Writing chops

Jay Rayner has been restaurant critic at the Observer for a quarter of a century. In Nights Out at Home he credits this to his writing ability rather than to the depth of his food knowledge (though his writing is at the prosaic end of his peer group, with none of the late A. A. Gill’s feline cleverness, Grace Dent’s originality, Giles Coren’s antic humour – he tends to steer clear of those writers’ small cruelties and larger bigotries, too – or the sheer appetite for experience that seemed to catapult Marina O’Loughlin, Gill’s successor at The Sunday Times, through the door of everywhere she wrote about).

What Rayner offers is a sort of ramped-up, and occasionally camped-up, Everybloke (a delicious sauce might be described as “banging”). He is in touch with the consumerist aspect of the gig (“My job is to tell readers how much pleasure their money can buy”) and he takes pains occasionally to refresh the brand with some gruff reportage about supply chains after Brexit. One detects a bullying undertone at times, which is maybe just another way of saying “strong opinions” – the guests he brings to restaurants under review are counselled to keep their impressions to themselves (“That said, if you say something witty and insightful … I will steal it and pass it off as my own”). He’s not­ably dismissive of dissenting takes on this or that dish. But his stuff is lucid and vivid – there’s a nice reference here to a “knuckle-crack of garlic” – and fuelled by a deep understanding of, and sometimes queasily intense love for, food.

Much of Nights Out at Home is devoted to anecdotage, but the real joy-sparking stems from the recipes. Rayner casts his net wide, from the Lyonnais traditions so expertly practised by Henry Harris at Bouchon Racine to the famous tandoori lamb chops at Tayyabs in Whitechapel; from a classically retro duck à l’orange, as served at the classically retro Otto’s, to a brilliant (and pretty easy) Cantonese side dish of wokked green beans with minced pork; from a “slightly risky, mildly problematic” tahdig (the gilded crust of rice that Iranian chefs learn to create using only the sense of smell) to that paragon of twenty-first-century British street food, the Greggs Steak Bake. There’s even a stab at the whimsical high-low mash-ups essayed by the “hipster” school of cuisine: charred hispi cabbage with “crushed Scampi Fries and Frazzles”. All seem thoroughly road-tested and intelligently adapted to work in a home kitchen.

The final chapter offers a sketch of Rayner’s domestic life. Cooking restaurant-style food at home isn’t just about spending twice as much on your chicken or upping the butter and salt in everything (though it helps); it’s about sometimes wanting to experience the pleasures of the table at their fullest while wearing our comfiest trousers, in a space where we feel safe and in the company of people we love.

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