Jay Rayner: ‘Gordon Ramsay keeps opening restaurants and I keep not going to them because … who cares?’

When restaurant critic, podcast host, broadcaster, jazz musician and writer Jay Rayner takes to the stage at the Borris Festival of Writing & Ideas in June with his one-man show, My Last Supper, it’ll mark a welcome return to Ireland for a man whose multi-strand career is the very definition of ‘portfolio’.

he ‘last supper’ question is one that food writers are often asked — and pose in interviews when they can’t think of anything more original — so it’s the perfect hook for Rayner’s show; a way of telling the story of his life through food. In it, he investigates our fascination with last suppers, and tells stories of the killer dishes he’d have on his own table, how he was introduced to oysters by his late mother, how he almost burnt down a hotel because of his love for snails in garlic butter, and of his lifelong obsession with pork.

On his last visit to Dublin, in 2020, Rayner ate at Dublin 8’s Bastible. His glowing review was published on March 15, 2020, the day that restaurants closed for the first lockdown. “I remember feeling such regret that they weren’t open to benefit from it,” he says. “Mind you, they’ve done alright. They’ve just got a star, haven’t they?” Indeed Barry Fitzgerald landed what many considered to be an overdue star for his South Circular Road restaurant earlier this year.

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Jay Rayner. Picture: Levon Biss

Jay Rayner. Picture: Levon Biss

“The great genius of Michelin is to make everyone else own its star system,” says Rayner. “We all say, ‘That’s a two-star,’ but if it hasn’t got two stars, then it isn’t one, because Michelin are the ones who hand them out. All these napkin-sniffing armchair gourmets can go around saying, ‘I think it should have this number of stars,’ but unless you’re a Michelin inspector, you can agree or disagree as much as you like, but it’s theirs.”

Rayner, now 55, grew up in Harrow, outside London. His father, Desmond, was an actor, and his mother, Claire, was best known as an agony aunt, in print and on television. Rayner studied politics at Leeds, where he edited a student newspaper, and worked as a journalist for 15 years until he took over the restaurant column in The Observer.

“There was a lot of food in my household,” he remembers. “My parents were both working-class kids who had known meagre times when they were growing up and were determined we would not experience that. The table was always full. And although my mother shied away from Jewishness, in later life, I concluded it was a very Jewish way of catering, both in substance and in form.

“Back in the 1970s, she was very busy. She had a full career, and one of her tricks was to put a chicken in a brick from Habitat with some veg, bung it in the oven, and come back seven hours later. It was years before I realised roast chicken could have real texture to it, not just fall apart. She made a great coulibiac, and I’ve inherited a pepper salad, which is labour intensive but delightful. She had a good collection of cookbooks.

“I think she was eventually slightly baffled by what I had become. She understood more clearly the first 15 years of my career, when I was a general reporter doing everything, and then had to recalibrate when I became the restaurant critic. Eventually, she came to understand that basically I was a columnist in the way that she had been, just with different subject matter.”

While his mother hated her own parents, she loved her grandmother, who taught her how to make one of the few specifically Jewish dishes she passed on to her son.

“She made gefilte fish — both the boiled version, which is disgusting, and the fried version, which is lovely,” he says. “The Proustian madeleine for me is the smell of gefilte fish being fried in my own kitchen. I’ve not done it very often, but I did it during lockdown for a feature on Claudia Roden’s encyclopaedia of Jewish food.”

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Jay Rayner (centre) with John Torode and Gregg Wallace on MasterChef

Jay Rayner (centre) with John Torode and Gregg Wallace on MasterChef

Rayner has been known to produce some excoriating reviews in his time. But in the summer of 2020, when the hospitality industry reopened after the first lockdown, he declared a moratorium on bad reviews, on the basis that this was not the time to be knocking an industry on its knees. At the time, he said the moratorium would come to an end at some point. Has that time now come?

“Not quite,” he says. “Yesterday, I went to a restaurant that had some good dishes and some truly terrible ones, and I did find myself thinking that, pre-Covid, I would have written about this and got out all the guns and said everything that needed to be said, and now I’m not sure I’m going to — that it would be worth anyone’s time. I still tend to save my most negative comments for the very expensive places that promise much and deliver little, and I did effectively end the moratorium with a review of the Polo Lounge at the top of the Dorchester Hotel.”

That review was headlined ‘Dismal food at inexplicable prices’, and the desultory cuisine described resulted in a bill for ‘over £370 (€445) for a meal that included a dreadful salad, terrible crab cakes, mediocre pasta, and a grossly overpriced rosé.’

Whatever about the ethics of post-lockdown reviewing, this is still a very difficult time for hospitality, with the industry in the UK experiencing many of the same issues that are plaguing Irish restaurants.

“There are shortages of staff, and ingredient costs are going through the roof,” says Rayner. “That all has to be passed on. The economics of the restaurant industry were laid bare by Covid. There are always people whingeing about prices in the comments under my reviews as if restaurants are in some way a con designed to separate stupid people from their money, but what became clear from Covid was that these businesses generally operate an economic conveyor belt needing money in at one end to pay staff and suppliers at the other; there was very little fat on the bone, so the moment they stopped having customers through the door, they were screwed. Some places will inevitably go out of business, but the industry will bounce back in different ways and create different opportunities.”

Rayner has been writing about Britain’s potentially perilous food insecurity for years now, but says there’s little pleasure in being proven right when things are as dire for British agriculture post-Brexit as they have turned out to be.

“It’s a little bit like looking at a very drunk man in the pub and saying, ‘Don’t drive! You risk doing massive damage to yourself’ and then watching him get in the car and drive off and crash into a tree. What’s happening now is so inevitable, so completely inevitable.

“We have undermined our food base through over-reliance on the economics of large-scale supermarkets,” he says. “I am not anti-supermarket — there are a lot of benefits to them — but we left ourselves at the mercy of external shocks. What I did not predict was that the external shock would be self-inflicted: Brexit, rather than the classic external shock, such as the terrible war in Ukraine. The carelessness with which those who I’m ranting about now [Michael Gove comes in for particular opprobrium] promoted this ludicrous project and dealt with the issue of the island of Ireland without understanding the sensitivities and what had been struggled for, and what they put at risk was just astonishing. The ignorance, craven attitudes, and the impact on food supply chains is just remarkable.

“The UK produces only 60pc of its food, and getting stuff in is still proving difficult. The line being pedalled by central government is that there are a few ‘teething problems’. But these are fundamental systemic issues, such as the shortage of vets. Many were from Portugal and have disappeared, and the people from Eastern Europe working in meat processing have also had to leave, which means there is not enough capacity to take pigs through the slaughter houses, so they are being culled and don’t enter the food chain. It’s obscene. At the more bespoke end, which has more to do with food culture, access to markets is disappearing, and producers can’t get their products out.”

Even though the hospitality industry is facing so many challenges, Rayner considers restaurants fair game in reviewing terms from the minute they open their doors and charge full price, although he says he tends not to show up on opening night.

“More often than not, that’s a failure of journalistic vigour on my part rather than some principled stance about giving them time to bed in… when the hot places open, Christ it’s an effort to get a table, and I’m not sure I’m quite up to it. Maybe I should be a little quicker through the door.”

And what about reviewing restaurants where there is rumoured to be toxic kitchen culture?

“The stories of abuse or sexual harassment are extremely hard to report,” he says, confirming the frustration of many critics who find themselves the repositories of information that is difficult to get into print because of defamation laws. “I am lost in admiration for the people who come forward to talk. There are a couple of chefs who I have known a lot about and tried to nail the story, but you can’t do so unless you have someone willing to come forward. It’s less to do with your own desire to report someone’s appalling behaviour than the willingness of those who have suffered to come forward, and, quite reasonably, a lot of them don’t want to.

“There are places I won’t have anything to do with. Gordon [Ramsay] keeps opening restaurants and I keep not going to them because … who cares? His modus operandi does not appeal to me … even though a lot of people say ‘he’s lovely’. Then why present this persona on television which is about abuse? That kind of violence in language does no favours either to him or to the profile of the industry. If he’s doing it just to play to the gallery, then congratulations, that’s how he’s made his money. I’m not going to give him the oxygen of publicity. I am very conscious that I have been privileged enough to have been given a slab of journalistic real estate. You have to be aware of how you can use that to help restaurants that will really benefit from it, which is a good use of that space, rather than picking up endless blingy tasting-menu experiences.”

Ah yes, the return of the tasting menu that has accompanied the reopening of restaurants post lockdown. Is Rayner a fan?

“I notice an enormous expansion in restaurants doing a tasting menu. I don’t think it’s just economics. There’s an aesthetic thing going on. It’s a retreat back to ‘Let me express myself’, rather than ‘I’m going to cook you dinner’. God, it’s a pain in the arse. I ask myself whether my resistance to the tasting menu is a question of, ‘Ooh my diamond pumps are pinching me! I’ve done this job for so long, have I become bored of something that other people who are not as exposed to restaurant meals as I am do not find boring?’ I do try to understand that.”

Juggling the restaurant column with his Out To Lunch podcast, recordings of The Kitchen Cabinet show for BBC Radio 4, and his live show, has made him quite efficient, says Rayner. So much so that he manages to carve out time for his side hustle as the leader of the Jay Rayner Quartet, a jazz ensemble featuring his wife, Pat Gordon-Smith.

“The piano in the room below is a very important part of my life,” he says. “It won’t surprise anyone to hear it’s not a money spinner, but I’m proud of the fact that I don’t lose money, the musicians who work with me get paid, and we have a lot of fun. It’s very important to me. My wife, Pat, is the singer. I think why the act works in the old vaudeville sense is the chemistry that happens on stage. I always joke that I sleep with the singer. You cannot manufacture that chemistry, which adds to the dynamic, and makes it special. She’s terrific, thank god for that. If someone comes to see a band and sees someone holding a sax, they assume they can play, and if they see someone sitting at a piano, they assume they can play, because it would be ridiculous if they couldn’t. But when they see a singer, there is always a period of terror that the person who is about to sing might be utterly deluded, because we have all experienced the deluded singer who can’t. My parents had a big party for their 40th wedding anniversary, with a friend doing cocktail piano. We decided Pat would sing Just One of Those Things, my parents’ song. My parents’ friends were an interesting collection of people, including many West End musical actors, musicians, and singers. Pat said afterwards, “You could practically hear their buttocks unclenching!”

Jay Rayner performs his one-man show, My Last Supper, at 7pm on June 11 at the Borris Festival of Writing & Ideas, festivalofwritingandideas.com