00:00:00
Speaker 1: We have good news. Ruthie's Table four is now a book. Table four at the River Cafe Conversations about Food and Life is a collection of guests, interviews, photographs from over two hundred and forty episodes. We have Paul McCartney, Tina Fey, David Beckham Melbrooks, Austin Butler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and many many more telling their stories through the lens of food or are now Ruthy's Table four dot com slash book Ruthie's Table four presented by Sky.
00:00:37
Speaker 2: When I came back to New York, I also came out in life and I started to watch. I was twenty seven at that point, though I had worked straight through the Palm and that was building a relationship with my dad that we didn't have from the early years. And then when I came out, I said to him, because it was such a heterosexual palms, say very much show. And I said, but is this going to be an issue for you? And he said, no, you're all You are a good man. And I see, and that the restaurant which I so resented as a boy, became the bridge that gave me my relationship with my dad.
00:01:25
Speaker 1: Like many of life's best ideas. The idea of having Bruce Bozzi as a guest on Ruthie's table for began in a kitchen a few months ago. Bruce, his husband Brian, and I were together in their home in LA. Knowing Bruce loves to cook, we had decided to make a tomato and basil pasta together for a good group of friends. Picking the basil, peeling the garlic, draining the tomatoes. Bruce and I talked about growing up in New York, living in LA and discovering how much we share in our lives and the world of food. Bruce grew up in an Italian American home and for many general rations his family had the Palm restaurant, an American legend. Today, Bruce and I are together again to continue our conversation, and when it's over, we'll end up where we began, another kitchen, this time at the River Cafe. Two good friends, cooking, talking and basking in the love and happiness of being together. Oh so do you remember that night?
00:02:23
Speaker 2: Oh my god, that was That night goes down as one of the top three nights we've ever had in that Yeah, seriously, the connection besides the food that.
00:02:36
Speaker 1: Was was just a tomato pust No, but as the simpler.
00:02:41
Speaker 2: The simpler, the better. Yeah, and the connection over the as we were cooking and our guests, it really was a phenomenon. When you said you were going to come to the house when we were going to cook, I was nervous. I was like, okay, like Brusy's coming to cook. What you know, what do we need to do? And you made it so incredibly easy and fun and the vibe of the.
00:03:10
Speaker 1: Bona wandered in. My brother came and this is really it was. Austin came, Austin came.
00:03:18
Speaker 2: We had the best and the other thing that Ruthie you do, which is something I really believe in the business that we are in. Uh, you brought everyone together.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: Well that's what you do, what we do and what we love. But it was it was really special. It was and I think tomato pasta do you love? You actually chose a recipe which has tomatoes and the sauce and pasta. Do you know the story of this pasta? Rose? You know, my late partner in the River Cafe had these two great friends called Adam mcchloe, and when we were doing the very first cookbook, we decided to put their recipes in for pasta with sausage, and when they disagreed, they but one of them did it very slow. So we said, okay, you're good friends. We'll put both your recipes in side by side. So one is tomato pasta, I'll Chloe, and the other one was Adam. And so you choose the Adam one, you choose the atom. It's right, all right.
00:04:18
Speaker 2: So tonight we are going to have Penny with Adam. Slow cooked sausage sauce. Serve six. It's eight fresh Italian spiced pork sausages crumbled. I mean, come on, that's so delicious. Two small red onions peeled and chopped. Two garlic clothes peeled and chopped, two small dried chilis crumbled. Two hundred and fifteen millis of kant leaders.
00:04:47
Speaker 1: This is This was written for the British edition. I could have given him the American one. Okay, we have an international audience. Anybody's listening. We can do the math for you.
00:04:57
Speaker 2: Do the math. Okay, So one kilogram jar of peeled, plump tomatoes, one hundred and twenty grams of parmesan, freshly grated, one hundred and fifty milli liters double cream, two hundred and fifty grams of penney or goad day I got mom Mia. Fry the sausage meat, stirring and breaking up the pieces after the juices from the meat have evaporated. Add the onions, garlic and chilies. Cook gently for about thirty minutes. I mean, can you imagine the smell of that. Add the wine. Cook until the wine evaporates. Add the tomatoes, lower the heat and simmer gently, or until you have a thick sauce. Season stir in the parmesan and cream. Cook the pennate until al dente. Add the pennate to the sauce, toss well and serve with simple as that. Yes, love, it's delicious.
00:05:51
Speaker 1: It's very Italian. Yeah, and I think that it's interesting that you chose such an Italian recipe.
00:05:56
Speaker 2: Well, I think you know, growing up, when my mother would cook, you know, when she you know, she had her lasagna recipe, and part of that was all sausage and stirring and you know, startaining the onions and the garlic and then adding that, and then when you were cooking the sausages, using the sort of juice from that to add in. So the whole ritual of kind of combining the ingredients is so magical to me.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Let's start at the beginning, because your your parents were born in parents and your grandparents.
00:06:32
Speaker 2: No, my great grandfather, Pio Bossi and his partner, they were born in Italy. My family comes from Parma. Parma and his partner, John Gansey. So it's the Ganzys and the basis his two families that came together. And they really just opened a small, one room restaurant at eight thirty seven Second Avenue on in New York on between forty fourth and forty fifth. They went to apply for a business license to call it Parama from the place they were from. But the people in the you know, the Business Bureau, couldn't understand their accents, so they stamped at Palm. And they were so frightened to say anything different for fear of like not getting it.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: I was going to ask you about my sort of thoughts about talking today. I was going to ask why was this restaurant called the Palm Because when you think of palm trees in the United States, you think of Florida or California, and this was on Second Avenue. It's such a great name for a restaurant. I mean, Parma would have been great. So tell me more about the beginning.
00:07:39
Speaker 2: So the beginnings I think are you know, and setting up any sort of foundation, and we're talking about anything that's set in truth and authenticity. The small restaurant that had would sought us on the floor, so it was not fancy. It was really you know, it was like a beat up joint kind of restaurant that very much in the early thirties, you know, the big crash of nineteen twenty nine. The neighborhood had a lot of syndicates, had a lot of newspaper people, but it was really local people living there. Cartoonists used to come in and they couldn't pay for their meals because their stock market had crashed. So my great grandfather said, okay, we'll start drawing on the walls and all the rivets of the murals, and that's how they pay for their meals. And that became a palm rivet. And then the other thing was people started asking for steak and there was a butcher literally across the street, and the waiter were just go get the steak when they wanted a steak, So it became then known as a steakhouse, an Italian steakhouse, and then steak and as it grew, But really for all those years, from the first and second generation, it was that one location on Second Avenue and very much the River Cafe. It expanded next door, took the space next door, and then it took the space upstairs as business dictated, you know. And then in the early seventies, my father and his partner Wally, said their fathers had been sick. They sort of took over and they at the time, George Bush Senior, who was an ambassador, was moving to DC and said, you know, there's not a lot of places to eat in DC. Have you guys ever thought of opening the Palm there? Because the Palm was three or four blocks from the United Nations in Manhattan. And they said no, but yes, and that began kind of the first white tablecloth restaurant expansion in America. So we went to DC and it was so jam packed. And you know, we're both friends with Diane von Furstenberg, who she always talks about the seventies and it was like, you know, seventies in New York was pretty spec It was just like you know, and it was like a line you couldn't get in. And there was a little Italian joint across the street, and my dad used to say he'd look out the window and these guys would just be like staring at the palm, which was so busy. And then they decided to take over that small space, and then from there went to Los Angeles, which I think these uh DC, Los Angeles, New York. That trifecta, Yeah, became politics in Hollywood and New York. It really kind of grew this small immigrant Italian restaurant that was already.
00:10:36
Speaker 1: Was it still seen as an Italian restaurant because you see, I know what.
00:10:39
Speaker 2: It was more of it than as a steakhouse.
00:10:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, and lobster. I remember the loves lobsters.
00:10:45
Speaker 2: So in the sixties they introduced the because I you.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: Know, I was married to an Italian who loved Italian food and loved food, you know, whatever city we went to, whether it was Beijing or Marrakesh or Paris, or you want to eat the food of the country, you know. You know, so when we go to New York and be taken out to or off a day, can we take you to this wonderful Italian restaurant, wonderful French restaurant. Let's go to Chinatown and have this. Actually what Richard would always say it was let's go to an American restaurant. And for us that was palm, you know, and this kind of and we and we just loved that generosity that and I think I never ate anything that probably except for lobster or steak.
00:11:30
Speaker 2: And everything was big, big, wasn't it. Everything was big. It became known to have these lobsters which no one was serving at this worth three four or five six pound lobsters which are huge, and steaks were eighteen ounces, and like you know, you know, everything could feed yeah, you know, everyone at the table, like you know. But and that became sort of a thing.
00:11:52
Speaker 1: But how did that connect to your house, back to the domestic life. Well, you were born into this family. Your father was at the restaurant.
00:12:00
Speaker 2: My father was at the restaurant all day. I never really saw my dad, right, I mean, so what would happen is in the morning he'd be asleep when we would go to school, and then he'd beat the restaurant for lunch. We'd come home from school. He who was two of us, and Andrea and she and.
00:12:21
Speaker 1: This was in New York City, so you lived right in Manhattan.
00:12:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, we lived in Queen's Jackson Heights, Queens until nineteen seventy five, and then moved into Manhattan and because it was closer to ye know, it's just across the bridge. And then at night we were with our mom and then.
00:12:39
Speaker 1: So I really does she have any involvement?
00:12:42
Speaker 2: Not really. It was a very pretty much man. It was historically the boys got the restaurant and it was not the easiest of times in regard to and my parents met in high school. They're still together today. But there was a big you know, a restaurant guys. Yeah, a restaurant person.
00:13:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, it takes a lot. The restaurant becomes your home as well when you're working there.
00:13:11
Speaker 2: My mother always says, you know, the restaurant would close at twelve, but you'd be home at three thirty in the Yeah.
00:13:19
Speaker 1: Ye, she cooked.
00:13:22
Speaker 2: She would cook for us.
00:13:24
Speaker 1: You go to school, go to school, home.
00:13:27
Speaker 2: Come home. And you know, I was not I didn't have the biggest palette. So you know, a chicken milonaise or a roast. A roast chicken was one of my favorite things. She could cook. You know, slow roast chicken, you know, salad and god, we didn't eat it because we you know, after school sometimes you go and the grocery store. She's a great woman. Yeah, a tough New York Italian, fiercely loyal to friends and family woman.
00:14:00
Speaker 1: And she sounds beect but she did you connect? Did you have a grandma? So your grandmother?
00:14:05
Speaker 2: My two grandmothers are really my Both grandfathers I met very briefly in life passed over quickly.
00:14:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:14:12
Speaker 2: One passed in seventy four, one past in seventy one, so I was a little boy. My grandmother's I was very close to my mother's mother, specifically Sadie, and she died in nineteen eighty three on March thirteenth, And we were very close. And she and my father's mother, who is now part of the Palm Experience, Louise, we were very close as well. And you know, they they were very different. My father's mother was loving, she had but she was out there, like she kind of traveled and lived life. She was sort of like a Sophia Laurent type, like red hair, you know, curvacious, smoking cigarettes. And my grandmother was more of a traditional if you think of Martin Scorsese's mom. Yeh, yeah, wins. I think they were twins. Like I recently saw that documentary and I sent to my mom and dad. I was like, is this not sadie, This is crazy? But so it was a different I would sit with her and squash into the same chair as her, and just she was kind of heavy set, and just her her arms were like dough if you and I say that respectfully, you know, if they had a lot of skin. So I would sit and kind of need her arms as we were watching TV. And one day we were watching TV and there was a there was a television commercial, if you will call there was a perfume called Chloe, and it was early eighties and this beautiful blonde woman now and like around this seventy something. And my grandmother said to me, and I wish I was beautiful like that. And I looked at her and I said, you are beautiful like that. Like that was so women as much as men were in my life. The women in my life shaped me and really informed me and raised me. Like the community of women. So I'm very connected to women in all levels in my life, which is funny because I'm also gay. And married to Brian. But you know.
00:16:14
Speaker 1: Connect that makes me connect. We do. My father was absent then during the did you did they? Did you ever take you to work with him?
00:16:29
Speaker 2: Well, the first memory I have of my dad taking me to the palm was in uh Now. Because he was working so much, the relationship wasn't so organic. There was a bit of you know, and I think Italian mothers and their sons there was there's, you know, something in my sister.
00:16:49
Speaker 1: My I was married to the son of an Italian mother. When I used to walk into the house Richard and I would go to visit her, there was what I used to call the gays. You know, it sort of stopped like I was sort of put on the side. It was started at the top and just sort of go down and end with you know, you look a bit thin as you be giving enough to eat or to you know. She was always that was her and that's why we loved going home. That's why you kind of went home. But he had his first granddaughter aged you know, I can't I guess this is she must have been ninety. And when we said that Richard's son had had a baby girl, this is my step children girl she said, Oh, at last, now we should we'll have someone to look after him. It was like, is that's what it was? But you know what, what no, I say, The prisons are not full of people who've been loved too much, you know, so that love, you know, sort of carried on.
00:17:52
Speaker 2: Very interesting.
00:17:55
Speaker 1: So your father, though, we're talking about my dad, he was, he was working.
00:18:01
Speaker 2: I think the connection was when I got old and I in my teens and I started to work in the summers for the Palm. I started to do not only was in my blood. You could see that this is not for everybody, and it began a relationship for he and I. And then well, go back to that.
00:18:23
Speaker 1: I mean, did you realize that this was not what you wanted to do in life?
00:18:28
Speaker 2: I didn't know what I wanted to but I knew. I knew during the summers I was going to work in the Palm because it was summer job. When I worked down East Hampton, I worked in the kitchen as an expedier. I was at the front, seating people, answering phones, taking with all old school at the time, you know what I mean. There was no pos systems and things like that. It was really but what I knew what I did well. Was I connected with not only the guests but the people I worked with. And there was no entitlement, there was nothing. I was in it, in it from the beginning to the end. And I think over time because then after when I became a young adult man looking for a career, I had my Hollywood years. I called them my normal Genie years, where I went to Hollywood. I worked at at night at the West Hollywood Palm, ringing checks with the matreaty of all times Gigi del Maestro, who was a waiter at the Palm two, and as they expanded the Palm, they spend it from within. They would if you were working, it's the best way culturally to keep the integrity. So Gigi became like a second dad to me. So at night I'd be like answering phones. During the day, I was trying to be an actor. I worked on a production, you know, I did all that kind of stuff. It's where I met a lot of people that we you know, that we know together. And then when I came back to New York, I also came out in life and I started to work. I was twenty seven at that point, though I had worked straight through the palm, and that was building a relationship with my dad that we didn't have from the early years. And then when I came out, I said to him, because it was such a heterosexual.
00:20:10
Speaker 1: Show, right there, probably no waitresses were.
00:20:15
Speaker 2: There was much later in life. Yeah, it was the integration and then female managers and the whole thing. And I said, but is this going to be an issue for you? And he said, no, you're all. You are a good man, and that's and that that the restaurant, which I so resented as a boy, became the bridge that gave me my relationship with my dad.
00:20:40
Speaker 1: Did you study in California?
00:20:43
Speaker 2: Did I wanted to go to calif I grew up watching television and seeing these shows in California, like these company chi Angels, all these. I thought California was like just freedom. So when it was time to go and I had a sort of just an energy, I was kind of.
00:21:00
Speaker 1: Laid back and I just gorgeous as you are now you know about that.
00:21:05
Speaker 2: But I said, I want to go to la for school. And I can remember two things happened in nineteen eighty four. My dad said in the which was very meaningful. He said, you know, you don't have to go that far. We're not just going to pop up and you know. And I said, that's not why I'm going. I'm going because I have this this love of California. My mother said, your dad's going to take you. And I looked at her. Because their wedding anniversary was something was happening, she couldn't come, and I was like, are you crazy. We were in the kitchen. He was, are you crazy? What? And we landed. The radio was on and said, you know, it's ninety seven degrees in southern California and I thought, I looked at the going down. I was like, yes. But he took me and for three days he did everything a dad you want, get you set up in you know, get your betting, set you up for food. And it was those three days that completely shape shifted our relationship too. And he left and he wrote a note that said you can there's always a ticket when you want to come home. I love you, and I'd never seen or heard him say that, and I kept it for a million years and then I gave it back to him as a gift.
00:22:25
Speaker 1: Sorry, that's just.
00:22:27
Speaker 2: It's all to me. It's all about family and it's all about.
00:22:31
Speaker 1: But did you create yourself a bit of family? And even in that situation in La, did you did you have your own apartment? Did you live in campus? Did you too many questions? Eat out? Cook at helme? No?
00:22:44
Speaker 2: In the in the in the school years, I did. I did do what you're saying. But in the school years it was pretty traditional. I created. I had a family of the you know, the kids I was around, and we did all LA stuff. The what I did wasn't I graduated in eighty nine, I moved back to New York and I became an NBC page and I love that job.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: That like in thirty rows.
00:23:08
Speaker 2: In thirty row it was his.
00:23:09
Speaker 1: Name, Kenneth.
00:23:10
Speaker 2: It was. I was not as queen as Okay, I was not as key, but I was came.
00:23:17
Speaker 1: To mind because I sa the other day we were just talking.
00:23:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry, due respect. Tell me about a great job.
00:23:25
Speaker 1: Kenneth was a really good worker. I mean I would aspire to be as efficient as Kennedy.
00:23:30
Speaker 2: No, no, well, I so I was giving tours. I would give four tours. I loved. I actually stole my uniform from you were supposed to return it. So I have given the button and that year SNL was celebrating it's fifteenth year anniversary. So Saturdays were get to work, give four tours, hang out, work, do the show, and I myself and this girl Stephanie. We had hair that was bigger than I can imagine. It was nineteen eighty nine big hair some of these It was crazy. And I would work the door studio at eight h again. You could get up and I would have the list and that was like the VIP and I'd be like, sorry, you're not coming in your name like people like they are so But I also had the Today Show assignment to me and I talk about that because I learned a lesson there that I thought I would, but I think we're taught in our business. So that summer, no one wanted this assignment. It started at five in the morning. The Today Show went live at seven AM. Jane Paully and Brian Gumble were the host. It was the last year they were doing that. It was sort of like the trauma someone when they were kind of looking to get Jane out. Robert Palmer was reading Robert John Palmer was reading the news and they wanted him out. It was quite but every morning I went to work and I said, good morning, miss Paully, good morning, mister Gumble. I never called them Jane and Brian. And my job was to make sure Ruthie, you got to the green room in time, that the bagels were set up, that I got you to make up in time that I got you. Think we had people like Betty Davis. So Betty Davis came one morning, she was all like smoking her six. I had to get her astray. And Catherine was her assistant at the time. It was Betty Davis. And she's in the one of the private dressing rooms and Katherine, I'm like, you know Betty Davis, She's like conic, I love her. And Katheryn goes, you should go in and tell her. And I walk into this room. I knock and she is leaned back on a chair and she has a stress on. She has one leg down and one leg up on the wall, so like's quite spread. Couldn't see anything, but it was I was like, okay, oh my god. And that was the morning, and she was on Letterman that afternoon. So Catherine said, do you think you could help us? So I did, and she goes, can you Betty Davis says can you walk me to my car? Becas and being honored at Lincoln Center. She slips her hand through my arm. We get into this crowded elevator and she's talking and I put her in and at one point I'm standing between her and Audrey Hepburn, who's on Live five. What and me? That was? It was like those two talking and like my face and I'm like.
00:26:13
Speaker 1: I don't know how that must have been their best day to have you in the middle, though, I bet they let's throw up. I think I think you said yes.
00:26:22
Speaker 2: It was the lesson. So Jane poly says to me, it's the end of August. It's been I go every morning at nine thirty, I go back to the page office and I am filled with energy and story. Now the assignment comes back up because there was three month assignments. Everybody wants this assignment and went from no one wanting it to everyone wanting it. And the last day it's like six point fifty. Jane's going through her notes for the beginning top of the show. She's putting on her lipstick Never Forget, and she says, Bruce, I hear today is your last day on the assignment, and I said yes, and she goes, if you'd like, I would be happy to write you a letter of recommendation. And I said, oh, but you know, all I did was make sure people got to make up and air and she goes, it's not what you did, it's how you Yeah, And that's stuck with me us. And I think it's when you're raised in hospitality, in service to people, you just do.
00:27:21
Speaker 1: I really think that working in a restaurant teaches you so much, you know, because of that experience of you have to be kind to people you might not want to be kind to. You have to read whether a table wants you to hover, they want you to go away. You have to find out if they're having a hard time how you can make You know, people come to me and say, oh, there's a difficult table and table four. I go, great, let me go and find them. Because one of the challenges is, yes, there's no such thing as a difficult table. There are people who might have got lost getting here, that they might have I would say, every table has a story. You know, their mother might be sick, they might have been fired that day, there might be celebrating. And I think what you're talking talking about from your experience at NBC or whether it was at the Pomp or your mother or your grandma. It's all to do with actually bottom line, liking people.
00:28:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. My dad always would say. He'd be like, you know, why are you working in the restaurant business if you don't like people? Yeah, And when you come across that, yeah, he'd say, like, you know, go be a librarian. Sit in a library and quiet and just like make sure someone has to their book. And I don't mean anything disrespectful about I'm sure there are many nice librarians. I'm saying it's a Joplin you don't have to have, but I believe that you have to really be interested in people. And to your point, one of the you know, there's nothing like a restaurant like here at the River Cafe when you when it's on full throttle, you feel the energy of that room and there's a million details. Like you said, you're looking, and you're if someone's not eating their food, you're looking and you you're going to that table to understand is something wrong, is something you don't like because you want to make them happy. I often would say to the people I work with who were equally as important to me. The working where at the Palm, anyone like, there's a differential. If you disrespected somebody that worked in at the Palm and you were a guest, that was unacceptable to me. But they were you know, they could have bad days too. But I always would say to that, you can't bring that into the house. This is this, This is the lady that we take care of because she provideses. She the work here allows you to send your children to school, or the work here lets people celebrate the life. So if you're going to bring that ship in here, you gotta go and people do so. I remember the first time I learned how to fire somebody.
00:29:49
Speaker 1: Which that's really hard.
00:29:51
Speaker 2: But I'm not that kind of guy. And I was working with a great general manager named Tim King. We opened up the Palm West and you York City, which was a big deal for me. It was July nineteen ninety nine, two hundred and fifty Sex Rush twenty five, super hot. Yeah, where was it fiftieth between Broadway and Eighth Avenue and you know that that was not even fully developed that piece of Manhattan and massive heat wave. So Tim King, he comes in and he said there was a guy just just we gave a lot of chances to and he was not living to what the ethics, the values that we and delivering the service. So he goes, Okay, Bruce, we're going to go meet with him and you're going to fire him. And I'm like, no, I can't do that. He goes, no, you're going to fire him. And the way is because you're not firing him. He fired himself in the minute. He flipped it. Yeah, yeah, I was like, oh, you're right. I didn't do this. He gave him a number of conversations and we wanted him to be successful. He couldn't be so in delivering that message as disappointing and setting as it is, when I think you get fired, for the most part in my experience, it's it's you've done it to yourself. So that made me.
00:31:09
Speaker 1: We once said I've only had to actually fire somebody once and in thirty eight years, and we had a chef. It was really good. He was the one I always wanted to work with. He was just great. But he one night he kind of flipped and he did things that were really unacceptable in a restaurant, and so I had to call him in the next day and I said, you know, I'll call him Chris, right, you know, because you know we need to talk about this. You know, what happened, what happened last night? Well you know and he said, yeah, I don't know. We talked about it and then I said, you know, because what would you do if you were me? And he said I'd fire me. And I'm like, okay, fire. He said, I'd give you another chance, I'll give you another chat. But he said fire.
00:31:59
Speaker 2: It was.
00:32:01
Speaker 1: Just so you know, but it is. It's a hard it's really hard. So back to your trajectory. We were working, you went to UCLA, you came back, you worked at NBC, and then did you then go into the bathroom?
00:32:20
Speaker 2: I know? So I said I needed one more chapter in California, okay, And I thought it was going to be my last chapter. And my mother looked at me and I was like, I'm nineteen ninety I'm moving back to Los Angeles and she was like okay. And it was one of those moments where you're standing at the door of January and I leave no place to I'm sleeping on a buddy's couch. And in those three and a half four years, I met a lot of people in Hollywood, like Barry Diller and Sandy Gallen and like this whole great group. On top of working in the restaurant, which was fantastic, So I met like, fancy people.
00:32:58
Speaker 1: Are you for still pursuing your act? I was.
00:33:00
Speaker 2: I was a production assistant and I was a commercial doing car I got only commercials that I could be in a bathing suit, not say a word and show my body. That's what they wanted from me. I really could. I was. Sandy would say you were the worst actor I've ever heard. He'd helped me do lines and I'd be like, okay, and then he'd be like if you knew. Sandy was always like real New York accent. He's like, you are a horrible accent, and I'd be like, thank you, like I'm going on this audition tomorrow. But it was setting. What it allowed me was to create a group of friends again and have begin a community that I could get to know myself, which I couldn't do in New York because that was you know, bloodline. And then I knew it was time to go home. All of cinner. I was like, because La at the time, especially for me, didn't ask a lot of me. So I did everything, but you could literally be like, you know, what'd you do to the Oh my god, I got my dry cleaning? Yeah, h much be exhausted. That was so fun. Yeah. Then palm, pomp, palm, I did you know? Worked? And then I fell in love and I fell in love with Brian. And I had decided right before that that I was going to become a dad and I was going to become a single father through surrogacy and yeah, and I.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: Helped you.
00:34:19
Speaker 2: I was forty thirty forty and I said to my parents, I was like, I'm going to do this and they were like, wow, it's not easy. And I said yes. And though I had known Brian, life brought that us together. That really brought us together in a series of circumstances which created effect. You know, we were like and I moved back to LA and that was.
00:34:41
Speaker 1: A domestic life, was it? Did you then create a family home? And cooking?
00:34:46
Speaker 2: When I cook, I cooked things very simple.
00:34:49
Speaker 1: Tell me about what you like to cook.
00:34:50
Speaker 2: My stuff is I could cook a great stay, you know, you know, charreds here, media mediumware, sauteed spinach, I like various super lean just these like lionaise potatoes or you know, sauteed potatoes and onions and a nice salad, two and a half bottles of wine. It's really good.
00:35:14
Speaker 1: It's really good.
00:35:15
Speaker 2: So like that. That. So that was the last twenty years. And in the beginning I was doing a lot of traveling because of the restaurant. My job had become more of an executive position. And then what we realized too was people forgot the Palm was a family owned business. And I got a little media training and would go on TV shows and I would cook dishes very you know, classic palm dishes, and I would always say when when it was presented to me as a possibility to do, I said, it's fine, but I can never be presented as a chef. I can be presented as a palm expert because I can cook you the shrimp bruno, or cook you the steak or but I'm not a chef. That would be disrespectful. I am. I just know how to cook our food. So that I did that for a while, and then twenty years later, the Palm was no longer in our family. In twenty twenty, unrelated to COVID, but really due to family strife where they always say generational family businesses do eventually, it's very difficult. Then when I look back my twenty twenty of it is the Palm at ten Restaurants, which was now in ten cities, still retained its magic somehow, not somehow because culturally at the time we were still everyone was being grown within. Once you got past that and you start to hire from outside, you teach that culture, and then it just became too big and too mageable. And though it was successful for many, many years, and like us, all good times recessions, bad times. If I could tell the younger version of me to tell the younger version of my dad, I say, I would have said, been more of like a McNally, have a bunch of restaurants in one city. Yeah, and you can really sort of enjoy the different flavors of that. I that I think the man I have am is all due to the room I stood in for so many years. When you're standing on your feet and you're looking at people and you're connecting, and you want and you're responsible for them, Like you said earlier, closing a business deal, so you know when to go near a table, not to make sure the quality of the food is great, but it's really about the experience or you are responsible for them celebrating an engagement or christening or American like, these are big. These are things, and then just connecting with people and making people feel Tim taught me once. Another lesson he taught me was at the podium when people would come. So someone comes in that I don't know, and then Ruthy, you come in. So you're right behind them. So I'm talking with them, but then I see you and my eye light up and he and he took me aside. He said, just so you know what you're doing, but you can't see the face of the person that's right in front of you. They see that, and they they kind of go there because I go, wow, you're right. Everyone needs to get that.
00:38:23
Speaker 1: I was trying. When I go to a table somebody I know, I sort of say hello to the other people first. It's just like because otherwise you're sort of saying hello, the big embrace to the person you know, and then the other people are like, you know, I'm not interested in you. I'm interested in who your friends, where you come from.
00:38:42
Speaker 2: The most important guest was the first time the person to face you didn't know in the room. The most important guest for you to connect with.
00:38:50
Speaker 1: I have to say that I have the best job in the world. I'd love my job, you know, I love I love coming in here, and it's become you know, it's a place of energy and decisions and food is you know, I think it's as we say, it's about sharing. It's about communicating about connections that you and I really bonded in the kitchen making trying to open those jars, remember we had.
00:39:14
Speaker 2: To bang them.
00:39:17
Speaker 1: And so food is all that. It's a connection, it's sharing, it's love, it's it's stressful. Sometimes it's all that, but it is also comfort and so for my you know, as you say, we can, we're going to do this again, going to be We're going to do this carry on. The food is all that, but it also something that you very often reach for because you need food to give you. Maybe a sense of comfort is there? Would it be your mom's lasagnia? Would you is there a food that you have that would be a sense a source of comfort for you? Sure?
00:39:48
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean I think it has changed. I think yes there was one. My mother's lasagna is always a source of comfort, but it's now a rarity because she doesn't do it as much. I like to take a chicken and slice it up in sautea with brown rice, broccoli with vegetables, with a little bit of a jalapeno pepper, so it gives it a little bit of a cake and it's like and I always need to put it in a bowl.
00:40:14
Speaker 1: I would eating a bowl is comforting, isn't it.
00:40:16
Speaker 2: I'd love to do pasta in a sort of restaurant metal ball where you just really kind of like twirl it around and like that to me gives me a lot of comfort and joy.
00:40:27
Speaker 1: Well, you give me comfort, and thank you so much for coming today. We'll do more. Let's go eat, okay, thank you. Ruthie's Table four is proud to support Leukemia UK. The Cartwheel for a Cure campaign raises funds for vital research and more effective and kind of treatments for a cute my Lord leukemia. Please donate and to do so search Cartwheel for a Cute.
00:41:00
Speaker 2: Ruthie's Table four was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton and Zad Rogers with Andrew Sang and Bella Selina.
00:41:07
Speaker 1: This has been an atomized production for iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: We have good news. Ruthie's Table four is now a book. Table four at the River Cafe Conversations about Food and Life is a collection of guests, interviews, photographs from over two hundred and forty episodes. We have Paul McCartney, Tina Fey, David Beckham Melbrooks, Austin Butler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and many many more telling their stories through the lens of food or are now Ruthy's Table four dot com slash book Ruthie's Table four presented by Sky.
00:00:37
Speaker 2: When I came back to New York, I also came out in life and I started to watch. I was twenty seven at that point, though I had worked straight through the Palm and that was building a relationship with my dad that we didn't have from the early years. And then when I came out, I said to him, because it was such a heterosexual palms, say very much show. And I said, but is this going to be an issue for you? And he said, no, you're all You are a good man. And I see, and that the restaurant which I so resented as a boy, became the bridge that gave me my relationship with my dad.
00:01:25
Speaker 1: Like many of life's best ideas. The idea of having Bruce Bozzi as a guest on Ruthie's table for began in a kitchen a few months ago. Bruce, his husband Brian, and I were together in their home in LA. Knowing Bruce loves to cook, we had decided to make a tomato and basil pasta together for a good group of friends. Picking the basil, peeling the garlic, draining the tomatoes. Bruce and I talked about growing up in New York, living in LA and discovering how much we share in our lives and the world of food. Bruce grew up in an Italian American home and for many general rations his family had the Palm restaurant, an American legend. Today, Bruce and I are together again to continue our conversation, and when it's over, we'll end up where we began, another kitchen, this time at the River Cafe. Two good friends, cooking, talking and basking in the love and happiness of being together. Oh so do you remember that night?
00:02:23
Speaker 2: Oh my god, that was That night goes down as one of the top three nights we've ever had in that Yeah, seriously, the connection besides the food that.
00:02:36
Speaker 1: Was was just a tomato pust No, but as the simpler.
00:02:41
Speaker 2: The simpler, the better. Yeah, and the connection over the as we were cooking and our guests, it really was a phenomenon. When you said you were going to come to the house when we were going to cook, I was nervous. I was like, okay, like Brusy's coming to cook. What you know, what do we need to do? And you made it so incredibly easy and fun and the vibe of the.
00:03:10
Speaker 1: Bona wandered in. My brother came and this is really it was. Austin came, Austin came.
00:03:18
Speaker 2: We had the best and the other thing that Ruthie you do, which is something I really believe in the business that we are in. Uh, you brought everyone together.
00:03:27
Speaker 1: Well that's what you do, what we do and what we love. But it was it was really special. It was and I think tomato pasta do you love? You actually chose a recipe which has tomatoes and the sauce and pasta. Do you know the story of this pasta? Rose? You know, my late partner in the River Cafe had these two great friends called Adam mcchloe, and when we were doing the very first cookbook, we decided to put their recipes in for pasta with sausage, and when they disagreed, they but one of them did it very slow. So we said, okay, you're good friends. We'll put both your recipes in side by side. So one is tomato pasta, I'll Chloe, and the other one was Adam. And so you choose the Adam one, you choose the atom. It's right, all right.
00:04:18
Speaker 2: So tonight we are going to have Penny with Adam. Slow cooked sausage sauce. Serve six. It's eight fresh Italian spiced pork sausages crumbled. I mean, come on, that's so delicious. Two small red onions peeled and chopped. Two garlic clothes peeled and chopped, two small dried chilis crumbled. Two hundred and fifteen millis of kant leaders.
00:04:47
Speaker 1: This is This was written for the British edition. I could have given him the American one. Okay, we have an international audience. Anybody's listening. We can do the math for you.
00:04:57
Speaker 2: Do the math. Okay, So one kilogram jar of peeled, plump tomatoes, one hundred and twenty grams of parmesan, freshly grated, one hundred and fifty milli liters double cream, two hundred and fifty grams of penney or goad day I got mom Mia. Fry the sausage meat, stirring and breaking up the pieces after the juices from the meat have evaporated. Add the onions, garlic and chilies. Cook gently for about thirty minutes. I mean, can you imagine the smell of that. Add the wine. Cook until the wine evaporates. Add the tomatoes, lower the heat and simmer gently, or until you have a thick sauce. Season stir in the parmesan and cream. Cook the pennate until al dente. Add the pennate to the sauce, toss well and serve with simple as that. Yes, love, it's delicious.
00:05:51
Speaker 1: It's very Italian. Yeah, and I think that it's interesting that you chose such an Italian recipe.
00:05:56
Speaker 2: Well, I think you know, growing up, when my mother would cook, you know, when she you know, she had her lasagna recipe, and part of that was all sausage and stirring and you know, startaining the onions and the garlic and then adding that, and then when you were cooking the sausages, using the sort of juice from that to add in. So the whole ritual of kind of combining the ingredients is so magical to me.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Let's start at the beginning, because your your parents were born in parents and your grandparents.
00:06:32
Speaker 2: No, my great grandfather, Pio Bossi and his partner, they were born in Italy. My family comes from Parma. Parma and his partner, John Gansey. So it's the Ganzys and the basis his two families that came together. And they really just opened a small, one room restaurant at eight thirty seven Second Avenue on in New York on between forty fourth and forty fifth. They went to apply for a business license to call it Parama from the place they were from. But the people in the you know, the Business Bureau, couldn't understand their accents, so they stamped at Palm. And they were so frightened to say anything different for fear of like not getting it.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: I was going to ask you about my sort of thoughts about talking today. I was going to ask why was this restaurant called the Palm Because when you think of palm trees in the United States, you think of Florida or California, and this was on Second Avenue. It's such a great name for a restaurant. I mean, Parma would have been great. So tell me more about the beginning.
00:07:39
Speaker 2: So the beginnings I think are you know, and setting up any sort of foundation, and we're talking about anything that's set in truth and authenticity. The small restaurant that had would sought us on the floor, so it was not fancy. It was really you know, it was like a beat up joint kind of restaurant that very much in the early thirties, you know, the big crash of nineteen twenty nine. The neighborhood had a lot of syndicates, had a lot of newspaper people, but it was really local people living there. Cartoonists used to come in and they couldn't pay for their meals because their stock market had crashed. So my great grandfather said, okay, we'll start drawing on the walls and all the rivets of the murals, and that's how they pay for their meals. And that became a palm rivet. And then the other thing was people started asking for steak and there was a butcher literally across the street, and the waiter were just go get the steak when they wanted a steak, So it became then known as a steakhouse, an Italian steakhouse, and then steak and as it grew, But really for all those years, from the first and second generation, it was that one location on Second Avenue and very much the River Cafe. It expanded next door, took the space next door, and then it took the space upstairs as business dictated, you know. And then in the early seventies, my father and his partner Wally, said their fathers had been sick. They sort of took over and they at the time, George Bush Senior, who was an ambassador, was moving to DC and said, you know, there's not a lot of places to eat in DC. Have you guys ever thought of opening the Palm there? Because the Palm was three or four blocks from the United Nations in Manhattan. And they said no, but yes, and that began kind of the first white tablecloth restaurant expansion in America. So we went to DC and it was so jam packed. And you know, we're both friends with Diane von Furstenberg, who she always talks about the seventies and it was like, you know, seventies in New York was pretty spec It was just like you know, and it was like a line you couldn't get in. And there was a little Italian joint across the street, and my dad used to say he'd look out the window and these guys would just be like staring at the palm, which was so busy. And then they decided to take over that small space, and then from there went to Los Angeles, which I think these uh DC, Los Angeles, New York. That trifecta, Yeah, became politics in Hollywood and New York. It really kind of grew this small immigrant Italian restaurant that was already.
00:10:36
Speaker 1: Was it still seen as an Italian restaurant because you see, I know what.
00:10:39
Speaker 2: It was more of it than as a steakhouse.
00:10:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, and lobster. I remember the loves lobsters.
00:10:45
Speaker 2: So in the sixties they introduced the because I you.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: Know, I was married to an Italian who loved Italian food and loved food, you know, whatever city we went to, whether it was Beijing or Marrakesh or Paris, or you want to eat the food of the country, you know. You know, so when we go to New York and be taken out to or off a day, can we take you to this wonderful Italian restaurant, wonderful French restaurant. Let's go to Chinatown and have this. Actually what Richard would always say it was let's go to an American restaurant. And for us that was palm, you know, and this kind of and we and we just loved that generosity that and I think I never ate anything that probably except for lobster or steak.
00:11:30
Speaker 2: And everything was big, big, wasn't it. Everything was big. It became known to have these lobsters which no one was serving at this worth three four or five six pound lobsters which are huge, and steaks were eighteen ounces, and like you know, you know, everything could feed yeah, you know, everyone at the table, like you know. But and that became sort of a thing.
00:11:52
Speaker 1: But how did that connect to your house, back to the domestic life. Well, you were born into this family. Your father was at the restaurant.
00:12:00
Speaker 2: My father was at the restaurant all day. I never really saw my dad, right, I mean, so what would happen is in the morning he'd be asleep when we would go to school, and then he'd beat the restaurant for lunch. We'd come home from school. He who was two of us, and Andrea and she and.
00:12:21
Speaker 1: This was in New York City, so you lived right in Manhattan.
00:12:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, we lived in Queen's Jackson Heights, Queens until nineteen seventy five, and then moved into Manhattan and because it was closer to ye know, it's just across the bridge. And then at night we were with our mom and then.
00:12:39
Speaker 1: So I really does she have any involvement?
00:12:42
Speaker 2: Not really. It was a very pretty much man. It was historically the boys got the restaurant and it was not the easiest of times in regard to and my parents met in high school. They're still together today. But there was a big you know, a restaurant guys. Yeah, a restaurant person.
00:13:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, it takes a lot. The restaurant becomes your home as well when you're working there.
00:13:11
Speaker 2: My mother always says, you know, the restaurant would close at twelve, but you'd be home at three thirty in the Yeah.
00:13:19
Speaker 1: Ye, she cooked.
00:13:22
Speaker 2: She would cook for us.
00:13:24
Speaker 1: You go to school, go to school, home.
00:13:27
Speaker 2: Come home. And you know, I was not I didn't have the biggest palette. So you know, a chicken milonaise or a roast. A roast chicken was one of my favorite things. She could cook. You know, slow roast chicken, you know, salad and god, we didn't eat it because we you know, after school sometimes you go and the grocery store. She's a great woman. Yeah, a tough New York Italian, fiercely loyal to friends and family woman.
00:14:00
Speaker 1: And she sounds beect but she did you connect? Did you have a grandma? So your grandmother?
00:14:05
Speaker 2: My two grandmothers are really my Both grandfathers I met very briefly in life passed over quickly.
00:14:12
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:14:12
Speaker 2: One passed in seventy four, one past in seventy one, so I was a little boy. My grandmother's I was very close to my mother's mother, specifically Sadie, and she died in nineteen eighty three on March thirteenth, And we were very close. And she and my father's mother, who is now part of the Palm Experience, Louise, we were very close as well. And you know, they they were very different. My father's mother was loving, she had but she was out there, like she kind of traveled and lived life. She was sort of like a Sophia Laurent type, like red hair, you know, curvacious, smoking cigarettes. And my grandmother was more of a traditional if you think of Martin Scorsese's mom. Yeh, yeah, wins. I think they were twins. Like I recently saw that documentary and I sent to my mom and dad. I was like, is this not sadie, This is crazy? But so it was a different I would sit with her and squash into the same chair as her, and just she was kind of heavy set, and just her her arms were like dough if you and I say that respectfully, you know, if they had a lot of skin. So I would sit and kind of need her arms as we were watching TV. And one day we were watching TV and there was a there was a television commercial, if you will call there was a perfume called Chloe, and it was early eighties and this beautiful blonde woman now and like around this seventy something. And my grandmother said to me, and I wish I was beautiful like that. And I looked at her and I said, you are beautiful like that. Like that was so women as much as men were in my life. The women in my life shaped me and really informed me and raised me. Like the community of women. So I'm very connected to women in all levels in my life, which is funny because I'm also gay. And married to Brian. But you know.
00:16:14
Speaker 1: Connect that makes me connect. We do. My father was absent then during the did you did they? Did you ever take you to work with him?
00:16:29
Speaker 2: Well, the first memory I have of my dad taking me to the palm was in uh Now. Because he was working so much, the relationship wasn't so organic. There was a bit of you know, and I think Italian mothers and their sons there was there's, you know, something in my sister.
00:16:49
Speaker 1: My I was married to the son of an Italian mother. When I used to walk into the house Richard and I would go to visit her, there was what I used to call the gays. You know, it sort of stopped like I was sort of put on the side. It was started at the top and just sort of go down and end with you know, you look a bit thin as you be giving enough to eat or to you know. She was always that was her and that's why we loved going home. That's why you kind of went home. But he had his first granddaughter aged you know, I can't I guess this is she must have been ninety. And when we said that Richard's son had had a baby girl, this is my step children girl she said, Oh, at last, now we should we'll have someone to look after him. It was like, is that's what it was? But you know what, what no, I say, The prisons are not full of people who've been loved too much, you know, so that love, you know, sort of carried on.
00:17:52
Speaker 2: Very interesting.
00:17:55
Speaker 1: So your father, though, we're talking about my dad, he was, he was working.
00:18:01
Speaker 2: I think the connection was when I got old and I in my teens and I started to work in the summers for the Palm. I started to do not only was in my blood. You could see that this is not for everybody, and it began a relationship for he and I. And then well, go back to that.
00:18:23
Speaker 1: I mean, did you realize that this was not what you wanted to do in life?
00:18:28
Speaker 2: I didn't know what I wanted to but I knew. I knew during the summers I was going to work in the Palm because it was summer job. When I worked down East Hampton, I worked in the kitchen as an expedier. I was at the front, seating people, answering phones, taking with all old school at the time, you know what I mean. There was no pos systems and things like that. It was really but what I knew what I did well. Was I connected with not only the guests but the people I worked with. And there was no entitlement, there was nothing. I was in it, in it from the beginning to the end. And I think over time because then after when I became a young adult man looking for a career, I had my Hollywood years. I called them my normal Genie years, where I went to Hollywood. I worked at at night at the West Hollywood Palm, ringing checks with the matreaty of all times Gigi del Maestro, who was a waiter at the Palm two, and as they expanded the Palm, they spend it from within. They would if you were working, it's the best way culturally to keep the integrity. So Gigi became like a second dad to me. So at night I'd be like answering phones. During the day, I was trying to be an actor. I worked on a production, you know, I did all that kind of stuff. It's where I met a lot of people that we you know, that we know together. And then when I came back to New York, I also came out in life and I started to work. I was twenty seven at that point, though I had worked straight through the palm, and that was building a relationship with my dad that we didn't have from the early years. And then when I came out, I said to him, because it was such a heterosexual.
00:20:10
Speaker 1: Show, right there, probably no waitresses were.
00:20:15
Speaker 2: There was much later in life. Yeah, it was the integration and then female managers and the whole thing. And I said, but is this going to be an issue for you? And he said, no, you're all. You are a good man, and that's and that that the restaurant, which I so resented as a boy, became the bridge that gave me my relationship with my dad.
00:20:40
Speaker 1: Did you study in California?
00:20:43
Speaker 2: Did I wanted to go to calif I grew up watching television and seeing these shows in California, like these company chi Angels, all these. I thought California was like just freedom. So when it was time to go and I had a sort of just an energy, I was kind of.
00:21:00
Speaker 1: Laid back and I just gorgeous as you are now you know about that.
00:21:05
Speaker 2: But I said, I want to go to la for school. And I can remember two things happened in nineteen eighty four. My dad said in the which was very meaningful. He said, you know, you don't have to go that far. We're not just going to pop up and you know. And I said, that's not why I'm going. I'm going because I have this this love of California. My mother said, your dad's going to take you. And I looked at her. Because their wedding anniversary was something was happening, she couldn't come, and I was like, are you crazy. We were in the kitchen. He was, are you crazy? What? And we landed. The radio was on and said, you know, it's ninety seven degrees in southern California and I thought, I looked at the going down. I was like, yes. But he took me and for three days he did everything a dad you want, get you set up in you know, get your betting, set you up for food. And it was those three days that completely shape shifted our relationship too. And he left and he wrote a note that said you can there's always a ticket when you want to come home. I love you, and I'd never seen or heard him say that, and I kept it for a million years and then I gave it back to him as a gift.
00:22:25
Speaker 1: Sorry, that's just.
00:22:27
Speaker 2: It's all to me. It's all about family and it's all about.
00:22:31
Speaker 1: But did you create yourself a bit of family? And even in that situation in La, did you did you have your own apartment? Did you live in campus? Did you too many questions? Eat out? Cook at helme? No?
00:22:44
Speaker 2: In the in the in the school years, I did. I did do what you're saying. But in the school years it was pretty traditional. I created. I had a family of the you know, the kids I was around, and we did all LA stuff. The what I did wasn't I graduated in eighty nine, I moved back to New York and I became an NBC page and I love that job.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: That like in thirty rows.
00:23:08
Speaker 2: In thirty row it was his.
00:23:09
Speaker 1: Name, Kenneth.
00:23:10
Speaker 2: It was. I was not as queen as Okay, I was not as key, but I was came.
00:23:17
Speaker 1: To mind because I sa the other day we were just talking.
00:23:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry, due respect. Tell me about a great job.
00:23:25
Speaker 1: Kenneth was a really good worker. I mean I would aspire to be as efficient as Kennedy.
00:23:30
Speaker 2: No, no, well, I so I was giving tours. I would give four tours. I loved. I actually stole my uniform from you were supposed to return it. So I have given the button and that year SNL was celebrating it's fifteenth year anniversary. So Saturdays were get to work, give four tours, hang out, work, do the show, and I myself and this girl Stephanie. We had hair that was bigger than I can imagine. It was nineteen eighty nine big hair some of these It was crazy. And I would work the door studio at eight h again. You could get up and I would have the list and that was like the VIP and I'd be like, sorry, you're not coming in your name like people like they are so But I also had the Today Show assignment to me and I talk about that because I learned a lesson there that I thought I would, but I think we're taught in our business. So that summer, no one wanted this assignment. It started at five in the morning. The Today Show went live at seven AM. Jane Paully and Brian Gumble were the host. It was the last year they were doing that. It was sort of like the trauma someone when they were kind of looking to get Jane out. Robert Palmer was reading Robert John Palmer was reading the news and they wanted him out. It was quite but every morning I went to work and I said, good morning, miss Paully, good morning, mister Gumble. I never called them Jane and Brian. And my job was to make sure Ruthie, you got to the green room in time, that the bagels were set up, that I got you to make up in time that I got you. Think we had people like Betty Davis. So Betty Davis came one morning, she was all like smoking her six. I had to get her astray. And Catherine was her assistant at the time. It was Betty Davis. And she's in the one of the private dressing rooms and Katherine, I'm like, you know Betty Davis, She's like conic, I love her. And Katheryn goes, you should go in and tell her. And I walk into this room. I knock and she is leaned back on a chair and she has a stress on. She has one leg down and one leg up on the wall, so like's quite spread. Couldn't see anything, but it was I was like, okay, oh my god. And that was the morning, and she was on Letterman that afternoon. So Catherine said, do you think you could help us? So I did, and she goes, can you Betty Davis says can you walk me to my car? Becas and being honored at Lincoln Center. She slips her hand through my arm. We get into this crowded elevator and she's talking and I put her in and at one point I'm standing between her and Audrey Hepburn, who's on Live five. What and me? That was? It was like those two talking and like my face and I'm like.
00:26:13
Speaker 1: I don't know how that must have been their best day to have you in the middle, though, I bet they let's throw up. I think I think you said yes.
00:26:22
Speaker 2: It was the lesson. So Jane poly says to me, it's the end of August. It's been I go every morning at nine thirty, I go back to the page office and I am filled with energy and story. Now the assignment comes back up because there was three month assignments. Everybody wants this assignment and went from no one wanting it to everyone wanting it. And the last day it's like six point fifty. Jane's going through her notes for the beginning top of the show. She's putting on her lipstick Never Forget, and she says, Bruce, I hear today is your last day on the assignment, and I said yes, and she goes, if you'd like, I would be happy to write you a letter of recommendation. And I said, oh, but you know, all I did was make sure people got to make up and air and she goes, it's not what you did, it's how you Yeah, And that's stuck with me us. And I think it's when you're raised in hospitality, in service to people, you just do.
00:27:21
Speaker 1: I really think that working in a restaurant teaches you so much, you know, because of that experience of you have to be kind to people you might not want to be kind to. You have to read whether a table wants you to hover, they want you to go away. You have to find out if they're having a hard time how you can make You know, people come to me and say, oh, there's a difficult table and table four. I go, great, let me go and find them. Because one of the challenges is, yes, there's no such thing as a difficult table. There are people who might have got lost getting here, that they might have I would say, every table has a story. You know, their mother might be sick, they might have been fired that day, there might be celebrating. And I think what you're talking talking about from your experience at NBC or whether it was at the Pomp or your mother or your grandma. It's all to do with actually bottom line, liking people.
00:28:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. My dad always would say. He'd be like, you know, why are you working in the restaurant business if you don't like people? Yeah, And when you come across that, yeah, he'd say, like, you know, go be a librarian. Sit in a library and quiet and just like make sure someone has to their book. And I don't mean anything disrespectful about I'm sure there are many nice librarians. I'm saying it's a Joplin you don't have to have, but I believe that you have to really be interested in people. And to your point, one of the you know, there's nothing like a restaurant like here at the River Cafe when you when it's on full throttle, you feel the energy of that room and there's a million details. Like you said, you're looking, and you're if someone's not eating their food, you're looking and you you're going to that table to understand is something wrong, is something you don't like because you want to make them happy. I often would say to the people I work with who were equally as important to me. The working where at the Palm, anyone like, there's a differential. If you disrespected somebody that worked in at the Palm and you were a guest, that was unacceptable to me. But they were you know, they could have bad days too. But I always would say to that, you can't bring that into the house. This is this, This is the lady that we take care of because she provideses. She the work here allows you to send your children to school, or the work here lets people celebrate the life. So if you're going to bring that ship in here, you gotta go and people do so. I remember the first time I learned how to fire somebody.
00:29:49
Speaker 1: Which that's really hard.
00:29:51
Speaker 2: But I'm not that kind of guy. And I was working with a great general manager named Tim King. We opened up the Palm West and you York City, which was a big deal for me. It was July nineteen ninety nine, two hundred and fifty Sex Rush twenty five, super hot. Yeah, where was it fiftieth between Broadway and Eighth Avenue and you know that that was not even fully developed that piece of Manhattan and massive heat wave. So Tim King, he comes in and he said there was a guy just just we gave a lot of chances to and he was not living to what the ethics, the values that we and delivering the service. So he goes, Okay, Bruce, we're going to go meet with him and you're going to fire him. And I'm like, no, I can't do that. He goes, no, you're going to fire him. And the way is because you're not firing him. He fired himself in the minute. He flipped it. Yeah, yeah, I was like, oh, you're right. I didn't do this. He gave him a number of conversations and we wanted him to be successful. He couldn't be so in delivering that message as disappointing and setting as it is, when I think you get fired, for the most part in my experience, it's it's you've done it to yourself. So that made me.
00:31:09
Speaker 1: We once said I've only had to actually fire somebody once and in thirty eight years, and we had a chef. It was really good. He was the one I always wanted to work with. He was just great. But he one night he kind of flipped and he did things that were really unacceptable in a restaurant, and so I had to call him in the next day and I said, you know, I'll call him Chris, right, you know, because you know we need to talk about this. You know, what happened, what happened last night? Well you know and he said, yeah, I don't know. We talked about it and then I said, you know, because what would you do if you were me? And he said I'd fire me. And I'm like, okay, fire. He said, I'd give you another chance, I'll give you another chat. But he said fire.
00:31:59
Speaker 2: It was.
00:32:01
Speaker 1: Just so you know, but it is. It's a hard it's really hard. So back to your trajectory. We were working, you went to UCLA, you came back, you worked at NBC, and then did you then go into the bathroom?
00:32:20
Speaker 2: I know? So I said I needed one more chapter in California, okay, And I thought it was going to be my last chapter. And my mother looked at me and I was like, I'm nineteen ninety I'm moving back to Los Angeles and she was like okay. And it was one of those moments where you're standing at the door of January and I leave no place to I'm sleeping on a buddy's couch. And in those three and a half four years, I met a lot of people in Hollywood, like Barry Diller and Sandy Gallen and like this whole great group. On top of working in the restaurant, which was fantastic, So I met like, fancy people.
00:32:58
Speaker 1: Are you for still pursuing your act? I was.
00:33:00
Speaker 2: I was a production assistant and I was a commercial doing car I got only commercials that I could be in a bathing suit, not say a word and show my body. That's what they wanted from me. I really could. I was. Sandy would say you were the worst actor I've ever heard. He'd helped me do lines and I'd be like, okay, and then he'd be like if you knew. Sandy was always like real New York accent. He's like, you are a horrible accent, and I'd be like, thank you, like I'm going on this audition tomorrow. But it was setting. What it allowed me was to create a group of friends again and have begin a community that I could get to know myself, which I couldn't do in New York because that was you know, bloodline. And then I knew it was time to go home. All of cinner. I was like, because La at the time, especially for me, didn't ask a lot of me. So I did everything, but you could literally be like, you know, what'd you do to the Oh my god, I got my dry cleaning? Yeah, h much be exhausted. That was so fun. Yeah. Then palm, pomp, palm, I did you know? Worked? And then I fell in love and I fell in love with Brian. And I had decided right before that that I was going to become a dad and I was going to become a single father through surrogacy and yeah, and I.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: Helped you.
00:34:19
Speaker 2: I was forty thirty forty and I said to my parents, I was like, I'm going to do this and they were like, wow, it's not easy. And I said yes. And though I had known Brian, life brought that us together. That really brought us together in a series of circumstances which created effect. You know, we were like and I moved back to LA and that was.
00:34:41
Speaker 1: A domestic life, was it? Did you then create a family home? And cooking?
00:34:46
Speaker 2: When I cook, I cooked things very simple.
00:34:49
Speaker 1: Tell me about what you like to cook.
00:34:50
Speaker 2: My stuff is I could cook a great stay, you know, you know, charreds here, media mediumware, sauteed spinach, I like various super lean just these like lionaise potatoes or you know, sauteed potatoes and onions and a nice salad, two and a half bottles of wine. It's really good.
00:35:14
Speaker 1: It's really good.
00:35:15
Speaker 2: So like that. That. So that was the last twenty years. And in the beginning I was doing a lot of traveling because of the restaurant. My job had become more of an executive position. And then what we realized too was people forgot the Palm was a family owned business. And I got a little media training and would go on TV shows and I would cook dishes very you know, classic palm dishes, and I would always say when when it was presented to me as a possibility to do, I said, it's fine, but I can never be presented as a chef. I can be presented as a palm expert because I can cook you the shrimp bruno, or cook you the steak or but I'm not a chef. That would be disrespectful. I am. I just know how to cook our food. So that I did that for a while, and then twenty years later, the Palm was no longer in our family. In twenty twenty, unrelated to COVID, but really due to family strife where they always say generational family businesses do eventually, it's very difficult. Then when I look back my twenty twenty of it is the Palm at ten Restaurants, which was now in ten cities, still retained its magic somehow, not somehow because culturally at the time we were still everyone was being grown within. Once you got past that and you start to hire from outside, you teach that culture, and then it just became too big and too mageable. And though it was successful for many, many years, and like us, all good times recessions, bad times. If I could tell the younger version of me to tell the younger version of my dad, I say, I would have said, been more of like a McNally, have a bunch of restaurants in one city. Yeah, and you can really sort of enjoy the different flavors of that. I that I think the man I have am is all due to the room I stood in for so many years. When you're standing on your feet and you're looking at people and you're connecting, and you want and you're responsible for them, Like you said earlier, closing a business deal, so you know when to go near a table, not to make sure the quality of the food is great, but it's really about the experience or you are responsible for them celebrating an engagement or christening or American like, these are big. These are things, and then just connecting with people and making people feel Tim taught me once. Another lesson he taught me was at the podium when people would come. So someone comes in that I don't know, and then Ruthy, you come in. So you're right behind them. So I'm talking with them, but then I see you and my eye light up and he and he took me aside. He said, just so you know what you're doing, but you can't see the face of the person that's right in front of you. They see that, and they they kind of go there because I go, wow, you're right. Everyone needs to get that.
00:38:23
Speaker 1: I was trying. When I go to a table somebody I know, I sort of say hello to the other people first. It's just like because otherwise you're sort of saying hello, the big embrace to the person you know, and then the other people are like, you know, I'm not interested in you. I'm interested in who your friends, where you come from.
00:38:42
Speaker 2: The most important guest was the first time the person to face you didn't know in the room. The most important guest for you to connect with.
00:38:50
Speaker 1: I have to say that I have the best job in the world. I'd love my job, you know, I love I love coming in here, and it's become you know, it's a place of energy and decisions and food is you know, I think it's as we say, it's about sharing. It's about communicating about connections that you and I really bonded in the kitchen making trying to open those jars, remember we had.
00:39:14
Speaker 2: To bang them.
00:39:17
Speaker 1: And so food is all that. It's a connection, it's sharing, it's love, it's it's stressful. Sometimes it's all that, but it is also comfort and so for my you know, as you say, we can, we're going to do this again, going to be We're going to do this carry on. The food is all that, but it also something that you very often reach for because you need food to give you. Maybe a sense of comfort is there? Would it be your mom's lasagnia? Would you is there a food that you have that would be a sense a source of comfort for you? Sure?
00:39:48
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean I think it has changed. I think yes there was one. My mother's lasagna is always a source of comfort, but it's now a rarity because she doesn't do it as much. I like to take a chicken and slice it up in sautea with brown rice, broccoli with vegetables, with a little bit of a jalapeno pepper, so it gives it a little bit of a cake and it's like and I always need to put it in a bowl.
00:40:14
Speaker 1: I would eating a bowl is comforting, isn't it.
00:40:16
Speaker 2: I'd love to do pasta in a sort of restaurant metal ball where you just really kind of like twirl it around and like that to me gives me a lot of comfort and joy.
00:40:27
Speaker 1: Well, you give me comfort, and thank you so much for coming today. We'll do more. Let's go eat, okay, thank you. Ruthie's Table four is proud to support Leukemia UK. The Cartwheel for a Cure campaign raises funds for vital research and more effective and kind of treatments for a cute my Lord leukemia. Please donate and to do so search Cartwheel for a Cute.
00:41:00
Speaker 2: Ruthie's Table four was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton and Zad Rogers with Andrew Sang and Bella Selina.
00:41:07
Speaker 1: This has been an atomized production for iHeartMedia,
