In his 25 years as a revered restaurant critic – and even after his most brutal takedowns – Jay Rayner says he never feels guilty.
“I don’t, because I don’t do it lightly, and I don’t think you should ever do it lightly, you should pick your targets very carefully,” says the 57-year-old Observer newspaper critic.
“I live by a single rule: punch up, not down. There’s no point in kicking 10 tonnes of crap out of a small, family-run restaurant that’s failing – they’re going to fail all by themselves.
“But if a big, over-financed corporate, glossy place that’s charging £20 a starter and £45 a main course and it’s not delivering for that money, I don’t hesitate to say so.”
After all, diners aren’t just paying for the food. “There is a sense that you rent a different kind of life at a restaurant table. You walk through the door and you leave the world outside,” says Rayner, who got his love of restaurants from his late mother, agony aunt and broadcaster Claire Rayner – and has now reviewed more than 1,500 of them.
“She’d come from a working-class background, very meagre one, and loved this experience of the room where things happened and things were brought to you. Basically, you were paying to feel a certain way.”
Although one thing about modern dining really gets his goat. “When I started doing this job in 1999, no restaurant ever said, ‘We’ll need the table back in four hours. And quite right too, because it’s not the diner’s job to work out when they have to leave – it’s the restaurant’s job to serve you in time. That drives me nuts.”
While viewers will be accustomed to seeing Rayner judge on both BBC’s MasterChef and MasterChef:The Professionals, they may not have realised he could cook too – until a 2023 Christmas special where restaurant critics cooked against each other. Entirely Rayner’s idea, and not without motive.
He’d been writing a book at the time – his 14th – but this would be his first cookbook. “There was this thing jangling in my head: People are not going to believe that these are my recipes or that I cooked them, or they’re going to be suspicious.” So the proposal of MasterChef: Battle of the Critics “wasn’t accidental”, he admits.
“As long as it wasn’t a disaster. I didn’t need to win, I just absolutely needed not to crash and burn.” Incidentally he was crowned the winner by John Torode and Gregg Wallace.
His latest offering, Nights Out At Home, brings together the food that Rayner has created at home, each inspired by specific dishes he’s tucked into in top restaurants, as well as a few high-street favourites. You’ll find a version of McDonald’s deep-fried apple pie, Nando’s peri peri chicken livers and the “cultural treasure”, a Greggs’ steak bake.
But that’s alongside individual custard tarts, inspired by the tarts served by the late Gary Rhodes at his many restaurants, and the taramasalata with radishes and boiled eggs from Rosie Healey’s Gloriosa in Glasgow. There’s the triple cooked pork in hot pot, like the one served at the (now closed) Northern Chinese eatery YMing, in London (“You’re almost memorialising the restaurant, which is lovely in its own way”), alongside the famous tandoori lamb chops from legendary Whitechapel Pakistani grill house Tayyabs.
“I went to talk to Wasim [Tayyab], the son of the late founder Mohammed, I said, ‘Has this [recipe] ever been written down? He said, ‘Oh no, it’s never been written down. I’m the only one who does it now’. I got him to write it down for me.
“I’m not recreating [the dishes], because I couldn’t, those restaurant kitchens are full of chefs, all very skilled, all know exactly what they’re doing,” says Rayner. “But I have been doing this for a very long time, which is go out, try something, going ‘that can’t be too hard to make at home, I’ll give it a go. It became a kind of game, actually.”
He asked each chef for their blessing to publish his own version in homage to their dishes – and, thankfully, no one said no.
“Not all chefs and restaurateurs like restaurant critics, they’re not required to either. It’s a complicated little Kabuki dance between us,” says Rayner. “So obviously I wasn’t approaching those who I suspected had no time for me. Why would I? Because I probably didn’t like their food anyway.
“Francesco Mazzei of Sartoria let me watch him make his seafood fregola, which is a dish I love. The way he made it in a restaurant kitchen wouldn’t be helpful to a home chef, so I had to take it away and adapt it.”
He doesn’t think all critics have to cook but, “I do think you need an appetite. One of the reasons I’ve been able to do this job for 25 years is because – the polite word is a highly developed appetite – or just pure greed. I like my dinner, and it follows from that, eventually you will start cooking.
“If you’ve had a complicated day, whether you can’t get [the kids] to do what you want and you can’t get your socks to pair, and you’re not in control of the world, you go into the kitchen and you take control of a bunch of ingredients and it gives you a sense that you’re back in control of the world.
“Even the process of cleaning the kitchen I find strangely rewarding. It’s about control and returning to first principles.”
As one of the UK’s most recognised restaurant critics, one thing Rayner has had to get used to is people asking him for recommendations.
“If someone emails me, and they sometimes do, saying, ‘I’m coming to London, where should I eat?’ It’s like, what am I supposed to say to that?
“If they say, ‘I’m coming to London, it’s my 40th birthday, I want something special, I like French food and I’ve got a budget of £75 a head, where should I go?’ Fine, I can answer that. I need parameters.”
Nights Out At Home by Jay Rayner is published in hardback by Penguin, priced £22. Available September 5. Nights Out at Home Live runs until November 9. Tickets at fane.co.uk/jay-rayner.
