Jago Rackham’s table for thought

Jago Rackham talks about food like it’s a language, a way to tell stories without needing a script. From the moment he describes his practice, you can see it—this isn’t just about taste or technique. As a Stoke Newington resident, I take his recommendation seriously: the Italian deli Gallo Nero II, with its ’80s façade, is worth a visit. For Rackham, food is never just about flavor: it’s about people, memory, and the stories that unfold around the table. In this conversation with hube, he talks hosting, recipes that double as personal essays, and the cities, dishes, and moments that continue to shape the way he cooks today.

hube: You went from studying politics and working in magazines to culinary arts. What sparked that shift?

Jago Rackham: There wasn’t really a clear conception or reasoning behind it. I like cooking, I like eating, and I like eating with my friends. I have always done that since I was a teenager. I grew up in a very rural place where there wasn’t anywhere to go, so we’d be at our parents’ houses. At mine, we’d drink and stay over because you couldn’t get home, and in the morning I’d cook big breakfasts for friends. Later, after university, I worked at magazines, but it was really hard to make enough money to live. Cooking became a better way of doing that, and then I got a kind of profile through food on Instagram. That is also how I started writing about food, because I already had that profile. For me, food is a way of writing about people, society, and class. Cooking itself, though, is different. It is just something I do with my hands, which is satisfying in its own right.

h: If any word could be a food, what would you want to taste?

JR: Fluidity. Or erosion. Both suggest change, a purity in movement. I would interpret them as ice cream, something that shifts texture as you eat it.

h: You often reference painters and writers in your work. Which creatives outside of the culinary world inspire you most?

JR: My partner, Lowena. Everything passes through her. The aesthetic side of what I do owes a lot to her. Beyond that, I see myself as a cook and a writer. Obvious references exist, like Flemish painting, but truthfully food is its own thing. It is elemental, it is necessary.

h: Translating your practice into recipes for—shall we say—more novice cooks, how has that changed the way you see food and your own process? How do you take something complex and make it truly digestible?

JR: People often say my recipes are confusing. I write them the way they used to be written before the 1970s, when it was expected that the reader already knew how to cook. In my book, I have had to write in a more didactic way, but usually the recipes are more like an archaeology of what I’ve done, expressive rather than precise. I rarely measure anything, even when making something like ice cream, and I’ll often write recipes from memory. So they don’t really change how I cook.

h: Your Greed Substack spans everything from food guides to recipes. If you could write any long-form story, what would you dive into?

JR: I’d write about Rome. I’ve been going for about a decade, especially in my early twenties, and recently went back. It’s fascinating because it’s a city that has this accretion of periods layered on top of each other. But it is also a culture that feels like it is backward now, no longer the center, not like New York or even London. Everything happened there, and now very little is happening.

h: When hosting, how do you balance curating a space for yourself versus for others?

JR: Honestly, it’s very natural. When Lowena and I host friends, it might look “themed,” but it is just a gathering of things we have collected over the years, combined with a sense of comfort for ourselves and our guests. The look of it is almost a byproduct of trying to make the space feel special and relaxing.

h: What city holds your ultimate culinary dream?

JR: Of the cities I know, Barcelona. It is the best place to eat, cosmopolitan but still rooted in Catalan and Spanish traditions, and much more varied than Rome. The city I most want to visit is Mexico City. I have been thinking a lot about it lately.

h: If you had to turn a dish from Rome into a character, which would you choose?

JR: Carbonara. He’d be a flashy guy, the type who tries to convince you there is more to him than there really is. He’d claim this deep history, like he’s truly part of the city, but he’d be hanging out in tourist bars and somehow be the most Italian guy there, even if he was actually from New Jersey. Carbonara itself is like that, delicious but also capable of being terrible. Everyone knows how it’s supposed to be made, and if you get it wrong, you’re committing a sin against the Italian people, yet each version lives in someone’s grandmother. This dish has roots in the 1940s, when Italian women fed American soldiers using their meat and egg rations. It’s new, but now it feels like it’s been part of the culture forever. He’d be a huckster, but somehow lovable.

h: And how much of food, to you, is visual?

JR: Food is at least 50 percent visual. That does not mean the food itself has to look nice, but the surroundings, the atmosphere, the people you are with— all of that matters. When I host, it is not a conscious recreation of filmic dining scenes, but naturally the way we set things up—the cutlery, the lighting, the space—shapes the atmosphere.

h: Your book To Entertain comes out next year. What can people expect, and what does being “entertained” actually mean to you?

JR: I wanted to make something that makes entertaining feel easy and natural, to disabuse people of the idea that hosting requires tons of resources or stressful planning. In places like Italy or Spain, sharing food is just part of life. In the UK and US, it can feel intimidating. The book is very practical. It is about creating an environment where you are comfortable, which makes guests comfortable too. The most important lesson is: don’t worry. If you have six people around a table and a bowl of pasta with pesto, that is already great, so long as you are not anxious. Anxiety ruins a dinner more than bad food ever could.

h: Looking ahead, what can we expect from you in the next year? Do you see yourself ever working in a professional kitchen, and if so, where would it be?

JR: Absolutely not. I do not have the energy or the skills to be a chef. Cooking the way I do is totally different. If I were to work in a restaurant, it would have to be some fantasy situation: a well-funded countryside place, open only for lunch, with someone else doing all the hard work. Beyond that, I have a performance-exhibition coming up in October, some cooking events in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and New York, and of course the book. Hopefully residencies too, maybe even in Mexico City or Tokyo.