You're listening to Ruthie's Table for in collaboration with me and m Intelligence Style for Busy Women.

Not long ago, I adventured to the Cotswolds to spend the day with Mark Nusoon at his home.

I thought I knew Mark well, but entering his house and his world, seeing what he'd created, elegant, warm spaces, incredible attention to detail, the design of a light switch, a door handle, a sofa, a bed or a bath gave me a deeper insight into this remarkable person.

Mark is the industrial designer of our time.

The Lockheed lounge chair and just twenty five the Embryo, the Kantisky bed, the O to one see concept car for Ford, and of course the Apple Watch.

To day on table for Mark is in my home the River Cafe, where we'll share stories about food and family and design.

Another adventure with an amazing man.

Did we have tye food?

Was it a I think we had typhood or sort of an attempt at typhood that day?

Well, you lived in Japan.

My family lived in Japan actually when I was a kid growing up, and I lived in South Korea as well, so I spent a big chunk of my childhood, you know, traveling and living in the Far East, I guess you'd call it.

So born in Sydney.

In Sydney in Australia.

Tell me about that.

Well, we lived in a multi generational, you know, household with my grandparents.

My mum was you know, in her I guess early twenties at that point, but working during the days.

So i'd come home.

Just what did she do?

You know, she did a variety of different different sorts of jobs, you know, mostly sort of secretarial kind of stuff, I suppose.

But the point was that she worked, and you know, so I'd come home from school, go straight to my grandparents' house and spend you know, an enormous amount of time with them, growing up with my grandfather and my grandmother.

My grandfather, who was an immigrant.

From Greece, was her first generation in Australia, or so his parents.

He was born in Greece and came by himself.

I think he left Greece when he was about fourteen years old, as they did back in those days.

I mean that must have been nineteen twenty or something like that.

He came to Australia.

But he was a big influence on my life.

There were incredible, incredible times and interestingly, you know, the one memory that stays with me till to this day was, you know, my grandfather had there were two spaces in this sort of household that were sort of his spaces.

One was the garage, stroke workshop.

The other was the kitchen.

My grandfather did all the cooking.

Yeah, my grandfather did.

Yeah.

My grandmother wasn't really allowed in the kitchen, but she was Australian.

She was Australian of English sort of Scottish descent, but she literally, you know, she barely went into the kitchen only occasionally to make tea and toast.

So he would work all day, come back cook.

What did he do.

He had a variety of jobs through his career.

I mean he owned shops in Sydney, everything from what they called milk bars, which were sort of cafes really that was the sort of the local name for a cafe, which were all run by Greeks, Greek immigrants.

He owned a barber shop, but he wasn't a barber and he ended up later in life becoming a gardener.

And that was you know what he did, you know, for the last or twenty years of his life.

He was a brilliant, you know, fantastic gardener.

Did he cook Greek food?

I remember it as being mostly Greek in sort of origin, you know, all of the sort of staple.

Tell me about Greek food?

What is Greek food?

Well, that's a really great question.

I mean, I mean, yeah, when I think of Greek food, I think of things like tara masalata.

You know, it's more than kind of the small things.

They're a mets saziki, something called squadalia, which is basically like the garlicy mashed potato.

I mean, it's like it literally looks like.

Mashed potato, not the one in the triangular.

It looks like it looks like pompure.

It looks like sort of mashed potato.

How do you eat that?

You eat that?

You still have that with cod?

With with I think it's sometimes it's it's sort of fried cod, but sometimes it's also steamed cod.

And it's a really particular particular recipe.

But but it's it's it's literally liquefied garlic.

I mean, it's this stuff.

It's it's like so strong.

So they're they're the sorts of things that that I remember kind of growing up, you know, growing up with of course, you know, my half of the family, well most of the family, I guess we're a sort of Anglo Saxon, right.

So everything that he cooked was sort of, you know, sort of watered down Greek.

But there was a huge Greek community in in in Sydney and in Australia, so you know, you know, Greek food was something that was not common, but it wasn't uncommon.

You know in this in this world we're in right now, of you know, the fear of immigration.

You realize the wealth that immigrants bring to a country.

Absolute would Australia be with the Greek and without Greek version or.

The Greeks, the Italians, the Lebanese, you know, the Mediterranean culture in fact is you know, and that's why I suppose you know, after that, you know, maybe maybe even decades after that, Sydney became a bit of a kind of a food place, food place.

Yeah, and it's it's it's for that reason his parents stayed in Greece.

Yeah, he came by himself fourteen, maybe even thirteen, that's what happened back then.

You know that he was the oldest of I think eight or maybe even nine children, and he was sent off to you know, to to the sort of to the New World.

He first went to South Africa, which was the route.

I mean, there are always you know, these sorts of shipping routes that and the Greeks were big sort of merchant marines, and that was what they did.

And he went to stay with relatives who had already established themselves in South Africa.

And you know, he never he came back to Greece once for the rest of his life, whole life, his whole life, so I guess, you know, he never saw his parents, never saw his father ever again.

But but but eventually they he brought his mother out to Australia, but she was by that point, you know, quite old, and.

What was it the promise of that.

But I think there had been there had been precedents, you know.

So my grandfather's father had already been to Australia at the end of the nineteenth century for a god there was a gold rush, you know, so he'd gone to Australia during the gold rush, made a fortune come back to Greece.

So people had already been traveling, you know, to the to these far away places for you know, a generation or two before that.

So it was far away and it took a long time to get there, but it was it was known.

But those trips took years, not weeks.

You know.

The island that my grandfather came from was was is called Ithaca, and all of the almost all of the people emigrated or everybody had someone from their family that emigrated and they went to one of three places.

It was either South Africa, Australia, or the US to New York specifically.

I guess maybe that's why there's an Ethacha in New.

York, not far from where I live.

Really, I'm from upstate New York.

That's where Cornell is.

Yeah, right, Richard, it's hysterical going back.

I go to Ithaca.

Relative.

Yeah, we have a house there, and at certain times of the year you'll only hear American, South Africa or Australian accents because it's coming back kind of come back to, you know, coming back to visit or they living here a bit of family property or something like that.

It's it's it's really really funny, you know.

I get my sort of you know, my annual dose of Australia because it is not in Australia.

Tell me about growing up.

Then we come home from school.

And my mum was was was so young, she was out working.

I'd come home from school because she wouldn't get home from work until sort of six or even seven pm, and we'd all eat together, me, my mom, my mother's brother, my uncle, my grandfather and grandmother.

So it was the five of us and we'd have, you know, kind of a family meal, and he would cook.

He would do everything.

I mean, he was sort of slightly obsessed with the notion that if you want to do something properly, you have to do it YOURSELFLF And I'm afraid I'm sort of afflicted something like that.

Yeah, yeah, sadly, I can't nice for all of us do that a bit of a control freak.

It sounds really warm and nice.

It was.

It was fantastic.

Can I ask you about your father?

Did you ever so my father?

My father left as young as your mom.

Yeah, I think, you know, maybe a few months older or maybe a year, but he wasn't really on the scene.

I didn't meet my father until until about ten years ago actually, so he'd completely sort of disappeared when I was you know, not long after I was born, so he wasn't present at all, you know, in that period of time.

But I guess, you know, my family was was was that extended family really, you know, it was all of those people.

It was you know, it was grandparents and uncle and mother and I.

You know, I didn't feel that I was sort of wanted for her father figure as such.

You know, there were plenty of men around, like my grandfather and uncle that were and they're probably quite showing me what to do.

But I was always really independent anyway.

You know, I'd go off and sort of make things.

I was obsessed with making things making.

You said that in the garage he had a workshop.

What was that.

Yeah, the garage was really a place to fix things, you know, to kind of you know, a diy space with tools and stuff, you know, I mean bits of wood and tools.

And it was a place where I spent almost all of my time, you know, making things, putting, learning how to sort of build things by myself.

You know, at quite an early age that you wanted to.

Make that absolutely.

You know, for me, making things was always a means to an end though, you know, if I wanted to have something, then I kind of had to make it.

You know, Australia it was and maybe still is, I'm not sure, a sort of a diy culture and maybe that was everywhere.

Actually I remember the repair shop.

I remember that my parents used to take things to be fixed.

It's interesting in day job now, you know, the notion that you can get something repaired is a form of luxury.

Now you know that something that's not disposable, you know, something that doesn't end up on a pile of landfill, you can take it back to Louis Viton and get it repaired.

But it's great.

You should be able to repair what you designed.

Do you think about the fact that it may have to be repaired or do you think, oh, it's a.

Lot absolutely, yeah, I embrace the idea.

You know, we build things, you know, we design.

Things with life.

With the idea that they could be fixed.

You know, I do a lot of work, you know, I'm designing sort of watches and time pieces and things like that that they not only need to be fixed, but they need to be serviced in order to be in order to sort of function properly.

And it's a notion that now that especially sort of younger generations of people, you know you don't you don't think that you've got to get things oiled and you know, greased and serviced basically, I mean as a designer.

For me, one of the one of the greatest attributes that a product can have is that you know, you can buy ones and have it forever.

Yeah, you know.

I love the idea that you buy a pen, you know, your favorite pen, and that'll be the pen unless you lose it, of course, which is that's my problem, which is my problem too.

Can we solve that one?

Maybe that would be like the repair shop, but you get the find it.

Yeah, we need finding things.

It's just like Apple need to make a much smaller air tag for all of these things.

Yeah, there's things.

Yeah, I know people as well.

People.

Where is that friend I at?

Where's that child?

Child?

Daughter?

Where is that?

Okay?

So going back to this growing up in Australia.

Because it's quite traditional, you know, it was Mundane's maybe too strong a word, but it was.

It was.

It was.

It felt reasonably sort of run of the mill.

But when I was about seven or eight, I can't remember, my mother got a job.

She was working in an architect's office actually, and she these these architects built created I guess what was what ended up becoming one of the very first sort of boots hotels in maybe in the southern Hemisphere.

We're talking kind of late sixties, early seventies.

And it was in a place called Cairns, which is like the far far north of Australia, completely tropical.

I mean it's like in the middle of nowhere's and they created this sort little boutique hotel and they sent my mum and obviously me to go and run this little boutique hotel.

We drive up in a Coombi van of e W Comby van with our dog and it was so cool.

A lot of the furniture was designed by Joe Colombo.

I mean, it was incredibly cool, this place in the middle of nowhere.

You know, celebrities like brit Eckland would come and stay in libav and I can remember, Yeah, And they engaged.

They engaged a French chef who came out with her husband Jule.

Her name was Georgette.

She came from France to live there, and she was kind of a hippie.

But that was my first exposure to sort of anything other than sort of sort of like French cuisine.

Do you remember it?

Absolute?

I remember that, and I remember her chainsmoking gore was you know, no, but that then that was the sort of.

How long were you there for?

I think we were there for about eighteen months.

It felt like a lifetime, but it was, you know, a relatively short period of time.

And he went to school there.

Yeah.

I went to school in the middle of a cane field on the back of a Bedford you know.

The school bus was a Bedford lorry.

Like the wild West.

Yeah, it was, it was.

It was bonkers.

Did you also make a watch?

Yeah, I modified a watch.

I didn't touch the insides, so I was given a watch actually one of the maybe it was my first watch, just not long after I'd learned how to tell the time, because you know, as you will remember, that was a little bit of a rite of passage.

Yeah, learning how to tell the time.

I think I must have been about eight or nine years old or something like that.

The first thing I did was take it into the garage and pull it to pieces and and sort of rehousard a newly designed case which I made.

There was a sheet of blue plexiglass, which I guess was maybe a quarter of an inch thick.

So I cut out that, you know, sort of a rectangular shape, cut a similarly shaped rectangle for the back and one for the front, and sort of sandwished it together right, so it was sort of clear on the top and clear on the bottom, and the movement just sort of sat in the middle.

I'm not even sure if I got as far as attaching a watch band to it.

I was going to ask you about the strap before.

I sort of returned to those interest and.

Then it was transparent, so that it was it was yeah, yeah, yeah, you first thing you did showed how something could work.

Yeah, well, you know that you can see the movement.

You can see the movement from the back and the front.

And I screwed the whole thing together with these little these brass screws that I found in the workshop.

Yeah, everything was there, So that was it was an exercise in working with found objects, you know, with with with you know, di y, you know, what was what was available at the time.

And I can remember everybody in my family sort of, you know, simultaneously horrified and thrilled, you know, horrified that I pulled this thing to pieces, and.

But thrilled that you did that's good that you were in a family that was thrilled.

Thrilled that I sort of managed to repurpose it.

Maybe that was the first thing that I ever designed.

Actually, what I.

Can remember, did your family go out?

I mean you paint the picture of a very kind of internal life of the workshop, the kitchen, the food, the family.

But did you did you go to restaurants?

In my younger years, I can't really ever remember going to restaurants.

We must have at some point, but I don't think.

You know, at that time in Sydney, we're talking kind of late sixties seventies, restaurant culture wasn't wasn't like it is now.

I mean, you know Sydney Sydney today, I mean that's all people do is talk about restaurants and real estate.

I mean that's the sort of obsession.

When did that happen to you that you started eating out?

Well?

So, so when we we we came back from from Cairns, my mother and I and I went to primary school for a few more years, and my mother got remarried when.

I was about twelve years old or thirteen, and my stepfather got had immediately got transferred to go and live in South Korea.

He was working for this big American pharmaceutical company.

So then then that's a big deal.

Crazy.

I went to live in South age age like twelve, but I went there and I went for three years, and that was when I can remember going to restaurants for the first time.

In South Korea.

Well, yeah, because we first had to stay in a hotel until because there was no the house that we were going to live in wasn't ready, so we stayed in a hotel, which you know was the kind of the most luxurious hotel in Seoul at the time.

Bearing in mind that South Korea in the seventies was a military dictatorship, right, there was a curfew from eleven pm till sort of six am.

You couldn't go out.

I mean, it was a proper kind of military, huge American military presence there.

We lived really close to the American Army base.

Actually.

Nevertheless, you know, we there were restaurants and there were places to go out, and that's when I started, you know, getting a taste for for for restaurants, but.

South Korean food, it was Korean.

Absolutely international, no, no, no, I mean it was what did you eat things like bulgogie?

Right, kim chi.

Of course, everybody kimchi.

I wasn't so fond of kimchi, although I love it now.

Kim pop, you know, or basically like sort of rolls seaweed.

You know, it's like really typical.

And we had a Korean made.

Korean is really big deal.

Now do you ever have it here?

I don't, but I should because.

That's maybe you and I could go and find find someplace.

Yeah, I mean good Korean, I mean like kind of you know, it is Korean culture.

Yeah, is crazy now that in New York it's all about Korea, about the Korean barbecue, about the way Korean food, so you know.

But but my exposure to sort of cuisine was mostly being taken onto the American Army Base by my friends from school, sneaking onto the onto the American Army Base, and sneaking into the p X where they had these shops called p x's where you could buy everything American.

Yeah.

So the first time I ever came across doctor Pepper and read lichorician, you know, that was pretty exciting.

I have a friend who was in Germany as well, said the same thing.

Then you go to the base and it was like being in a supermarket in Ephaca, New York.

Yeah.

Yeah, so you lived in Korea and then went back to.

I got sent back to Australia to boarding school in Sydney, but I'd go and visit them practically every holiday, you know, so maybe two three times a year I'd go off to see them in in Tokyo.

Then it was you know, then I really got sort of bitten.

By the Travelers explosion.

That was it, you know, Tokyo was kind of became my place.

You know.

That was what age I.

Was probably sixteen or seventeen at that point and then and then that was.

Also must have been design wise.

Quite yeah, it was.

I mean what struck me about being in Japan, being anywhere actually outside of Australia was was just the way, you know, culture really the way that different people solve problems, right, they solve problems in different ways.

So for example, you know, you'd go into the subway in Tokyo and you sort of observe how things were built and what materials they'd use.

You know, all of the railings were stainless steel.

It's the first time I'd ever seen that.

And I can remember the same thing in Paris you know when I lived in I lived in Paris for quite a while, you know, when I was when I was older and getting on a metro that was on rubber tires, yea.

The silence of the yeah, which is.

Just kind of a mad concept.

But the way that different cultures solve problems in different ways.

That was the thing that really struck me about being in Japan because it really was about as far away as you could.

You know, culturally, it was extremely different.

You know, everybody associates Japan with with detailed minimal yeah, minimalism resolving things, and you know, for me, the mentality that I had, I felt right at home there.

You know, it felt like the country I should have been born in.

You know, the way that they sort of thought about things, Not so much that they thought, you know, that everything was about d It was more that it felt to me like they were thinking on on a smaller scale.

They just they just considered things, you know, on a much much smaller scale, and it was it felt, you know, that was kind of how I thought about things.

Food wise.

I always think that you know people who say, if you opened the restaurant somewhere else, you know, New York or San Francisco or Miami or Dubai, you know, and how would you actually control it?

And funnily if I think Tokyo could do it, you know, because I always had this idea that you could get Japanese cooks to come and hear chefs to work here for a certain period of time and they'd probably end up making fresh tagular really better than we did.

I mean, I don't, I don't.

You know, you don't want to generalize about a culture, but there seemed to be an attention to that detail.

It just becomes a fancy.

But you know, I mean you really you can't eat badly.

I mean you really struggle to eat.

It's very much Japanese food.

It feels to me like Italy, right, there are these two cultures that you you know, food is so important and the quality of food.

It's all about the quality, isn't it?

The quality of the project and the execution.

But it's it's soon going back.

You were sent back to boarding school, yeah, and then you went to college.

Then I school.

I went to art school actually in Sydney.

In Sydney, yeah, yeah, yeah, I never studied design formally.

I decided I wanted to become a jeweler and a silver smith, mostly because that was the only part of the art school where you could actually learn how to do something.

You know, if you're in the art department, you know, the painting department or the sculpture department, they sort of leave you to your own devices and you just kind of get on with it.

But in the jey department, service missing department, they teach you how to actually do things with metal.

So I was learning how to how to make things.

I never ended up practicing as a jeweler or a silversmith, but the skills that I learned doing those things really, you know, set me up so so brilliantly for starting to design furniture.

First things that I started designing.

With in the book.

Let's talk about the book.

Yeah, so this book came out last year and it was I guess it's forty years of forty years of work.

So nineteen eighty four is the year that I graduated from from art school, so it's it's from then until now.

You know.

It was very much like a functional encyclopedia.

I just wanted to chronicle everything that i'd done.

This is maybe one of the one do you want to talk about the better known pieces, things like a watch that I made.

I guess I was like eighteen or nineteen at the time.

I mean these, as you can see, you know, these are sort of very very kind of postmodern and attempted a sort of shares long which and this watch is.

When you were designing jewelry.

Well yeah, yeah, I was working in the jewelry department trying to you know, make and this this was a you know, these chairs.

You know, I always wanted to design chairs because chairs were the sort of the iconic thing designers and architects, you know, made the thing to do.

Yeah.

Yeah, did the chair They did that, that chair for the Pomperty.

Have you ever seen that?

Yeah, absolutely, yeah, they did that one.

He said it is harder than designing the whole building, much more challenge.

Yeah, absolutely, Well some of them, we know, obviously most of the world's most famous chairs have been designed by architects, observe.

Yeah, I mean these were very much inspired by what was going on at the town in the in the world of architecture.

But that's a funny piece.

So that's a bracelet with a wheel on it, which sounds like a kind of very strange idea.

But but so I was studying jewelry and I just wanted to make furniture in the jewelry department.

So I was able to sort of twist it and like and you know, I said, basically, you know, furniture is jewelry.

You know, they both they're both kind of useless without the body, right, they don't kind of function without without the body.

And so they kind of bought that idea and thought it was an interesting one.

And so, you know, I create pieces of jewelry that, you know, like sort of performance pieces that you could wear, but they functioned a bit like a piece of furniture.

Do you have this like you've asking where these pieces are.

It's a really great question because you know, a lot of this stuff, I have no idea where it is.

I wasn't good at I know, I wasn't good at at keeping mons.

I'm still not.

You know, I'm not a I'm not a collector.

I know, the archive, the idea.

I'm a kind of a doer, you know.

I do it and then once it's done, it's it's gone and sort of lives its own life and it's out of my head.

But you went from from the cocoon of the school.

Did you did you have to go work for someone?

Then?

I had a series of sort of rudimentary jobs, you know, but they were were they were not fun jobs, you know, working in working in department stores, and working in news agencies.

And I met a job in a design office.

No, no, I never worked in a design office.

I never worked for anyone that was that was doing anything like what I wanted, what I did, or what I wanted to do.

The first break that I got, I suppose, was in I guess it was eighty five or eighty six.

A year or two after I finished my college, I applied for a grant from the government from the from in Australia, from an institution called the Craft Council, and they were giving money to people and I was told, I was advised by my tutors not to you know, I was too young to apply, but I did, and I got a grant, and I think it was several thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days.

And I set about trying to pull together an exhibition, which I did so I found a gallery which was really the best gallery in Sydney at the time, and I had an exhibition in nineteen eighty six of five or six pieces of furniture that I put together.

The first piece was a lucky lunge.

I was like, you know, nineteen or something at the time.

Yeah, that was the only piece in the show that got bought, so it was but it was bought by a museum, So that was a good start.

Do you think somebody could do this now, to have a gallery, to have your own you.

Know, I'd love to think so.

I'd love to think that it was possible.

But the difference for me and maybe for my generation was that, you know, we had to make things.

But the only way I could communicate with prospective you know, manufacturers, was to show them something.

There was no good showing people drawings, you know, they wouldn't kind of buy it.

You had to show than the real thing.

And to show them the real thing, you had to be able to make it, to make the thing.

So you know, that was my obsession was was making things, well, small series of things, you know, making and then maybe along the way you could sell a few, you know, to make a bit of money.

But then you also designed spaces, So did we designed you did do restaurants, didn't you.

Go to the Yeah, I did a bunch of restaurants.

Well.

I designed this restaurant called Coast, which was on album Male Street in London in the mid nineties, which is quite a yeah.

Yeah, well, I tell you the most fantastic thing about designing a restaurant, you know, what was what was Taylor made about that?

That project?

For me was that you could do everything.

You know, what do you mean?

You could do the cutlery, you could do the vasas, you could do the furniture, you know, the tables, you could do everything.

You know.

I love the idea of doing everything, and I've kind of gone on to do kind of that, right, design all of these little bits.

Of course, you could design the space, but for me, it was really much more about designing all of the things that went in the space.

You know, I learned a lot of designing Coast.

I a few years later designed another restaurant in New York called lever House, which.

Oh yeah when Abbi rosenbo Yeah, exactly, a great building right opposite the Secret Building.

So you walked in off the street and then you went down, you went down you know, maybe four or five flights of stairs, and then it was a huge ceilings were maybe twenty twenty foot tall.

It was an amazing, amazing space.

You know that that was a much more sophisticated project with a much you know, with a bigger budget.

And you know, again, I got to design all the furniture.

I got to design the carpets, I got to design you know, like literally everything, the light fittings, which was what year, boy, boy, I don't know, maybe ninety late nineties, I want to say, the walls.

You know, we brought Japanese plaster is in to do the walls, which is a sort of very rough plaster that's got sort of grass and stuff.

When you go to restaurants, now, does it make a big difference to I?

You know, I felt designing restaurants in that manner was very much a thing of the time.

You know, I'm far less interested now when I go to restaurants in the design than the food.

You know, I think ultimately the food is the most important thing.

And what about starting love From then I.

Met Johnny for the first time probably let me think mid to late nineties.

He had not long been working at Apple, but we didn't start working together for probably another fifteen years after that.

Yeah, you know, we talked incessantly about you know, design and how we'd rather do it, what was a good idea and what wasn't a good idea.

But we didn't start working together for a really long time after that until a meaningful opportunity sort of presented itself, and then Johnny brought me on boarded Apple to start working with him on the watch, the watch, which was just a sort of a notion.

I'm not I, yeah, I should be.

What was the Apple Watch?

Two thy and thirteen after Steve?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, not long but.

He never did he ever think of the watch?

Did he ever?

No?

I believe that was entirely Johnny's conception.

Did you live in San Francisco?

Never?

No, I always lived between London and Paris, mostly since the sort of early nineties.

You know what then then, you know, food culture really you know, kind of started to mean something to me.

But it was mostly through the ritual, you know, the idea that you would every day go out and have lunch, you know, even you know, often by myself and I you know, to this day, it's something I love doing it.

It stays and stays with me, just you know, the importance of that taking that moment, taking that time to even when you're working right, it doesn't have to be sort of associated with not working.

Well.

Renzo Piano, who's you know, Italy, he really did not understand the two words business lunch or working lunch.

He just didn't get it.

He said, you know, when you work, you work, and when you eat, you eat.

And the idea of having a working lunch or a business lunch it probably has changed now, but was.

And you know Italians go home for lunch.

And actually, Renzo and Richard that's when I started cooking in Paris, because they would work all morning on the Pompertu and then come home for lunch.

Wow, And so I would kind of I was kind of in Paris.

I was twenty three, and I thought, okay, well, you know this will be interesting for me.

I'll work, you know, And so that's when we put the idea of lunch being really important in that culture.

Yeah, absolutely, lunch and lunch and holidays during the summer, my Tuesday takeaways.

Yeah, from Paris.

But what about domestic life, cooks at home?

Did you cook or did Charlotte cook?

Charlotte, Charlotte and I both cook.

She cooks more than I do.

I love cooking, you know, but I just find that I don't have the kind of headspace to do it very much, sadly.

But I do love love it, and I love the idea of it.

I'm great at following a recipe, but I do.

I do love Yeah, barbecuing.

Oh see, that's very male.

You know, despite all of the cliches.

I know, I know now, but I think women like barbecuing too.

But it is interesting how men who want to cook well do the barbecue.

Not only male, but also very you know, kind of stereotypically Australia.

But it wasn't until I was in Tuscany about ten years ago in a restaurant there, and they have the most fantastic kind of setup for cooking steaks.

A huge fire on the right hand side, like with fueled with olive wood.

It has to be olive wood, and then there are holes underneath the fire and the coals fall out onto a surface, and then you sweep the cold over and you sweep it onto another grill and the little ones fall through and the coals stay hot because air is coming through.

Anyway.

I found the blacksmith that made this.

The next day went there and had had them build one for me because this system is probable and sort of genius.

Well, I love.

We have one in tuscany where we are, and it's what I call vertical coil.

So you put all the coals in the wood vertically.

Oh wow, okay, vertically, and then as.

They get hot, they fall down, and then you put more of that and then you just keep sweeping it.

It's really cool.

Similar you have to keep sweeping across, you keep the going.

And you just keep sweeping across.

But what I've discovered is that it has to be olive wood.

I mean, olive is one of the only things that really and in Greece, of course we have an abundance of olive wood soil.

And I've had your olive oil.

Yeah, because we're just about to do another crop, of course in November.

But how is it going to be?

Do you think we're worried about olive oil this year?

Last year was a disaster.

This year is looking pretty good.

I think we should get about a ton I guess the metric ton which but we have like six hundred trees, right.

And you have you press it yourself or do you take it.

To the community press that we go to.

There's one particular one where we know the people and where you've got to make sure you're the first one there.

So you get the cold press, because you know, it's the heat that generated the olive press that creates that.

It sort of cooks the oil.

So if you're the first one, you're okay, you've got to be the first one.

But that's fun.

You know, it's something that everybody does, you know, like the entire island and picks us.

We pick it.

A bunch of other people that come and help, you know, just you hide hands and you know for a few weeks.

And fantascany they pay them in the olive oil that was a traditional the olive oil you know, traveled no more than sort of ten kilometers from the tree.

The idea that now we send it to China, we send it to America.

You can buy Tuscan olive oil everywhere.

That's such a great ingredient.

Which makes me think that we haven't actually read the recipe.

What do you like about this recipe?

What made you choose it?

It's a good segue from the barbecue.

It's something that it's something that I can do.

I can do quite well, I think.

But what I love about it is that it's just simple.

And there's a little bit at the end which is quite technical, which I kind of like.

Okay, so this is the recipe for beef for steak taliata.

About thirty minutes before cooking, remove the steaks from the refrigerator uncovered, let them come to room temperature, get the grill into a high heat or the barbecue.

Get that kind of fired up and ready to go.

Generously season the steaks on both sides with salt and black pepper, and then grill the steaks on one side for three minutes vigorously, i'd say, then turn them over with tongs not fingers, for another two minutes on the other side.

Remove them from the heat and transfer them to a warm plate and let them rest for five minutes.

And I guess, you know, one can't sort of overstate the importance of letting them meat rest.

Something that seems slightly strange to.

Do just makes a huge difference.

Yeah, and you get the juice.

Sometimes I put a bit of you know, lemon and olive oil over it while the juices come out.

You know, it's really yeah.

And it's extraordinary how much it keeps cooking.

You know.

It's just something that it's really impossible, difficult to kind of to imagine.

But the most important part in the bit that I love at the end, because it involves sharp knives, is is slicing the steak diagonally, not sort of straight up and down, but cutting it a dre in a thirty five and a forty five degree an, so you sort of expose more of the surface area of the steak inside.

Still do you make it quite often?

This is something that you.

Like to have, not as often as i'd like, actually, because I love to do it on that on said barbecue, and that barbecue happens not to be in the UK.

So if i'd in Greece, I do it.

I do it often.

And what do you what do you fry it in?

Do you use beef?

We don't fry it now.

We put it on the krill, okay, right, But like you, we have a grill here, and when I do it at home on a grill pan, I have that cast iron grill pan which I like to cook with.

And the other day I was making steaks and the fire alarm went off and I couldn't.

I didn't know how to turn the smoke alarm off, and they came these firemen.

There was one that was so gorgeous.

Let's do this again.

It's so funny that happened to all the girls that.

Were going, Oh, why don't we invite him to dinner.

My father used to say we lived in the country and we had a volunteer fire department, and used to say, never ever, ever called the fire department, because they will be so excited about being called out, because they're so bored that they come with hoses.

And he had paintings and arts.

He said, I'd rather things burn that have water damage.

So we were always told in case of fire, do not call the fire department.

So as we ended with the recipe, we have always a question.

We ask at the end, if you were looking for comfort, is there a food that you would reach for when you needed comfort.

Food?

It's it's a cup of tea.

A cup of tea, Yeah, tea my sort of comfort.

Go to what tea?

Well, I'm sort of slightly obsessed with tea.

So it could be assam, could be a type of assam, could be dud dealing, could be orange pico could be lapsang, soushong, or a mix of all of those.

And what is your method, you know, all of.

The usual things.

You know, the water has to boil, you know, properly boil, like you know, hitting the pot.

You know, in an ideal.

World, always make a part of tea, not a cup of tea.

Oh yeah, no, no, no pot, yeah yeah, the right amount of tea.

Let it sit for the right amount of time.

But I like experimenting with mixing different teas.

But that's my that's my kind of comfort my comfort food, you know, and it's something that I look forward to at certain times of the day and in certain places.

And you know, for me, it represents so many things.

It's it's it's an obsession with my grandmother that I think I inherited from my grandmother.

She was obsessed with tea.

Your mother's mother, my mother's mother.

She was the one that was never allowed in the kitchen.

Yeah, so she made so.

So you know, she was really good tea.

Thank you Mark, thanks to have lunch.

Ruthie's Table four is proud to support Leukemia UK.

Their Cartwheel for a Cure campaign raises funds for vital research and more effective and kinder treatments for a cue My Lloyd leukemia.

Please donate, and to do so search cartwheel for a cure.

Ruthie's Table four was produced by Alex Belle and Zad Rogers with Susannahlop, Andrew Sang and Bella Selini.

This has been an atomized production for iHeartMedia.