Rose Gray, who has died of cancer aged 71, was the co-founder, with Ruth Rogers, of the iconic River Café in London, and was one of Britain’s most influential modern chefs and cookery writers.
In a 23-year partnership with Ruthie, she revolutionised Italian cooking in the United Kingdom through an emphasis on freshness, seasonality and simplicity and, with a bestselling series of ground-breaking and elegantly designed books, established a worldwide reputation for herself and the restaurant.
Rose was tall, worldly and beautiful and had a well-earned reputation for indomitability. Watching her on the floor of her coolly glamorous restaurant, confident, composed, so obviously enjoying who she was and what she did, it is hard to imagine that she had ever experienced a single setback.
But the knocks came early and hard. Shortly before Rose was born, her pregnant mother Anne returned from a trip to London to the cottage she shared with her husband and infant daughter to find the family home burned to the ground. Rose’s father and sister were dead. Anne had come from a middle-class family — her grandfather, Sir Trevor Lawrence, had been the president of the Royal Horticultural Society — but life changed dramatically after the fire. She and Rose were taken in by Anne’s sister, Naomi, who lived in Box Hill, Surrey. It was a Women’s Institute kind of atmosphere, money was tight, frugality was all and the politics were conservative.
A free-spirited, outgoing girl, she developed a passion for art. At the Guildford School of Fine Art she gained a BA. After a short stint teaching fine art at a girls’ school in Shoreditch, in east London, Rose married Michael Gray in 1962. The couple had three children in quick succession and moved to a house in Warwick Avenue, northwest London. Ever the entrepreneur, Rose created a self-assembly paper lampshade and furniture business and honed her cookery skills, setting up a crêpe business catering for parties and nightclubs.
In 1969 a 21-year-old graphic artist called Ruthie Elias turned up at the Warwick Avenue house. Newly arrived in London from upstate New York, Ruthie remembers Rose, who was 10 years older, as bohemian, exotic and exciting, bursting with energy. Although they saw each other occasionally, Rose and Ruthie’s extraordinary partnership still lay almost 20 years in the future.
While the children were still quite young, Rose fell in love with David MacIlwaine, a sculptor and artist, whom she later married. David was the love of her life. Rose and David started a new business together, importing cast-iron stoves from France. After two or three years of fairly successful trading, they over-stretched and went bankrupt. The early 1980s were difficult years for the couple. Rose, David and their children moved to settle near Lucca, in Tuscany. It was here that Rose began to take a serious interest in Italian cuisine.
In 1985, while in New York for an exhibition of her husband’s work, Rose received an invitation to cook at a newly opened fashionable Italian-style restaurant, Nell’s Club. It was the first cooking Rose had done professionally and she loved it.
Returning to London two years later she worked briefly as a chef at Carluccio’s — but there was never going to be enough freedom there for a woman of Rose’s strong ideas and irrepressibility.
It was at this time that Rose and Ruthie’s paths crossed again. Ruthie’s husband, Richard Rogers, had just set up office at Thames Wharf, in Hammersmith, and he was keen for the development to be not just offices but a community: this meant having somewhere for everyone to eat. Over a cup of coffee, Ruthie proposed the idea of a restaurant to Rose. Rose said simply: “Let’s do it.”
The result was the River Café, which opened in 1987, when Rose was almost 50. Her children were grown and she threw herself into the project. She sourced ingredients, cultivated relationships with wine-makers in Italy and worked long, punishing hours. In 1998 the River Café earned a Michelin star, which it has kept ever since.
Initially Rose and Ruthie were reluctant to write a book, insisting they were chefs not writers. But they quickly understood that a book was the natural next step.
The publisher was persuaded to break with the tradition of having an illustration of food on the cover — the text was minimal, the photographs were of food that had just come out of the kitchen. The first River Café Cookbook appeared from Ebury in 1995 and several more followed. In 1998 Rose and Ruthie presented a 12-part series on Channel 4, The Italian Kitchen.
Rose was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2001. After surgery and chemotherapy she was clear for five years. But in 2009, just as she was finishing what was to be her last book, The River Café Classic Italian Cookbook, doctors discovered brain tumours. She refused to be an invalid, insisting on joining friends on a summer trip to France. — Ronan Bennett