12 minute read
IN PROFILE JAY RAYNER
The critic, broadcaster and host of this year’s Marylebone Food Festival launch dinner on the state of Britain’s restaurants, the art of reviewing, and why he doesn’t set out to give anyone a kicking
Words: Mark Riddaway Portraits: Joe Magowan Jay Rayner Quartet image: Pal Hansen
Things, as the past couple of years have tried their hardest to remind us, change.
Back in early 2020, as Jay Rayner prepared to host that year’s Marylebone Food Festival gala launch dinner, he joined me for an upbeat interview, the main themes of which were the thrust and vibrancy of British restaurants and the joys of working as a critic in such a buoyant sector. The festival didn’t happen, for reasons that hardly need parsing. Lots of other things didn’t happen either. Today, when we meet again to discuss the festival’s belated and very welcome return, the tenor of the conversation is a little different.
“Before the pandemic hit, I think it’s fair to say that the restaurant sector was booming,” says Jay. “There were new openings happening all the time – at the top end and the middle and at the bottom – and there seemed to be a customer base for them all.” Covid quickly deadened that boom. Many restaurants, including some that were meant to feature at that 2020 dinner, have sunk without trace. Others are struggling. “What we hadn’t quite clocked was just how precarious a business model the restaurant industry is,” he reflects. “Most of them are not cash rich; they have no real reserves. They’re conveyor belts. They need money in at one end from the customer so they can pay their suppliers at the other. The moment Covid hit, they were in serious trouble.”
That trouble was intensified by the multi-course menu of horrors served up by Britain’s departure from the EU. Covid shocked the sector, “but the underlying systemic issue is Brexit,” says Jay. “Food prices are rising because of Brexit, there’s a labour shortage because of Brexit. It’s as simple as that. As an act of self-sabotage, it takes some beating.”
So, here we are, two years into a crisis, planning for a festival that, while still celebratory in tone, is also a welcome opportunity to offer our support, both moral and monetary, to a sector whose vulnerabilities have been horribly exposed. After taking them for granted for so long, we know now that restaurants and their talented, masochistically dedicated workers need us as much as we need them. If they fail to prosper, we all lose.
Jay is an impassioned advocate for those who spend their days and nights making our dinner. His public image is that of a critic who relishes being critical, who loves nothing more than the dispensing of a good, hard shoeing, but for Jay reviewing restaurants is an act of love, not sport. It was in that spirit that, in July 2020, as restaurants limped back after lockdown, he decided to turn his Observer column into a beacon of positivity. “My thought was, read the room. I quickly reached the conclusion that our readers didn’t want to read shit-baggings. They didn’t want to see very negative reviews of restaurants because, god knows, even the terrible places were on their knees. A moratorium on those really negative reviews seemed like a reasonable approach, at least for the time being.” For over a year, if his experience at a restaurant wasn’t good, he paid the bill himself (“The paper reimburses my expenses for a restaurant I review, not for ones I don’t, which seems fair enough”) and went looking for something sunnier to write about.
This long ceasefire (which was eventually broken by an excoriation of the “gross insult to good taste, manners and commercial decency” presented by the Polo Lounge at the Dorchester) was no empty gesture: while national newspapers battle to maintain readers and relevance, the restaurant critics they employ are – thanks to the reach of social media and the recent explosion of interest in food – as influential today as they’ve ever been, able to influence with a turn of the imperial thumb whether a restaurant, and the career of its chef, might thrive or die.
Jay’s embrace of positivity wasn’t, though, as much of a u-turn as some might presume. While on occasion his reviews do end up with blood on their knuckles, his fearsome reputation is probably less a reflection of his written output than of his willingness to ham it up on telly (plus his possession of what Charles Dickens called a “speaking countenance” and the internet might call “resting bitch face”: “Sometimes I look grumpy, but I’m actually just thinking,” he says, mournfully. “I can’t do anything about that.”) In person and in his writing – which is warm, funny and beautifully crafted – he is nothing like as grumpy as that scowling visage would suggest.
“In a normal year, fewer than a fifth of my reviews in any one year are negative,” Jay confirms. He knows full well the transformative effect that a few hundred words of positive prose can have – “I remember one restaurateur sent me the bookings log from the day my review came out, and they had received 980 bookings. Christ, if only I was corrupt!” – and he understands that a negative review can have a profound impact on people’s lives and jobs. “The responsibility does weigh on me,” he says. “If I write a negative review, I have to be absolutely certain that it’s proportionate, that the recipient deserves it, and that I’m not piling in on a small business that’s already failing.”
Being a mere hatchet man would be all too easy: the negative reviews get more hits, more comments, more shares. But despite Jay’s understanding of his function (“My job is not to sell restaurants, it’s to sell newspapers”), he refuses to feed that bloodlust by deliberately searching out awful restaurants. “If I stumble across a bad experience, I know the readers will enjoy it, but I don’t ever go looking to have a terrible meal,” he insists. “I’ve done two collections of my most negative reviews and a live show based on them, so I’m absolutely aware of the marketability of being brutal, but I’m still committed to the idea that you have to be very careful not to go seeking it out.” He wants to eat great food and have a lovely old time, but if the greed >
or complacency of his hosts forces him to throw some red meat to the ravening hordes, so be it.
To ensure that the restaurant he’s reviewing knows nothing of his intentions until he’s standing in front of a stunned-looking maitre d’, Jay books under a pseudonym. “I used to use the name of a fictional restaurant critic I created for a novel, because I liked the idea of him emerging into the real world, but now I tend to book under the name of whoever my companion is.” Once he passes through a restaurant’s doors, Jay’s complete inability to be inconspicuous – big man, big hair, big presence – is not, he insists, a threat to the authenticity of his experience. “All restaurants are about prep,” he explains. “They can’t change their recipes, they can’t change their ingredients, they can’t change their staff. What can they do to make my experience spectacularly different and better than anyone else’s? They can avoid pouring the soup down my back, but that’s about it.”
If a panicked manager, upon spotting that unmistakable mien, tries to usher him away from his original table to one that isn’t too small or right outside the loo, he refuses to move. He keeps a close eye on other patrons, too. “I’ve had experiences – in really crap restaurants, it has to be said – where the table next to me is sitting before I arrive, is ordering before I’ve sat down, and then I get served before them. That really doesn’t help.” Likewise, unsolicited freebies are sent back to the kitchen, and the bill is scrutinised for any chicanery. “The classic one is where they leave things off the bill to make it look smaller. Most people send the bill back because things have been wrongly added; my problem is the opposite.”
These things matter: Jay is not just a food critic, he’s an everything critic, the pleasure and pain of eating out being about so much more than the texture of the celeriac mash. His roots are in journalism, not in food (“I was an oldschool reporter, I would cover murders and all sorts. I just happened to be greedy”), so if the food isn’t interesting, he’ll
The three members of the Jay Rayner Quartet who aren’t Jay Rayner: Dave Lewis, Pat GordonSmith and Robert Rickenberg
try to sniff out something that is. It’s for that reason that he doesn’t give star ratings. “The vast majority would be three out of five, and people would look at that and think, I can’t be bothered to read it. They’d only read the ones and the fives. I want you to read my essay on what that restaurant is, not just stop at the star rating.” Places that aren’t either entertainingly brilliant or entertainingly bad – which is most restaurants – demand a bit of thought to keep the reader engaged. “I have moments where I worry what I’m going to write 1,100 words on, but like any journalism you just have to look for the story, and there’s always one there.”
Hard though it may be to think of new angles after writing more than 1,000 reviews, he’s not even close to giving up. Jay’s mother, Claire Rayner, was a famous newspaper journalist too – an agony aunt at the Sun, the Sunday Mirror and the short-lived Today – and her writing opened up other opportunities as a broadcaster and speaker, just as Jay’s has done. “Ma knew that if she ever gave up on the problem page, everything else that surrounded it would fall away,” he says. “And it did. When she’d finally had enough of Rupert Murdoch and David Montgomery at Today, and stopped, everything else she did drifted away.” He won’t let that happen to him. “It’s a very lovely job, and although it isn’t a massive part of my income now, it’s a very important part of my working life. They’ll have to prise my cold dead fingers off the table.” Following his mother’s advice, he even tries to avoid having anyone deputise in his slot – you’ll rarely see a guest column in the Observer that states: “Jay Rayner is away.” Instead, he just stacks up enough copy to cover his absences.
Continuing until his dying breath won’t be a chore, though. “I’m still engaged, I still love restaurants, I still love pushing through that door at the start of the evening,” he says, and all around the country (which he explores more widely than most critics, thanks in part to the roving itinerary of Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, which he hosts) there is inspiring food to be found: “Generally, in every town you can find somewhere good and interesting.” There are even some positive new developments to cling to in the wake of Covid, despite the carnage.
Foremost among these are the conversations now taking place between owners and their staff. “During the lockdowns, a lot of people re-evaluated their life choices and decided that working in a restaurant industry for lousy wages, while they enjoyed being part of, maybe it wasn’t the best way for them to spend their lives. That has forced an acknowledgement that pay matters, worklife balance matters and how staff are treated matters,” Jay explains. “In a market with a labour shortage, employers can’t be monsters. There has been an upsurge in people throughout the industry saying: ‘We’re not going to take abusive workplaces anymore.’ I think that is absolutely a positive. It’s only our tea. Nobody should have to put up with a terrible work experience just to make dinner for me.”
The nation’s sudden immersion in the pleasures of outdoor eating is another welcome change. “I think it should happen all the time,” says Jay. “The idea of streets being shut off and becoming a place where you sit and eat is fantastic.” So too is the increased availability of affordable commercial units, which offer a foot in the door for accomplished, ambitious, youthful chefs who want to strike out on their own instead of navigating the oppressive hierarchies of the high-end restaurant world.
For the most part, it is in London’s outer areas that these seeds of renewal have been planted, while central locations have been hollowed out. Marylebone though – as this issue of the Journal makes clear – has avoided any ghost-town vibes, partly due to its unusually large and settled residential community. “It’s a really intriguing part of London, because it functions as a neighbourhood,” says Jay. “It’s a wealthy neighbourhood, for sure, but its restaurants have to be both destinations and real neighbourhood restaurants if they’re going to succeed. Understanding that is why Ravinder has done so well.”
The Ravinder in question is Ravinder Bhogal, owner of Jikoni and a “very good mate” of Jay’s. “Ravinder and I have known each other for about 12 years. She was a presenter on a terrible Channel 4 food show I was working on, which had the awful title Food: What Goes In Your Basket? It did have a colon, mercifully, but it still sounds like a grammatical error when spoken aloud. She always said back then that she wanted to get into restaurants. I said to her: ‘If you want to get into restaurants, you have to do it properly.’ And she did. It was amazing – she put up with utter shit, working her way round some tough kitchens before opening Jikoni.”
It was through Jay’s friendship with Ravinder and their shared patronage of The Food Chain charity that he was convinced to appear as the Food Festival dinner’s host. He’s also doing the music: noodling away on the piano with his impressive jazz band, The Jay Rayner Quartet. “It’ll be cocktail jazz, which I don’t get to do enough of. You don’t have a set list, you keep calling tunes, you muck about with each other, and ideas come out.”
“Let’s be clear,” he concludes: “this is a brilliantly bourgeois event in a brilliantly bourgeois corner of London, supporting restaurants and raising a fair wedge of cash for a charity that really needs it.” Great food, live music, enthusiastic chefs, a charismatic host, and a good cause. Things change, as we all now know, but the appeal of that particular combination isn’t one of them.
MARYLEBONE FOOD FESTIVAL marylebonefoodfestival.com
