah, And they import directly from the Miland market, and you know, for the last probably twenty years, you can get like the best is.

Like advertising free other diabet the best Italian produce.

The peak stuff and really, really really kindly, they their office agreed that they'd pod two hundreds how many kilos of two hundred kilos apiece?

Not quite, but.

It was such a monumental effort and so kind and then they precked all the spinach for us, and then they like manually and then we got the whole lorry load of it delivered and we opened the back doors of the.

Lorry and it was just peace and spinach and we were like, oh my god, I've got to cook that now, and we were like, okay, get some pots on.

It was really it was because we cook as if we were at the River Cafe.

We didn't cook like we were in a mass production kitchen, so we did it exactly as we do here, but just took like five hours to blanch that much spinach as opposed to five minutes.

And making the risotto took you know, it took like four or.

Five hours to just you know, get that amount of onions and celery and garlic chopped.

We needed like fifty in kilos of grated parmesan.

So once you start going up the quantities, it it started to like I was getting really stressed on.

I was just souping everything up into hours and Saint Ruthie, do you know how long it's going to take to cut the lemon tarte?

If it takes ten minutes to portion, and I was like, it's gonna take five.

Hours and it did.

Really called that.

Two of them five hours, and I said, well maybe if you'd had four of you, it could have taken two and a half hours.

But they wanted to cut.

Yeah, they wanted, you know, they do say cooking his repetition.

We really saw in this Bella was amazing because of fairness.

She put that she actually put on her Instagram and the recipe for fifty lemon tarts, yeah, which is really cool because that's about how many liters of lemon juiceted lemons.

And yeah, I mean I really want to say again that the tour just to can you imagine their office, you know, they're you know, they're a sizeable company in London where everyone decided to you know, I was sent pictures of them on their desks that's their computer people podding peas.

They all did it and apparently it was good team building also for them.

I feel like it was.

It was just really a throughout quite positive experience.

So we knew that the challenge of doing this dinner was had all sorts of challenges, but there were no I have to say, there were no kitchens that we could use, you know, so what we looked at was doing the kitchens in the meeting room around the space that were there basically at the bottom of the turbine hall, there were the tables and then if you think of that, around the circumference in a way with these meetings rooms to take the food out.

So can you describe the challenge of how you cooked in somewhere there was no extraction and no.

Well we were massively helped by this company called the Last Supper who organized huge events.

I think for them it's even for them it's a big event.

But they'd certainly do more big events than we do, and they just impeccably organized.

And so when we arrived in there are three kind of classrooms adjacent to the quite big classrooms adjacent to the turbine hall, and in each one they'd set up for us a kitchen with you know, two long tables each.

Just four normal induction.

Tops and three ovens each, you know, electric ovens, and but efficiently, cleanly, quite basic.

And the fact that they were the mirror of each other meant that we could get the whole team together and explain to them, this is what's happening.

You know, you're all going to be doing this at the same time.

When we were going through the kit list though, because we were trying to make, you know, have all the kit right, but then when you have for every kitchen with four inductions and four trestle tables and two ovens, but then actually what we actually needed was twenty four inductions, you know, forty eight tables as soon as it and then everything was coming in in these massive quantities.

So on the face of it, it was sort of a simple meal for one hundred and twenty in a kitchen.

Just to be specific, how do you make a resulta for seven hundred people?

Really genuinely, you think about how you make a risutta for seven people, and you just multiplied tims ahundred you multiple times one hundred.

Honestly, that's what we did.

And I think my suspicion is at some of the early meetings that other people that were involved in this kind of size of kind of slightly or maybe I thought that we were approaching it a little bit like how did we just scale up a dinner party to such as?

But that is what we did, and it really worked.

But we did.

We had the guys making the result of working in pairs, weren't they So they had to make fifteen bags fifteen bags of rice that much?

So did fifteen bags of rice between the two of them?

Yes, But because there were such good cooks each team making the rice, and they've all River Cafe trained, so we trust them implicitly to know.

And we had a standard recipe for the for the one bag rice and then the fifteen bag rice for each person to work on.

And then everyone knows exactly what they're aiming for.

But I think chart touch on something really crucial there.

I think what was great was having really good staff that we could we trusted.

Often they'd come to me and they'd say, what do you think?

And I said, well, actually, you know what, let's work out together.

What time you're going to put the sea bass in the avenor you told me you know how we went around every little past of all like, so, what's your view of how you're going to send this out?

And we all let them put a little bit of their knowledge and into.

It, and I think that really helped.

So we're talking about scaling up, this is about you know, I'm taking, as you say, Rosarta for seven or a Risuta for seven hundred.

But what you also just touched upon in terms of the people that you trust to do it and the people who worked with So there wasn't that frustration or there wasn't that kind of concern which gives you confidence.

Do you think it all comes down to the people that you chose to or not all of it, but a lot of it comes to the people that.

Yeah, because they were all know the house styles.

There was no explaining to do there.

Everyone knew those dishes, so they could just all of them could cook that for ten, all of them could know how to cook that for a hundred and they all they had to do was work in.

Each team was only cooking for one hundred and twenty, so actually that's quite manageable for them as chefs.

And then me and Joseph were working across all of it, which was quite funny because we were working down the corridor.

We were just passing each other the whole time.

But then also really nicely, we neither one of us had to take the sole responsibility.

For it, which I actually wouldn't have liked to.

Take the responsibility on my own for that because there was so many questions and we ran into problems when we had the van.

Our vans came in, but they wouldn't let us stand on the floor of the Tate Modern car park unless we had high vis on.

But none of us taken high vis because we had anticipated needing it, and so there was there was a bit of like confusion, and then Joseph was dealing with him and then he was, you know, like one of us could deal with one issue trying to get some high vis, another one who could deal with another issue, but on your own it would have been would have been too much.

I think I thought it was going really well, you know, and we were sending out the main courses and as I say, Sean and I were running between all these kitchens, and I've realized that we'd sent out seven hundred main courses in eighteen minutes minutes.

And I just and at that point, I was just like, Hey, that's it.

This has just gone really well.

I mean, I wasn't, to be honest, I wasn't anticipating would be quite that fast, and I was really you know, we were incredibly pleased.

Maria told me last night that she had three hundred and fifty letters and ninety nine percent of them mentioned they've never had food like yet.

So I will give credit right now to the two of you, because I think it all, it all filtered down, you know, it all all came across, and so I think you really have to pat yourselves on the bag.

Thanks how long?

The best?

No, you are, No, you really you really are.

And I think that, you know, the best ingredient that we've had for this whole thing has been the two of you.

Multiply that time seven hundred and we'd be really roky.

Thank you, Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair