Table 4 at The River Cafe is a collection of glossy edited interviews with very famous people about life and food by Ruthie Rogers. Released 17th March 2026 by Simon & Schuster on their Gallery Books imprint, it's 384 pages and is available in hardcover and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout.
This is an interesting glimpse into a rarefied world of privilege and material wealth which most of the world will never see. There aren't many recipes (there are a few), but it's not primarily a cookbook. What it does, and does pretty well, is to give that glimpse behind the curtain into the life and acquaintances of the author. In just one page of the introduction she mentions meeting/feeding/talking with and entertaining Mel Blank, Nina Raine, Judy Dench, Ralph Fiennes, and Ian McKellen. Uncharitably, it could be called cover-to-cover name dropping, but honestly, a lot of the interviews and conversations with luminaries manage to show a likeable humanity. It's not all gloss.
It's possibly (probably) the editing process, but almost all of the entries were very much of a sameness. It's unclear if that's because they were made to sound processed and homogeneous, if she follows the same formula for all her interviews, or if being really really wealthy and REALLY famous (Victoria Beckham's in there as well as Paul McCartney, in fact, there are precious few who don't have honorifics like Sir, Lord, Lady, etc in their names) -knocks- the edges off and makes them the same. At the end of the day, they mostly sound alike. Not necessarily a bad thing, but interesting nonetheless.
Privilege and celebrity. It's very well photographed throughout.
Four stars. It would be a good choice for public library acquisition, or for gift giving.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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