Enjoy Celebrity Radio’s Jay Rayner Interview 2016 UK Tour Food Critic Observer….
Renowned restaurant critic, Master Chef judge, One Show contributor and jazz pianist Jay Rayner is embarking on two UK-wide tours in 2016.
You can catch ‘A Night OF Food and Agony and My Dining Hell’ entertainingly combine Jay Rayner’s flair for storytelling and acerbic wit with a hidden talent as a musician.
As a restaurant critic for the Observer for over 15 years, if there is one thing Jay has learnt it is that his readers delight in reviews of bad restaurants.
In this accompaniment to his book of the same name, Rayner rants about his most hated restaurants fads, describes some of his most excruciating nights out and – just to balance things – reads from the worst reviews his own work has ever received.
Having already had a successful run in 2015, this is a hugely entertaining show in the company of the man recently voted the best food and drink journalist in Britain.
Enjoy an Exclusive interview with Alex Belfield & Jay Rayner…
Kicking off in Kingston in February and finishing in Swansea in April A Night Of Food And Agony, featuring Jay’s quartet, will essentially offer two shows for the price of one.
The first half of this evening is an hour-long version of My Dining Hell, where Jay talks about his time as a restaurant critic and one of Britain’s most well-known food experts, delighting the audience with anecdotes about the best and worst restaurants he’s ever eaten in.
Fresh from his knock-out show at legendary jazz venue Ronnie Scott’s, the second half of the evening brings Jay together with his ensemble of top flight musicians to perform.
Accompanied by the singer Pat Gordon Smith, bassist Robert Rickenberg and saxophonist Dave Lewis, Jay will play tunes from the Great American food and drink songbook.
There’ll be standards from the likes of Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, Blossom Dearie and Dave Frishberg, alongside anecdotes from his life being paid to eat out on somebody else’s dime, and stories about growing up with a mother, Claire Rayner, who was a sex advice columnist.
An award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster with a fine collection of floral shirts, Jay Rayner has written on everything from crime and politics, through cinema and theatre to the visual arts.
But despite his stint as sex columnist for Cosmopolitan, he is best known as restaurant critic for the Observer.
Jay Rayner is a former Young Journalist of the Year, Critic of the Year and Restaurant Critic of the Year, though not all in the same year. In the 2014 British Press Awards he was shortlisted for both Critic of the Year and Specialist Journalist of the Year.
Somehow he has also found time to write four novels and three works of non-fiction. His latest book is A Greedy Man In A Hungry World: How (almost) everything you thought you knew about food is wrong.
He chairs BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and is a regular on British television, where he is familiar as a judge on Masterchef and, since 2009, as the resident food expert on The One Show.
Interview recorded by Alex Belfield for Celebrity Radio 4th Feb 2016.
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