Ruth Rogers

Ruth Rogers, Lady Rogers MBE (born 1948) is an American-born British chef who owns and runs the Michelin starred Italian restaurant The River Café in Hammersmith, London. She is the wife of the Italian-British architect Richard Rogers (Lord Rogers).

Ruth Elias, known as Ruthie, was born in upstate New York. She inherited her left-wing politics from her parents. Her father was a doctor, the son of immigrants to the US from Hungary; he spent some time in Spain in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War. Her mother was a librarian and trade union activist, whose parents came to the US from Russia. The family moved to in the early 1960s; she recounts an anecdote of turning down an invitation to watch Bob Dylan and his band rehearsing in 1965.

She studied at Colorado Rocky Mountain School from 1964 to 1966, and then for a year at Bennington College in Vermont. In 1967, her second (sophomore) year, she took a year out to come to England, accompanying a boyfriend who was a Rhodes scholar in Oxford. After she decided against returning to Bennington, she studied design at the London College of Printing from 1968. While in London, she joined the protests against the Vietnam War outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1968.

She met the architect Richard Rogers in late 1969. Rogers was 15 years older, and at the time he was married to and in a professional partnership (Team 4) with his first wife Su Rogers (née Brumwell), with three young sons. After Rogers divorced his first wife, he married Ruth in 1973. She accompanied Rogers when he moved to Paris for several years to supervise the building of the Pompidou Centre. They lived above a market in Le Marais, where she learnt the importance of seasonality, before moving to the Place des Vosges. She then spent time in north Italy; Rogers's parents had moved to England from Florence.

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