Sweetie, what do you mean you don't have a River Cafe cook book? Don't you care about the difference between bresaola and carpaccio? Don't you need to know how to cook borleotti beans? Don't you wonder what your friends will think if they don't see it on your shelf? Social and culinary suicide, sweetie.
The River Cafe phenomenon is an interesting one. One of any number of smart restaurants serving interesting food that opened in London in the late 1980s, it has had a far greater reach and a far greater impact than could normally be expected from a single restaurant. This is almost entirely due to the runaway success of the cookbooks written by chef-owners Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray: The River Cafe Cookbook, River Cafe Cookbook Two and River Cafe Italian Kitchen all of which are now available in paperback. Perhaps due as much to their elegant, Zeitgeisty design full of bright colours and blurred kitchen shots as to the trademark recipes interpreting Italian farmhouse cooking, the River Cafe cookbooks fast became obligatory for any self-respecting gourmet or style-conscious cook. The original River Cafe Cookbook had a first print run of 5,000; the three books have sold more than half a million copies to date and last year Channel 4 commissioned two TV series with Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, entitled The Italian Kitchen.
The pair are understandably a little smug about their success, particularly as they were repeatedly told that people "out there" wouldn't be interested in a book of recipes from a small restaurant in London. There was also a spot of trouble when they insisted on overseeing everything that was being cooked up design-wise; "We weren't going to have a book unless we could be involved in the way it looked. We wouldn't really let anybody else do anything - one publisher fired us."
Rogers and Gray are very aware of their own position of influence now and take that position seriously. In the 12 years since the River Cafe opened, the availability and common use of ingredients such as polenta, parmesan and cavalo nero has increased dramatically and Gray and Rogers manage to claim responsibility for much of that without sounding immodest - satisfied maybe, but not arrogant. As Rogers puts it: "It's all very exciting. People say to us `Why do you put these ingredients in the books that you can't get outside London?' In fact we think that if we put something in and people make enough phone calls, enough requests in an attempt to get it they become smart, demanding consumers and the supply is improved. We now have supermarkets coming to the restaurant trying to see what we're using in our cooking."
It's a philosophy they also apply to organic produce, a cause which Gray says interests them more than the GM food debate. "I'd rather have food that was grown the way it should be - you can garden away the pests," says Gray. Rogers adds: "You can't stop the progress of scientific knowledge, whether it's genetic tinkering or cloning. It can be frightening or it can be liberating - the main thing is our right to know."
They are about to start compiling a third River Cafe cookbook, a process they describe as "very enjoyable". The first one "practically wrote itself" as so many of the recipes were already written down for their chefs by Rogers and Gray. The characteristic River Cafe dish is inspired by the time both women spent in Italy and the home-cooking they ate there so they were determined to get each dish absolutely perfect. The content of the books is very much decided by what they cook in the restaurant: "We don't sit down and try to think up recipes. We sit and look through our menus and look at how we have effectively changed."
The third cookbook will concentrate on what is available in each month of the year, with a particular emphasis on vegetables. "We're going to call it River Cafe Green," says Rose. It seems the obvious choice of title - the previous two books are known as much by their coloured covers (royal blue for the first book, buttercup yellow for the second) as by their names - but the publishers aren't out of the woods just yet. "Yes," laughs Rose, "They were so excited that it was going to be called Green so the cover could be green that we thought we might make it red."
The River Cafe Cookbook and River Cafe Cookbook Two are published in paperback by Ebury Press, £15 in UK. River Cafe Italian Kitchen is published by Ebury Press, £10 in UK.