Jay Rayner on being a critic and his passion for good food

If something was bad, he said, he simply wouldn’t write about it. Until recently that is. “Then I came across the Polo Lounge pop-up on the roof of the Dorchester Hotel,” he says.

What triggered his ire was going through the wine list. “The cheapest bottle of wine is £84. And then I went and looked at the retail value of that bottle of wine and it’s around thirteen quid.

"At that point I thought ‘you know what, there are limits to positivity’. Plus, if you’re going to punch, punch up. And the rooftop of the Dorchester Hotel is literally and figuratively punching up. The food’s staggeringly over-priced – £38 for a bowl of pasta – so I didn’t hesitate,” he says.

Rayner's latest book Chewing The Fat – Tasting Notes from a Greedy Life, is a collection of his columns from the past two decades.

He describes the book as his lockdown project which involved trawling through his back catalogue of work. “In those days when we were all pretty much locked in our homes I started reading my own work and I was quite struck that there was some like-affirming stuff in there. I realised while I was writing those articles that I was writing about deeper issues of connectivity and the way we relate to each other through food,” he says.

“I like to think that throughout my writing life I’ve never just been one of those people who banged on about whether the batter on the fish was crunchy or not. I’m more interested in what we eat and what it says about us.”

As with any critic worth their salt, though, Rayner isn’t averse to having the occasional rant when he feels it’s warranted. “Some people seem to think of me as a misanthrope, but I don’t think I am.” That said he does have pet hates, such as waiters who take food orders without a notebook “it will never end well”.

“I do still hate picnics and I do still think buffets are where food goes to die, and I get irritated by restaurants where the lighting is too low so you have to get the torch out on your phone to read the menu, or the music’s too loud. Obviously, these are the responses of a man who’s starting to get a few years on the clock and I’m aware that I’m starting to come across as an old man. But that’s alright because there are quite a few people of my age who say ‘amen, brother,’ when they read those things.”

Rayner has been a “professional eater”, as he puts it, for more than 20 years, but first and foremost he is a journalist. “If you’re going to be critical you better have a good reason and you better have backed it up. And not wanting to sound like an old grey beard, the thing people forget about the job that I do is that it is reporting.”

In other words, writing skills are more important than a healthy appetite and a penchant for a tasty amuse-bouche. “I’m not going to claim there’s an art to it, but I think it’s interesting that a significant number of the people who end up doing it have been other sorts of journalist first… Grace Dent wrote an awful lot about other things before she started writing about food. Very few people who come from a food background end up doing it.”

He still gets emails from would-be food writers or restaurant critics and his advice to them is always the same - “learn to write about everything.”

“I did a teaching class, which sounds very grand, but the point I always made was if you are writing repeatedly about the same subject, ask yourself what is the story? What am I actually writing about? Otherwise all you’ve got is a table and chairs and a plate of food. So you have to identify the story and I attempt to do that ahead of time based on everything I’ve looked at. Once I get there the story may change but I go in with a sense of what I think the story is.”

Rayner grew up in a “noisy, north-west London Jewish family” and came to Leeds University in the mid-80s to study politics. It was here that he discovered the writing bug while editor of its student newspaper which started him on the path to becoming a journalist.

He still holds Leeds in great affection. “It’s over 30 years since I was a student in Leeds and yet there was something very formative about that experience that makes that particular city mean more than any other for me.”

He returns this week for ‘an evening with’ event as part of the Leeds Piano Trail, organised by the Leeds International Piano Competition, where he will be talking about his book and also his other great passion – music. For as well as being one of the country’s foremost restaurant critics he also plays piano in his jazz band The Jay Rayner Quartet.

And next month he’s back again, this time at the Carriageworks Theatre, with his Last Supper Show which was originally due to take place in spring last year but had to be rescheduled due to the pandemic.

Given the growing reputation of the food scene in the North – in last month’s National Restaurant Awards four of the top five were from the region – he’s likely to continue being a regular visitor to Yorkshire.

“If you look across the country at the things that are going on, there’s been a massive transformation. Readers send me messages saying I should try this place or that place and far more of them are outside London than they are in.

“Just in the last 24 hours I’ve had emails recommending places in York and Sheffield that I should try. There’s a real sense of civic pride in places outside London and if something good pops up then you’re going to hear about it,” he says.

It’s why he still enjoys his job. “One of the reasons I’ve been able to carry on as a restaurant critic over 20 years is what one might call ‘appetite’, and what one less politely calls ‘greed’.

“There’s still an interest in what I’m having for dinner. I’m out to review tonight and I’m slightly excitable about where I’m going and what it’s going to be like.”

Chewing The Fat, published by Guardian Faber, is out now.

Leeds Piano Trail – An Evening with Jay Rayner, Headrow House, Leeds, Sept 8.

My Last Supper: One Meal a Lifetime in the Making with Jay Rayner, Leeds Carriageworks, Oct 28.