I went for lunch with legendary food critic Jay Rayner — here's what I learned

Jay Rayner is a legendary restaurant critic, author, TV personality, and radio host, but he still has an appetite for more, writes Food editor Jillian Bolger

Restaurant critic Jay Rayner with Food editor Jillian Bolger in London. Pictures: Andrew Dunsmore

In London's Chinatown, on a street packed with restaurants, no one pays any attention to Jay Rayner. We stride down Gerrard Street in the midday sun, and enter a lively little Chinese joint called Four Seasons, which majors in duck. 

Rayner may be a regular, but no one seems to know who he is — neither staff nor diners — and, if they do, they don’t care. His review may be stuck on the wall, but the restaurant critic of the Observer for 25 years, and newly of the Financial Times, barely receives a second glance.

“The hilarious thing is I come here quite a lot,” he explains. 

“There’s one [staff member] who occasionally [recognises me]. My review is by the door on the way in, and they couldn’t give a toss. I think what they did was that, weirdly, rather than go and buy a copy of the paper, they printed it out from the net and laminated it without [my] picture.

“I finally reviewed it in February of 2020, when all the stuff out of Wuhan was causing a backlash against Chinese restaurants, and Chinatown was suffering. And so I said, ‘well, as a mark of solidarity I’m going to go to the one I really like’, I mean, in reality, all of the restaurants then closed.”

Four Seasons is close to the studio where Jay records his award-winning BBC Radio 4 show, The Kitchen Cabinet, and he has picked it for our interview. I’d suggested we meet over lunch, because, frankly, who would choose Zoom over the chance to break bread with a professional eater of this stature?

Jay comes here often to dine alone, fuelling up for an evening’s show.

“They are complicated records, so you don’t want to do them hungry,” he insists. 

“And you’re not going to get to eat dinner properly. I’m about to manage a panel and an audience of about 700 people, and there are a lot of things going on in my head, so an hour by myself with some Cantonese duck, and then a copy of the New Yorker, and it’s good.”

I ask him to order for us, and he falters. “It’s a very interesting thing because I normally come here alone. I’m trying to work out what’s an appropriate amount of food for two. Are you hungry?”

“Always,” I reassure him, before he asks if I’m happy to ignore starters. Decisively, he chooses a half duck, boneless, half char siu, king prawns in salted egg yolk, deep-fried crispy beef (“just for a nostalgic thing”), stir-fried morning glory, and sweet and sour eggplant. We agree to skip rice and happily tuck into jasmine tea.

I confess that my chopstick skills are below par. “You’ll get no judgment from this side of the table if you drop your food down your front, you know that?” he offers helpfully as I self-consciously wrangle slippery morning glory into my mouth.

After 25 years with the Observer, restaurant critic and broadcaster Jay Rayner is now working for the Financial Times. He also recently released his first cookbook: Nights Out at Home. Picture: Andrew Dunsmore

Before our meeting, I’ve been devouring his new book, Nights Out at Home, his first cookbook, and one that sees him recreate 60 recipes inspired by restaurant dishes he’s eaten out professionally. I’m unlikely to cook anything from it — even the memorable flatbread that I scoffed in the edgy winebar Erst in Manchester, last year — but this is a storybook, too, and doesn’t need to be cooked from to be of value.

“How far have you gotten?” he asks, before I whip out the dog-eared hardback from my bag. “You’ve done all right!” he exclaims, clearly pleased that I’ve been doing my homework.

“I’m really enjoying it,” I confess, which prompts a sincere thank you. “It’s been like a primer on having lunch with Jay. Like a guide on how to eat with you before meeting you.”

Sitting across the table from me, the man I know from his TV appearances as a judge on MasterChef, from his radio show, and from his columns, is exactly as I’d imagined him: earnest, sharp, witty. But is this real Jay or showbiz Jay?

“I have this thing that [my book] is me but it is a version of me. You play up to the cameras a little bit.

“Because you can’t be half-hearted in print, you know, a lot of it really is me but there are bits of it which are slightly exaggerated. But you can decide by the end of lunch — can’t you.” 

He surprises me by admitting his delight that the Irish Examiner has dispatched someone to interview him.

“I go to the North a lot. An awful lot. So I’ve been twice this month, weirdly. 

I mean I’ve been to Ireland loads of times but I’ve never really engaged with the food world over there like I should, which is a confession. 

“It’s one of the reasons I’m going to Ballymaloe because I’ve never been, I kind of thought ‘that’s a gap, yeah, you should go’. Plus, it sounds like a laugh.”

I recall reading somewhere that the duck we are eating is from Silverhill Farm in Cavan. Is that right, I ask? “I don’t think anybody necessarily comes to Chinatown and asks about the sourcing of ingredients,” he grins.

He’s never been to China and isn’t really interested in visiting. “I mean, probably when I was a younger man. That kind of intrepid travel doesn’t interest me now.”

Jay Rayner recently released his first cookbook: Nights Out at Home. Picture: Andrew Dunsmore

At one point in his early career as a general features writer, an editor was going to send him to Rwanda. “And then he wanted to send me to the Vietnamese Lao border to chase down a mythical missing antelope or something. Well, I refused to do Rwanda. I refused Kurdistan, too, because they were both in the middle of wars and my partner had not signed up for [a relationship with] a war correspondent.

“But I didn’t really have the hunger to travel the way some people do, and I don’t know if that’s a character failing on my part.”

His reflectiveness is unexpected, and at one point, he interrupts himself to apologise for not speaking in quotable sentences.

“One of the great things about restaurants, and I said this in the book, is that you travel the world. You’re going to get a different version [of a dish], and maybe it’s not as you would find at point of origin. But it’s interesting.” 

I remark that he is carefully side-stepping the word “authentic”.

“How does ‘authentic’ help us? Take the British Chinese takeaway tradition. They are a thing in themselves. So, if all you’re trying to do is benchmark food against some notion of truth and honesty, you’re not going to get very far.

“This [pointing to the crispy chilli beef] is the one thing I’ve ordered which is pretty much out of the British take-away playbook.” It is delicious, I note.

“Delicious,” he chimes. “I have no idea where there’s anything like it. Or maybe there is. I’d need to ask [Chinese food expert] Fuchsia Dunlop.

“Two things can be true at the same time: one which is the food you’re eating in a particular restaurant is great, and that there is another version of it, which is fundamentally different, at the point of origin at the place that inspired it.”

Food writer Simon Hopkinson is the person who alerted Jay to Four Seasons’ excellence. 

“He swears that the Chinese are the best at roasting duck and this is the best in London. I do not know whether that’s true. Because I haven’t eaten in them all.

There’s a culture of sort of ‘stamp collecting’ now. Where’s the best? What’s the best? Well, that sounds exhausting. Just find something that’s good and you like.

Despite 25 years of restaurant reviews, he’s ambivalent about Michelin stars. “I always found it slightly weird that the people of Manchester have been so upset, as if [not] having a Michelin starred restaurant said something about them. It doesn’t.

“And I stick to one particular line, which is the quality of a city is not marked by the number of gastro palaces it has, but by the number of bistros there. And I want to visit the city with lots of nice bistros I can eat in every night, not the place with a number of Michelin starred restaurants I could eat in once a year.”

I ask him about his 2009 book, The Man Who Ate the World, which saw him dine at the world’s finest restaurants.

“It was a weird idea. I sometimes wonder where the idea came from. There was a point to it journalistically, which was that it was slightly ahead of its time.

“It identified the globalisation of luxury, which has become a massive, massive thing. But it only works if you find the right tone. Tone is everything. You know, people will say, well, I’d love your job, all that eating. It’s not an eating job — it’s a writing job. And if you get the tone wrong ...

“I can think of various bloggers and whatever online. You read their writing, and you think, I never want to meet you and I never want to eat with you. I never want to spend time with you. This is miserable. And those Instagram reels? I’ve got nothing against it. I mean, I’m all over Instagram.

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“There’s a lot of really good stuff, but there’s a particular kind of luxe restaurant reel. ‘Come with me as we ‘nah nah nah nah’. The voiceover. Aagh!” I agree, lamenting the dearth of knowledge.

“I don’t really have a problem with that because if you start having a problem with people who aren’t experts on social media, then you’ve got a problem with the weather. It’s a fact of life.

“What matters is how it’s presented. I mean, there are some good people who are sources of great information and there are some that aren’t. That’s all I care about. Is this interesting? Does it work? Despite what you don’t know.”

He believes that there’s been a knee-jerk reaction to content creators.

“I think two things. One: a lot of it may be rubbish, but then a lot of stuff put out by mainstream media is rubbish. The other point that follows — the idea that people who work for newspapers and magazines are all universally informed and know their stuff — is not true.

“I remember one moment. It was a paper I was working for, and I came downstairs and I said to my wife, ‘I read the newspaper so that the people who are cleverer than me and better informed than me can tell me what’s going on in the world. The problem is I know all these people and they’re neither’.”

He is quick to add he is very happy at the Financial Times, while admitting that it sounds like pandering. 

“I am somewhat besotted with my new home because I’ve been reading the FT for a good few years before I joined it. And the seriousness of the reporting and the journalism, and the informed opinion is beguiling. It’s top class.

“When you look at it, there’s a kind of discord dialogue at the moment, with people going. ‘Oh, food media is dying. Nobody’s taking it seriously.’ And I’m always a bit suspicious of those things because it suggests there was a golden age. And I’m not sure when that golden age is meant to have been. 

There have only been restaurant critics in the British press since 1986, it’s not something with massive longevity.

“[People say] nobody takes it seriously anymore. When was the point it was really taken seriously?

“Or is it just that there were certain writers that you loved? So, obviously, Marina O’Loughlin and Matthew Fort wrote brilliant reviews, but I wonder whether they were that more serious than the rest of us.”

He’s already working on a follow-up to Nights Out at Home, and one of the essays is about how you write about food. 

“I’ve been pointing out that really the language that we have — crispy, sour, salty, sweet, chewy, whatever — doesn’t get us very far. It doesn’t get us very far in describing the experience you’ve had, and, really, it’s the least useful part of your armoury.”

Jay seems to enjoy the fact that no one in Four Seasons restaurant cares a hoot about who he is — funnily, when we walk to the Trafalgar St James hotel for his photo shoot, there’s a marked difference in the public’s reaction and several couples in the hotel spot him and surreptitiously snap photos — though he clearly cares about his reputation.

“Competition is an important thing. People ask, are you in competition [with other restaurant critics]?

“On the one hand, no, I do my own thing, but on the other hand, I absolutely want people to think I’ve written a better review that week than whoever else is writing. And if you lose that, you should quit, and I don’t think I’ve lost it.”

• Jay Rayner is taking part in the Ballymaloe Festival of Food, May 16-18. He hosts a cookery demo on Saturday May 17, and is in conversation on Sunday May 18. For tickets: ballymaloegrainstore.com.
• Special thanks to The Trafalgar St James London, Curio Collection by Hilton, where Jay was photographed. trafalgarstjames.com.