Slow food, fast cars and now perfect timing - Massimo Bottura teams up with Florentine watchmaker Panerai It’s that thing,” she says, “if you love them, let them go. They always appear with that look in their eyes, asking for a word, and you know it’s over.” She smiles. “Later, they say: when I worked with you my biggest problem with the day was making my ravioli thin enough to see through. Now they talk about worries about the electricity bill. Owning your own place often takes you further and further away from the kitchen.” Partly in homage to those last years, Ruth created The River Cafe Look Book, published towards the end of 2022. In a rainbow of colour it pairs surprising images with pictures of River Cafe food – a plate of spaghetti vongole and some wilting tulips, a pink telephone and a raspberry sorbet – the recipes for which follow. “I was asked to do a cookbook for children,” Rogers says. “But [the photographer] Matthew Donaldson and I thought perhaps you could do a book that works for 12 year olds and 82 year olds. After Richard fell, he had quite severe neurological problems. Somebody gave me these books, which paired images – a Vermeer painting with the moon, a baby’s profile with the edge of the sea – inviting you to make connections. People with autism, people with dementia see things in that. And Richard loved looking at these books. So we thought maybe we could do the same kind of thing with food, pair of photographs together – the look book.” Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil and cook the gnocchi for 3 minutes until they rise to the surface. Remove with a slotted spoon.

Chef Ruth Rogers and photographer Matthew Donaldson on breaking new ground with The River Cafe Look Book The River Cafe Look Book is a new cookery book from the acclaimed London restaurant that Ruth Rogers CBE launched with Rose Gray in 1987. Over the decades, the restaurant has introduced Londoners to modern, Italian cuisine, and trained up some of the world’s best-known chefs, including Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Fusilli With Zucchini

In 1996, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik described London’s River Cafe as “the best Italian restaurant in Europe.” High praise is certainly justified, but that specific claim might not be wholly true. As Rose Gray, the restaurant's late co-founder, told the New Times Times a few years later: “we cook Italian food, but we're not an Italian restaurant."

Zucchini Salad. Photography by Matthew Donaldson This River Cafe salad looks great and is fun to make with kids The first cookbook from London's iconic River Cafe written with beginner cooks and children in mind - a collection of more than 50 delicious and easily achievable recipes, including a host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks Our latest cook book The River Cafe Look Book; Recipes for Kids of all Ages by Ruth Rogers, Sian Wyn Owen and Joseph Trivelli. 100 beautiful and inspiring photographs, 50 easy-to-cook recipes, and invaluable tips from chefs of The River Café.With more than 50 iconic recipes, each of which has been masterfully adapted and revised by the River Cafe chefs specifically for those new to cooking, the fabulous dishes in this collection bring the warmth, beauty, and sumptuous ease of Italian family home-cooking to cooks of all levels of kitchen expertise - including your kids! See a vase of dramatically wilting tulips set next to spaghetti alle vongole, as readers of this new book will, and they’ll “recognise the shared curves and complex and graceful warp of stalk in the pasta.” The River Cafe Look Book: Recipes for Kids of all Ages Ruth Rogers, Sian Wyn Owen, and Joseph Trivelli Brazilian gun battles, avoiding arrest and being just a 'wallpaper' guy - what we learned from JR on 60 Minutes