Smashed Kitchen Legends: An interview with chef and cookbook author Theo Randall

Chef Theo Randall talks about his latest book Verdura and his career

Theo Randall is one of the UK’s best known and loved chefs. With an award winning London restaurant Theo Randall at The InterContinental, five cookbooks and regular TV appearances to his name, Randall is one of the leading exponents of Italian cuisine in Britain. As head chef of the legendary River Cafe in Hammersmth, he won a Michelin star in 1997 and was recently awarded the Ordine della Stella d’Italia (Order of the star of Italy). His most recent cookbook, Verdura, was published earlier this year. In an hour-long phone interview, I spoke to him about the book and his long and successful career.

It’s incredible to think that Theo Randall at The InterContinental opened back in 2006.

It's extraordinary, 17 years is quite a big chunk of life. When we first opened the restaurant, my kids were little, and now I'm a grandparent. That says it all really.

In a fashion-led and fickle scene like London’s, it’s quite unusual for a restaurant to be so enduring. What factors have led to that long-running success?

I think it's down to a lot of hard work, having a good team and keeping the team happy. Throughout the 17 years I've had a lot of longevity. For the first eight years most of the chefs stayed, I had a very solid team. I've been very fortunate with the publicity I've been able to get. Programmes like Saturday Kitchen have been invaluable to promote the restaurant.

I'm quite a sociable person and I always try and make people feel welcome and special. That makes a big difference, particularly in Mayfair where it's quite stuffy sometimes, and you get repeat business. Because I'm in the kitchen cooking people can come in and say hello. It's an open door and anyone can come in.

Having a central London location helps, as does cooking good food. If you cook with your heart and the seasons and you cook with your own passion, then I think you create good food.

The cookbooks have been very valuable for the longevity of the restaurant, I've done five cookbooks and all those things that I've done over the years have all added up. I did a Huffington Post blog for quite a few years and that was really ahead of its time I did a hundred recipes online and it went to a huge audience so that was really helpful.

What is your role now at the restaurant, are you still hands-on?

I'm in the kitchen all the time. We are closed Sunday and Monday, so I'm here Tuesday to Saturday unless some filming or we're doing other stuff. Even when I'm writing a book, I'm still in the kitchen in the restaurant. One of my favorite things is doing a double shift in the restaurant. It sounds bizarre, but for me that's just what a day should be, doing lunch and then doing dinner. I'll do the meat section, I'll do the fish section. The thing about me is I love cooking. I love being in the kitchen. I love being with my team. If I'm sitting at home on a Saturday night watching television, there's something really wrong.

I'm not a shouty chef. I don't want people to feel insecure when they come in the kitchen. My theory is if you're confident and you've got a good taste, then you'll become a good chef. You've got to tell people when they're doing things wrong but you've also got to give them credit when they do well. You want people to have the same feeling as you do. I set the example in the kitchen or on the floor. If I've got a smile on my face, then the floor will have a smile on their face. If I'm miserable and shouty and jumping up and down, telling people off, they'll have the same feeling. So it all comes from inside.

You've been passionate about Italian food throughout your career. What makes you loyal to the cuisine and have you ever felt the need to go beyond that to do other projects in other styles?

I think Italian food is, for me, the best cuisine. I go to Italy at least three times a year - a summer holiday with the family, probably a wine trip or an olive oil trip - so that re-energizes your passion for Italian food. We do a monthly menu where we choose a region of Italy, and we cook dishes from that region, which are very traditional. It's a bit of a bargain, £75 for four courses and three glasses of wine from that region. It's an education of dishes and I find it really inspiring.

Italy is twenty regions, twenty different countries really. They've all got their own take on something, their own inspiring ingredient or inspiring recipes and so that drives me. When I go to Italy, I go to a restaurant and I'll sit and eat something very simple and just think, God, it makes you realize how great a dish can be with just a few ingredients. I like to be as authentic as possible, but sometimes you can't be too authentic because it's almost too simple. I can't put things like tripe on the menu because it's not going to sell.

Keeping to its roots and traditions is actually is a very sensible thing to do. I make up dishes and create dishes, but I always look back at what the classics are. Take pasta allo scoglio - you've got the most amazing ingredients. You've got prawns, mussels, clams, a little bit of chilli, garlic and tomato, and you mix that with a really fantastically made fresh pasta and finish off with some nice olive oil, why would you want to change that?

I think the older you get, the more traditional you become. Chefs can use too many ingredients and get carried away. You might get an influence of a dish that might be Mediterranean or French or Spanish or something, but I would always stick to the traditions of the Italian kitchen.

When you first started at the River Cafe it was around the time of the birth of ‘Modern British’ cooking. Do you remember that time and how it felt? Did you feel part of something?

Modern British was about having really delicious food that had a sort of nod to Britishness, but there was quite a lot of French technique and skill in there and the River Cafe was very much away from that. It wasn't modern British in any way whatsoever. It was actually desperate to find what the real Italian food was and finding those ingredients to create the kind of rustic Italian food that you'd eaten in Tuscany or Emilia-Romagna.

But the Modern British movement was something definitely at the time. That was when restaurants really changed. When Rose and Ruth opened the River Cafe they were very different to everyone else. They hadn't really had the traditional restaurant training, and I think that was the best thing they could have had done, the fact they hadn't been in all of the kitchens and restaurants in London at the time. They were untrained but they were trained in life and that made a big difference. They had confidence and intelligence and knew how to treat people. It was a very friendly atmosphere, very much a team thing with even the waiters helping out with prep.

Part of Rose and Ruth’s inspiration came from Califormia and Alice Waters and you went out there to work in Water’s kitchen. How was that experience?

I had to go and work at Chez Panisse because I wanted to see where all it all came from. I wanted to see first hand what these restaurants were like, because California was incredible, the produce and the food being made was so confident. I remember they would have wine dinners and Italian and French winemakers would turn up from the other side of the world and have a dinner for one night. They were completely respectful of this restaurant in California that was promoting their product.

It was fantastic. That whole time was hugely inspirational. I think a lot of these restaurants have inspired a lot of chefs and kitchens, and so that sort of whole modern British movement was inspired by not just what was going on in the UK, but it was obviously further afield. And restaurants like Chez Panisse had a big, big thing to play in that. At the time in London when the Modern British movement was happening, a lot of chefs had started to travel and they'd been to these places and got ideas, and they came back and thought, let's do something different.

So you were at The River Cafe from 1989 until 2006 and helped win the restaurant a Michelin star in 1997. Was it quite a wrench when you decided to leave?

I'd been thinking about leaving for a while because, even though I was a partner in the restaurant and had shares, I just felt it was time to do my own thing. You only really know if you're any good when you do your own thing. It was difficult to leave such an amazing place. Rose and Ruth were just such brilliant people, and people are still there that I worked with when I first started, so it was difficult to leave.

I remember feeling, when I actually finally left and opened at the Intercontinental, there was a sense, not of relief, but okay, I'm glad I made that move. There had always been that little bit of that voice in the back of my head saying, you've got quite a nice thing going on here. Do you really want to leave this? When we won Italian Restaurant of the Year at the London Restaurant Awards, we’d only been open a year and I thought, wow, that was a great thing to have. It was a great accolade, and it really made me feel that I'd done the right thing.

Rose and Ruth were like my mum, they were incredible but there were times when you get frustrated or you'd want to do something, but they didn't want to so it was the right time to leave. I enjoyed every minute and I'm glad I stayed as long as I did. People say I stayed there for a long time, but you know what? Sometimes you really learn so much when you're somewhere for a long time. I was given a lot of freedom and I felt really part of the business so it was a very pleasurable experience, and I have very happy memories.

Have you been back to eat at the River Cafe since you left?

Many times. I'm still a huge fan, and I still see Ruthie. She's a brilliant human being in so many ways and has driven The River Cafe from day one. She put her heart and soul in it. When Rose passed away, she took the reins and carried on. They did it together but Ruthie was always the details person. She'd make sure everything was right, she'd make sure that the bookings were right, she'd make sure that the food was right and there was a consistency with it. I think that was really important and that's why the River Cafe has just gone on from strength to strength in the last decade.

You’ve opened other restaurants over the years, is that something that you'd consider doing again if the opportunity arose?

I've opened a lot of restaurants. I've had very good chefs who have come to me and said, look, I'd really like to do something with you. Actually, in the same way I went to Rose and Ruth because I was at that point thinking, well, it'd be nice to do something else with them. I've always thought that if I could give other people an opportunity, then I would.

The restaurant in Bangkok, which ran from 2014 to 2022 did incredibly well. I had a chef called Chris Beverly who worked for me. By chance, the owner of the hotel in Bangkok, which is an InterContinental, said they'd like to do a new Italian restaurant. I brought Chris over, and we worked on the menus. We did a couple of special dinners for them, and they loved it and the deal was signed. Chris was head chef and there for five years. He’s now married to a lovely Thai girl, and they've got a child. That's another side to restaurants, they bring people together. I met my wife at the River Cafe. It's a very social scene, restaurants, it's a lovely thing.

A few years later, the owner of the InterContinental in Hong Kong came to the restaurant in London and I was chatting to him. Then he went to Bangkok and loved the restaurant there and said, well, can we do a similar thing to that? So that's how that restaurant started. Then I did something in Kensington. Sadly, they're both closed now. The one in Bangkok was closed, they changed the building. But the one in Hong Kong, I hadn't been out there for two years because of lockdown. My chef Fabio is still there. I took my name off it, but let him carry on because he did all the hard work.

I was going out there three times a year to both sites. It does take a lot out of you because every time you're there, you've got to work like a bloody dog. You're there for 10 days. They want to get as much publicity, as much menu training as they possibly can. I'd get back off the plane and be putting out fires here, and then go on to the next place. It is difficult. I don’t know Jason Atherton and people like that do it.

I’d definitely do another restaurant but I would be very careful about how I do it. You can jump in feet first and then you've got to work out how to run it. After the second or third year, you've got to really work out ways of redoing the menus, doing lots more publicity. When you first open a restaurant, the first six months are the time when you can put so much PR and effort in and the restaurant can be really, really busy. But it's the second, third year that when you have to really work hard because that's when you have to come up with new things, come up with new ideas, come up with new ways of promoting the restaurant.

I remember doing Iron Chef in Bangkok. It was an opportunity that came up when the restaurant was three years old. It’s quite a big show out there and I ended up winning it. It was the perfect thing. It reinvented the restaurant. It was doing well, but it suddenly became even busier, which is what you need to do.

When I've done the restaurants, I've always had a key person there to make sure that they're running it. I'm not going to do a restaurant with a chef and then just send them a couple of emails and the recipes and hope for the best. It's very much hands on as much as you can really.

You are on TV quite often. Is it something you enjoy or is it a necessary evil to promote what you are doing?

I love teaching people and television is a great format to teach people. If you do something that's simple and they can see it being done in real time, then they'll be inspired to cook it. That's why I love programs like Saturday Kitchen because it's live and it's real time. I always try and think of things that will inspire people and a dish that is very easy to cook and affordable. Putting truffles and fresh porcini in things and buying lobsters is not everyone's cup of tea. I want to make sure everyone can cook it and so something like a mussel pasta is great.

There's obviously different sides to it. Chefs think that suddenly they're a superstar actor. They're not. The reason you're on television is because you can cook, you can show people something or show a skill and you can teach people, that really is what it's all about. I've been inspired by people on television or someone cooking something or seeing something in a restaurant or in a book, and it's made me want to cook something, so I like to do the same for others.

One thing you are particularly good at on Saturday Kitchen is getting the complete recipe across. Sometimes the pace is quite frantic and you think, ‘What's going on? What did he just do?’ You seem able to keep things concise so they make sense.

Thank you. The thing about live television is that you've got someone with a board saying, ‘Three minutes to go, one minute to go’, and you can hear someone going, ‘Plate the food, quickly!’ There's been times when there's been someone on and they've just taken too long and I've been doing the second recipe and you've got an eight-minute recipe that you've got do in five minutes. That's when it becomes really frantic and you're like, ‘Oh Christ, why me?’ But those sorts of things are fun and they do bring the best out of you.

You’ve just published your fifth cookbook, what was the initial spur to start writing cookbooks?

My passion for teaching. You've got to have the passion and put the time in to do it. It's bloody hard when you're running a restaurant and you come home and you're exhausted and you think, well, I've got to write two recipes before I go to bed.

Why did you decide to write about vegetables this time round?

It started quite a while ago with my daughter, who's now 23. When she was about 12 or 13, she said to me, ‘Dad, I want to eat more vegetables.’ I call her sausage. She loves eating sausages and she loves eating a steak but she will eat vegetables until they come out of her ears and I love that. So I experimented a lot. I did a lot more cooking at home with vegetables and it started from there.

The book is 10 vegetables, 10 recipes per vegetable. Essentially it's all about vegetables and eating more of them and knowing what to do with them. It's very seasonal because things like potatoes, squashes and asparagus all have their own time of year. I want recipes that are easy and simple to follow, but also good for family eating. There's lots of pasta, there's lots of risotto, there's lots of baked dishes and lots of grilled dishes. It's a real mixture.

People generally are eating far more vegetables than they used to. It doesn't mean you're a vegetarian, it doesn't mean you're a vegan. Some of the best pastas I've ever eaten have been simple like spaghetti with courgettes. It's maybe three or four ingredients, but those three or four ingredients can make it vegan without you even really noticing it.

Writing a book on vegetables was really about people cooking at home and having a healthier diet. It's not healthy as in, there's no fat in anything, it's quite the opposite. There's loads of cheese and things like that, but it's a nice way to cook. Some of the dishes are side dishes. There’s a whole section on potatoes and some of them would go with a roast lamb or something. There's a chapter on aubergines and 10 very different recipes on how to cook them. Once you get the general feeling, the confidence of cooking an aubergine, it is the most wonderful ingredient. You can grill it, you can fry it, you can roast it, you can do all manner of things with an aubergine.

I’m also trying to educate people on choosing fresh vegetables. When you pick an aubergine you want to go for the shiny ones - that means that they haven't got any seeds in them. If they have a matte texture on the outside, they're full of seeds. When you pick one up it should feel really light. If it feels heavy, it's full of seeds and virtually impossible to cook or eat because it's just unpleasant.

Is there another book in the works?

It's going to be all about regional Italian food so that's going to be really interesting. It will be out early 2026. I've already done a huge amount of research on that already because we've been doing the regional menus. But you get inspiration from everywhere. It's not just me travelling around Italy and ticking off all the classic dishes. I went on holiday to Ibiza and we went this restaurant called La Paloma, which is quite famous. They'd cooked an aubergine in a wood oven, almost like baba ganoush. They’d split it in half so it was all smoky inside, and they put this mixture of vegetables and pasta in it. I was amazed at the flavour this aubergine had. You'll find inspiration everywhere, you just have to open your eyes.

Verdura by Theo Randall (£28) is published by Quadrille
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