JAY RAYNER | DINING WITH DIABLO
Feared and fierce in equal measure, food critic, Jay Rayner spoke with Emma Clark about his tour My Dining Hell, jazz, pop up restaurants, and how he’s a lovely atheist Jewish boy at heart.
On my first call Jay was at a butcher’s counter about to purchase a bag load of chicken wings. He very politely asked if he could call back and explained: “I’m working on a new short book which for the first time includes recipes. There’s a chapter in there on eating with your hands and the joy of it, so there’s a particular chicken wing recipe, I’m trying it out on the kids tonight. It’s very simple, but, basically it’s garlic, lemon and fennel seeds, roasted in the oven until they’re good and sticky and salty and fabulous.”
His new tour My Dining Hell, which Jay is taking across the country explores why we love reading bad reviews. He tells amusing tales of his dining adventures, and one of his particularly colourful reviews mentions a deconstructed cheesecake. “What’s a deconstructed cheesecake? It’s one that has a variation of the ingredients of a cheesecake which work well together but on different corners of the plate. You can imagine a classic cheesecake, which has a biscuit crumb base, and a cream cheese topping, but with a deconstructed cheesecake you could have a scoop of some sort of cream cheese topping, ice-cream or whatnot, or you could just have a pile of crumbs. It’s what we call ‘not a cheesecake”.
When asked if he had seen the film ‘Chef’, and if he had ever experienced the wrath of restaurateurs or an angry chef, as seen in the film. He was quick to quell any similarities: “Yes I have seen it, but no chef has ever come out sending back each of the plates. No good can ever come from that. There are occasions where I do actually know the chef, maybe at the end we will say hello. There are occasions where it’s a smallish operation, a husband and wife or a family run establishment, and there’s no doubt they know what I’m doing there, at which point I go up to them and say ‘thank you that was great’. I don’t do it very often. I really don’t do it very often. A small restaurant could see me as terrifying, but I’m obviously lovely. Everything will be fine, as long as you cook safely.”
His Welsh tour brings him to the beautiful setting of St Donats Castle, once owned by the infamous Sir William Randolph Hearst, a renowned party thrower rumoured to have entertained Charlie Chaplin and John F Kennedy. Interestingly Jay’s choice of fantasy dinner party guests do not include anyone alive today: “Mae West, she would be dirty. I would have loved to talk to George Gershwin and the great Sir Peter Ustinov. Honestly, I think one of the problems with dinner parties is too much cooking; the solution is to make something that is slow: a big braised lamb shoulder, mixed with a red wine, a little brown sugar, and then let it simmer down. Once that is in the oven, you do olives and charcuterie to start and ice-cream at the end and everybody’s happy.”
Reticent to divulge even a teeny morsel of the show and what to expect, he gave nothing away: “I think you’ll have to wait until the show to be honest because, there is no doubt that people love negative restaurant reviews, but they are the smallest part of what I do. I’ve currently got this reputation. I have no idea where that came from. In 2014, 25 of my reviews were positive, and maybe nine were negative, but it is the negative ones that the people will remember.
With his love of food and the use of locally sourced and sustainable ingredients, I ask if there is a gap or trend in the market that needs to be explored: “Perhaps the real gap is with the independents being able to set up on a site where the rent is reduced. It works very well in South London where I live. It’s a controversial issue, but if local councils approach the planning appropriately then it will clear a way for the independents to come in. Independents that don’t necessarily do bloody burgers, but create the way for people to do something which you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find”
Asked about the pop up restaurant epidemic, he is a supporter of them: “The pop up can be a very, very good way for a young chef or restaurant to have a go, and that makes an awful lot of sense. For some people, it’s just a way of playing at it, and it may not lead anywhere; they’re not really going for it and there’s a lot of silliness around pop ups as well. But for some, it’s a good way to try the business out and find out if they like it because running a restaurant is bloody hard work.
His well publicised support of food quality, animal welfare, has been a passion over the years, and when asked if he feared for the future of UK food production in general he said: “I wrote a whole book about that, Greedy Man in a Hungry World. We are affected by changes and unfortunately we have got to get used to food being more expensive. People say, ‘oh it’s ok for you, you middle class welfare hypocrite’ or whatever and, yeah, it is fine for me but we will start having a problem unless we start paying a bit more now, because we need to see investment in British agriculture. We are not producing anything near what we need to be.”
When not reviewing, playing or writing books, his music of choice is jazz: “I have to work to something without lyrics, almost always jazz, some Oscar Peterson and nowadays Ian Shaw is terrific.” As an accomplished pianist himself, his band will be touring the country in the forthcoming months, including a gig at Ronnie Scott’s later this month. Playing with Jay will be an ensemble of top flight musicians, performing an hour and a half of tunes from the great American food & songbook.
His mum, agony aunt Claire Rayner was a regular on TV and radio growing up in the 80s, I asked if there was any advice she gave that he still lived by today: “I think she noticed that I seemed to be edging towards a not entirely dissimilar career as hers in the sense that I was going to have a public profile, being a print journalist doing broadcasting, writing books and so forth. She gave me two pieces of advice, well three actually – one, never be photographed holding a glass of wine, two, never turn down the opportunity for a pee and three, always be nice to taxi drivers. It’s the rules of public life.”
And finally one pet hate that drives him wild apart from deconstructed cheesecakes: “One thing that really bothers me is the unwillingness of waiters to give up filling your wine glass, even when you’ve told them that you’ll fill your glass up yourself. I have no desire for anyone to keep filling up my wine glass, they don’t know how much I want to drink, and every time I empty my glass they try to fill it. I prefer to take control myself.”
Jay Rayner: My Dining Hell!, St Donats Arts Centre, St Donats, Fri 27 Nov, Tickets: £15. Info: www.stdonats.com
photos BELLA WEST, LEVON BISS MEDRES