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Like many great chefs, Ruth Rogers wanted to cook the sort of food she made at home. Shrouded in secrecy, with a menu appositional to London’s soggy culinary scene, River Café opened 30 years ago to a small fanfare. “I’m going to tell you about a restaurant you can’t go to,” were the opening lines to its first review, which Ruth fondly recited to us with the air of a cabaret emcee. It’s this theatricality which has, in part, tied Ruth to the River Café for so long; overseeing a dozen cookbooks, visits from Michelin, and the upheaval of the restaurant scene around it. This space – its clean lines, shock pink oven, hand-written menus – has many imitators, but few rivals. But at 30, if the walls of the River Café could speak, what would we hear?

Lakshmi is a household name in the US primarily thanks to another cooking show: Top Chef – the incredibly successful cooking competition that started in 2006 and has expanded with franchises all over the world – and for which she was a judge for 17 years. But after almost two decades and several Emmy nominations, Lakshmi decided to leave the strict and demanding world of high-end cuisine to concentrate on exploring the food of ordinary Americans. Taste the Nation (which also got an Emmy nomination last year) was launched when Trump was still in office, and with the next presidential election on the horizon, Lakshmi is open about the fact that food is often an entry point to talk about more pressing issues. “Food affects and touches every other aspect of our lives. It has to do with the environment, it has to do with politics, health, the economy, and agriculture. It has to do with trends and what’s in the zeitgeist,” she says. “So in talking about food, you can talk about every other aspect of life and it’s often a great gateway to have those other conversations.” The reality TV pro- gram has a documentary feel, with bits of history and archives interspersed with Lakshmi’s interviews and cooking scenes with chefs and community leaders. The stories are told from Lakshmi’s unique perspective, both as a woman and as an immigrant. While in Top Chef she was used to wearing heels and lots of makeup, and telling contestants to “please pack your knives and go” (her iconic line), now she joins families for dinner at tables topped with checkered tablecloths. It’s a departure from the often white male-dominated world of cuisine and cooking shows. “I would say I want to evolve the genre. I’m interested in how people eat all over the world, not just how a very slim margin of the population can afford to eat in a certain kind of restaurant,” says Lakshmi. “We talk about culture, we talk about family life, we talk about children and we highlight women in the industry. Because while the professional food world is dominated by white men, we know that most of the food in the world is actually cooked by women.”