Jay Rayner: ‘Nothing makes me feel more Jewish than antisemitism’

Jay Rayner is tearing into a salad. Not on the page – in one of his famously scathing restaurant reviews – but on the plate before him. “Where’s the…? Hang on…? I ordered the smoked eel salad, didn’t I?!” He forks, frustrated, through the lettuce to find “potatoes, tomatoes, olives, some little deviled eggs which do look delightful, but I think they’ve forgotten to put the eel in here”. He’s laughing now, salt and pepper curls jiggling in syncopation with the jowls. “Oh, this is funny. I’ve brought you to one of my favourite restaurants – a place where I spend my own money – and this happens. I mean, I don’t want to be ridiculously picky but…” he summons a waiter. “Ummm? The smoked eel?” Sir? “Where is it?” We’re at Bentley’s, a discretely excellent little seafood place tucked into Swallow Street, just around the corner from London’s Piccadilly Circus. Arriving first, I felt a static charge go through the staff as I gave our booking name as “Rayner” and was shown to a bar stool beside my interviewee’s regular perch. Nicknamed “Acid Rayner” after his first appearance on MasterChef in 2007, Rayner was a restaurant critic at The Observer for 28 years until moving to the Financial Times in 2024 (of which more later). I’d interviewed Vinnie Jones two weeks earlier and more friends asked if I was nervous about hanging out with the restaurant critic than with the supposed hardman actor and ex-footballer. “Really?” asks Rayner, one part shock, two parts tickled. “I’m amused by that,” he says as the embarrassed waiter returns his salad. “One thing that people might find intimidating about me is my physical stature. I’m a big bloke. Six foot two and built like a brick shithouse. And I have this face that falls into a frown.” He demonstrates, forehead crumpling. “Here’s my resting bitch face.” The son of the equally blunt and confident TV agony aunt, Claire Rayner, the writer and broadcaster makes no bones about his nepo baby roots. “I’ve checked my privilege and I’ve got loads,” he says. Born in London in 1966 to Claire and actor dad Desmond, he edited the student newspaper while he was at Leeds University before going on to cover gossip, news and features for the nationals (“I have done proper court stuff, murders,” he huffs) and winning Young Journalist of the Year at the 1992 Press Awards. With Anna Haugh and Grace Dent on MasterChef (Photo: BBC/Shine TV) His late mother, he once wrote, “adored making mischief. If talking about abortion or underage sex not only helped people but also pissed off Mary Whitehouse and the bishops, that was all to the good.” Nothing was taboo. Strong opinions, robustly expressed and dramatically defended, were the conversational staples. He learned that “shameless, overweening self-confidence is a useful quality in a reporter”. He’s right – at least when it comes to restaurant reviewing. Most of us eat out rarely these days. This means we’re cowed into questioning ourselves in swanky restaurants. The microaggressions of confusing cutlery, pretentious menus and snooty sommeliers can make diners feel that we must be the ones in the wrong if we haven’t enjoyed a meal that cost half a week’s wages. So we need guys like Rayner to feel utterly entitled to push back on our behalf. He did this most famously in 2017, demolishing the over £500-a-head Le Cinq at Paris’s Four Seasons Hotel George V in a deliciously quotable review that went viral around the world. Although he claims he booked a table in the hope of experiencing “moments of bliss” that would justify the eye-watering prices, he clearly had much more fun at his desk later describing the dessert with a milk skin like “something that’s fallen off a burns victim” and a dish of pigeon “served so pink it just might fly again given a few volts”. Writing like this can feel intoxicating. But in his new book Nights Out in the Kitchen – a bracing blend of memoir and recipes he’s reverse-engineered from his favourite eateries – Rayner does a little soul searching to ask if it also makes him “a total bastard”. While he has no sympathy with the owners of a place like Le Cinq, he acknowledges the “pain” felt by many of those on the receiving end of his public maulings. But he says his job is to entertain and inform the reader, not soothe the egos of chefs. He singles out Gordon Ramsay – whose chicken wings he once deemed “no better than the sort you’d buy when completely bladdered from some gnarly KFC knock-off joint in Dalston” – as a chef who punches down on shows like Kitchen Nightmares, while he only ever punches up. “I cut up rough only on the hugely expensive restaurants, the ones that promise much and deliver little.” Rayner cuts up a little rough with me when I ask about the leaked messages in which he said he was leaving The Observer because of “antisemites” on The Guardian’s staff – he wrote that he felt editor Kath Viner lacked the “courage to face them down”. “That’s the one tag line your editor sent you out into the street with,” he incorrectly assumes. When I tell him the curiosity is all my own he softens a little. “I don’t think it’s controversial to say that being Jewish – however atheistic, and I’m completely secular – in the past 10 or 12 years has been really, really difficult. And there is nothing that makes me feel more Jewish than antisemitism.” He sighs. “I could comfortably have enjoyed expressing my identity through bagels and chopped liver, and liking the comedy of Billy Crystal. But something happened on the left, on the hard left, which made that very, very uncomfortable. And, you know, it’s just been very, very hard, distressing and strange. But I hope it will go away.” He’s ready to move on now. “I’m on another newspaper now and that’s fine, thanks.” But otherwise he’s a softer and more avuncular man than I’d expected. We talk about his mum’s death, in 2017, from a kidney infection following intestinal surgery. “I ended up in the hospital room with her on what turned out to be her last afternoon,” he says. “She asked, ‘Am I dying?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not looking great.’ “And I paused and said, ‘Should we discuss your last words? Because [George V’s supposed] Bugger Bognor will not do.’” Between them they decided on, “Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS, I’ll come back and bloody haunt you”. He’s proud of putting the line out in a statement that “made her death a news story. It felt like a successful sentence. It was quoted in the House of Commons and David Cameron had to respond.” Occasionally Rayner does ponder quitting the cushy culinary critic’s life and going back into covering “serious stuff” like politics and crime. But he loves food too much and he gets into enough online spats as it is. With fellow restaurant critic Grace Dent (Photo: BBC/Shine TV) “I once wrote about what had happened to the espresso,” he says. “Coffee culture was starting to treat the coffee bean as a fruit: giving it a light roast which made it very acidic. My espresso was starting to taste like lemon juice, and I complained.” He shakes his curls. “Somebody on Twitter threatened to punch me in the face for it. I mean, if you threaten physical violence against someone for writing about coffee, what do you do when the big stuff happens?” Today he begs me not to “be mean” to poor old Bentley’s for forgetting the eel, which he tells me is “lovely” with a “light cure” and “a slight tension” – the latter sounding like he could be describing the jazz music he performs with The Jay Rayner Quartet, in which his dusky-voiced wife Pat Gordon-Smith sings. I wouldn’t be mean to Bentley’s anyway. I’ve been charmed by my jaunty seafood cocktail and the seaweed butter on soda bread which Rayner praises in his book. Bentley’s Lobster Thermidor is one of the recipes he recreates for home kitchens in his book. While the restaurant’s chef simmers down big pans of crustacean heads and shells and mixes that up with their own Hollandaise, Rayner’s version calls for a tin of shop-bought bisque and a stovetop béchamel. Chuck gruyere, mustard and chives in with your lobster meat. Then, instead of pouring the mix back into the lobster shell, “where it runs into the crevices and you can’t get it out”, he advises ladling it lovingly on to toast, topping with cheese “until golden brown and bubbling”. In 30 years of writing about dining out, Rayner reckons he’s used every adjective going. But when it comes to Lobster Thermidor on toast he keeps it simple for me: “It’s just really good.” ‘Nights Out in the Kitchen’ by Jay Rayner is published by Fig Tree, £22