As a restaurant critic, Jay Rayner has spent years appraising other people’s food. With the launch of his first cookbook, the tables are about to turn, writes Emma Higginbotham
Jay Rayner has a secret. We all know that he’s long been The Observer’s restaurant critic, writing entertaining, sometimes caustic, occasionally headline-hitting reviews of his dining experiences. What you probably don’t know is that when a dish particularly delights him, he hotfoots it back to his kitchen and whips up his own version.
Now the award-winning author, broadcaster and MasterChef judge is launching his first cookbook, Nights Out at Home. Part recipes, part memoir, it is, he says, the upshot of all that “heroic eating”, and a love letter to the places at the heart of his working life.
“I have always, genuinely always, taken the best ideas home from restaurants and tried to see if I could do something like it,” says Jay, who turns 58 this week. “I realised I was coming up to 25 years reviewing for The Observer – which is weird – and I thought the best way to celebrate would be to come up with 60 recipes inspired by my favourite dishes.
“I use the word ‘inspired’ very specifically,” he cautions. “They are not the dishes themselves, because they can't be. I'm not a restaurant cook, and I haven't got a kitchen full of eager young commis chefs. They are home recipes, some easy, some less so.” Nor are they just dishes from fancy-pants restaurants. “Absolutely not, because many of those fancy-pants restaurants have cookbooks! There's no point in me giving you recipes from a chef like Raymond Blanc, because god knows Raymond's published more than enough of his own.”
Instead, it’s the likes of clams with black beans and chilli from Trikol in Gateshead, sweet soy braised pork shoulder from Kushi-Ya in Nottingham, and charred hispi cabbage inspired by XO Kitchen in Norwich (which, intriguingly, is seasoned with crushed Monster Munch). There’s even his version of a Gregg’s steak bake – although, unlike the bakery giant’s “beguiling rectangular pockets”, Jay’s calls for veal jus.
One dish he’s particularly fond of is the crispy duck salad from The Ivy in London’s West End. “I thought it was fabulous, and I went home and wondered how I could do it,” he recalls. “After I came up with my method, I looked up Mark Hix’s original recipe, and it's a conscientious chef's recipe: take 12 duck legs, simmer them in aromatics for three hours, let them cool, break them up into pieces, deep fry them, turn them in a sauce with seven ingredients… My method was take two confit duck legs, fry them until they get crisp, and turn them in hoisin sauce.
“I had to clear every single recipe by every single chef – because could you imagine if chefs picked this up and went, ‘That bastard Rayner ripped us off!’ – so I called Mark, who I do know, and I said, ‘Mate, this is what I'm doing’, and he went, ‘Yeah, that would work’. It takes about 20 minutes to make that salad, whereas in the kitchens of the original Ivy, it would probably take six hours.”
His favourite, though, is the tandoori lamb chops from cult Pakistani grill house Tayyabs in East London, which he’s chomped and adored for 20 years. He asked Wasim Tayyab, son of founder Mohammed, how they were made, only to discover that the recipe’s never been written down – Wasim learned by watching his dad. Jay convinced him that now was the time: “So he wrote down what he puts in the 10-litre buckets, and I had to come up with a version that would work at home. It's a bit messy, but they are **banging**. That is the most-tested recipe, because a whole bunch of my friends, who all know Tayyabs, went, ‘can I try them?’”
Food has always been a fixation for Jay (short for Jason), a “greedy boy” who grew up in north west London with his brother, sister, father Desmond, an actor, and his mother, the beloved journalist and agony aunt Claire Rayner.
“My parents were working class kids who’d had meagre upbringings, and they were desperate not to revisit the privations of their childhood on their kids. So the table was always full, in a very secular Jewish way,” he recalls. “Mealtimes were a place of noise and chatter, and also no portion control. I'm very much like this even now – the idea that there would be ‘just enough for one each’ is impossible. Which may explain why I am not a small, slim man.”
Originally he wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps. “Then I discovered that being able to remember lines and show off was not the same as acting. I wasn't very good. But I did like the written word. Every morning four newspapers came into the house, because Claire was a journalist, and at the age of 14 I decided I wanted to be a journalist.”
To that end, he went to study politics at Leeds University, specifically because it had the biggest student newspaper. “Its editorship was a full-time paid job, to which you had to be elected. I thought if I got myself elected by a cynical student body, nobody could ever accuse me of having got into journalism through nepotism.”
Elected he was, and after a successful year as editor, in 1988 Jay was headhunted to work on student supplements for the nationals. “It was amazing. And that was my start. However, it hasn't made the slightest bit of difference – Claire has been dead 14 years, and still people suggest I got where I am through nepotism. My response is: ‘Why having a mother who was an expert in sexual dysfunction should get me a job on MasterChef, I do not know’.”
Initially, Jay was writing hard-hitting pieces about everything from race crime to social injustice, and certainly had no plans to become a restaurant critic. “It was solely at the point when the editor said we needed a new one that my hand went up,” he says. “What I realised was that food was a way into many other subjects, and it really has proved that.”
Asked to name his most memorable review – from more than 1,500 over quarter of a century – Jay picks his brutal 2017 critique of French institution Le Cinq, in which an onion dish was ‘mostly black, like nightmares, and sticky, like the floor at a teenager’s party’, and the pigeon was served so pink that ‘it might just fly again, given a few volts.’
“I did not go to Paris with the intention of shooting a holy cow,” he insists. “I went to Paris to review a gilded gastro palace, eat some exquisite food, laugh at rich people, and point out just how expensive dinner in a Michelin three-star could be. That Le Cinq turned out to be so goddamn awful was hilarious. And I did know, as my boots clapped down the marble stairs on the way out, what I was about to do, but I didn’t know how big that review would become. It became a global event, and I say that with bafflement.” Newspapers from the USA to India covered the story, which led to a new nickname, Acid Rayner, “and I was hired to do an ad for a Finnish supermarket group as ‘Europe's most-feared restaurant critic’. So if I chose any other review, I'd be dishonest.”
Jay’s reviews regularly get more than 100,000 online views every Sunday. With so many readers – and potential customers, or otherwise – his words can make or break restaurants. “I stick to one rule: punch up, not down,” he shrugs. “If a restaurant is selling starters at £18 to £25 and mains at £40 to £60 and they're not delivering on that, I have no concerns about telling it like it is. But if it's a small mom-and-pop operation that’s not doing very well – Christ, you don't need to kill that in The Observer.” In those cases, he leaves it alone.
Is he ever flummoxed by the blank page? “No, I relish it. The most complicated ones are where it's not terrible, it's not brilliant, it's fine. ‘Fine’ is an awful word. It's the word teenage boys use when their parents ask them how they are. And actually, a journalist really earns their living by finding a way to write entertainingly about the ‘fine’.”
Choosing the right words is more challenging as a critic on MasterChef, which he’s been doing for nearly two decades. “A restaurant review is ‘How much pleasure will my money buy me?’, whereas MasterChef is just about the food on the plate,” he says. “You've got to find language which is compelling, but it’s quite a narrow frame – three shovel-faced people sitting in a room, waiting for things to be brought to them so that they can go, ‘Hmm, I'm not so sure about the aspic’. You've got to acknowledge that you may come across as one of the worst people on earth.”
As for his own cooking prowess – he won the ‘Battle of the Critics’ version of MasterChef last Christmas – Jay is largely self-taught. “There is this narrative that your mother passes the skills down, and I learned a few things from Claire, but really it was my own questing mind,” he says. “I started cooking at university, and I realised I like the process. I find it comforting.
“We all want to have control in life, and sometimes, when you're a parent to small kids, or busy working, things get away from you. But the great thing about cooking is you can get into the kitchen and take control. It's an act of control over ingredients, and at the end of it you should have something nice to eat. You might make a mess, but even the process of cleaning up is about control. Which may all sound like my book is an act of therapy. Maybe it is.”
Jay, who lives in Brixton, south London, has written in the past about his two sons. He now has a son, Ed, and a daughter, Taiga, which is not up for discussion. The book is dedicated to Taiga. Away from print and screen, he’s an accomplished jazz pianist who regularly gigs with his band, the Jay Rayner Sextet, featuring Pat, his wife of 32 years, on vocals. He’s also been hosting food panel show The Kitchen Cabinet on Radio 4 since 2012. Where does his heart really lie?
“I played a gig last night, and when you're in a raucous room and they're cheering and the band is on point, that's fantastic,” he says. “I **love** presenting The Kitchen Cabinet. It's a joyous thing, and I love doing MasterChef. But I'm at my most comfortable when I've written 400 words of a review the day before, and then I'm coming back to finish it. Underpinning everything, I am a writer.”
There are one-man shows, too: Jay is about to embark on his fifth tour. “Originally I was going to be interviewed on stage, and I then decided I didn't trust anybody, because I'm a control freak.” Instead, he’s recorded 15 of his famous friends posing questions – from Rob Brydon asking if he’s ‘just an insufferable snob’ to Nigella wondering how he roasts a chicken. “They're all jumping off points, so it's a fun night. But it also goes to the heart of the book, and how the recipes work.”
The fame, the food, the celebrity pals – it’s been quite a ride. What would Jay, the teenage wannabe journalist, think of how he’s turned out? “He might be slightly appalled, actually,” says Jay, and laughs. “He imagined that I was going to be a great seeker after truth. I would point out that I've done many things of which I'm very proud, and that actually this is a fine and noble way to make a living. But the younger me would probably be quite po-faced, and go, ‘Really? You're a restaurant critic? You go and eat and write smart-arsed things? Call that a proper job?’ Yes, Jay, I call that a proper job. Get over yourself.”
Nights Out At Home (Fig Tree) is out now
FOOD BITES
What did you have for breakfast? A couple of pieces of toasted sourdough with butter and Marmite. I usually do.
Proudest moment in the kitchen? I spent two days making Pierre Koffman's boned pig's trotter stuffed with chicken mousseline, sweetbreads and morels. It's a totemic dish. One was a bit of a car crash, but the other was bang on, and I couldn't quite believe I'd managed it. I'll never do it again.
Most famous person you've dined with? During my years as the food reporter on The One Show, I was fed Blueberries by Will Smith. Does that count?
Perfect dish for September? The seafood fregola in the book, inspired by one served by chef Francesco Mazzei at his various restaurants. It is deep and comforting, courtesy of the fregola, but the shellfish, lemon and light touch of chilli reminds us that summer is not yet gone.