'Bright yellow, happiness and sunshine is quite nice'

Hannah Twiggs meets River Cafe founder Ruth Rogers to talk 'Squeeze Me', celebrity friends and why she's opening a less expensive version of London's most famous restaurant

- Hannah Twiggs

When Ruth Rogers was invited to lunch at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for Ed Ruscha’s retrospective, she took the actor Austin Butler as her date. “It was kind of a bit daunting and fancy,” she says, “but he’s the sweetest person in the world.”

Afterwards, she took him to the artist's LA studio. "They're very similar," she adds. "There's a kind of American way of being down to earth in the best way." The two have since become good friends. "Which I find very moving," Rogers says lightly, as if it's perfectly normal to play cultural matchmaker between an 87-year-old conceptual artist and the star of Elvis.

It's classic Rogers: charming, offhand and seemingly unaware of how improbable her world sounds to the rest of us.

Few chefs occupy the space Ruth does - somewhere between cultural figurehead and social connector, the quiet centre of an extraordinary Venn diagram that links food, art, architecture and celebrity.

She hosts Ruthie's Table 4, a brilliant podcast where guests from Paul McCartney to Nancy Pelosi to David Beckham talk about the meals that shaped them, and presides over the River Cafe, the one-Michelin-starred west London restaurant she co-founded in 1987 that remains, almost four decades later, both a symbol of serious cooking and a magnet for the A-list.

"Well, I don't think of them as celebrities," she says when I ask about her famous friends. "I think of them as interesting people who've worked really hard to get where they are." She bristles slightly at the word - not out of snobbery, perhaps, but principle.

For Rogers, success is clearly something you earn, not inherit. "A lot of them did not grow up entitled, and almost see food as a measure of their success," she says. "The day they could order a good glass of wine, the day they could go to a restaurant and not be panicked by the price of something - that came not from entitlement, but from hard work."