Latest news with #TheKitchenCabinet
Irish Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
‘You get obsessed': Lunch at Chapter One with arguably one of the world's best food writers
On the back of the kitchen door in a well-known London restaurant – name redacted for reasons of plausible deniability and professional courtesy – there's a wall of shame: mugshots of restaurant critics taped up like a rogue's gallery, each one a warning to the kitchen brigade – if this face appears in the diningroom, start sweating. Among them is a photo of Tim Hayward , former restaurant critic at The Financial Times, with a handwritten caption: 'Fat Jeremy Corbyn .' To be clear, it isn't so much a political comment as an unflattering comparison in the beard-and-belly department. Jay Rayner is there too, labelled 'Obese d'Artagnan,' which feels marginally more flattering – assuming you want your swashbucklers portly and wielding a quill instead of a rapier. Hayward, arguably one of the world's best food writers (The Financial Times, The Guardian, seven books), tells it with the relish of a man who enjoys a well-cooked humiliation. A friend tipped him off – not out of concern, but with the glee of someone spotting a mate's face on a toilet wall. Staff had scrawled their own nicknames, some cruel, some cryptic. A makeshift intelligence op – less CIA, more MI5 run by kitchen porters – but it says a lot about how seriously restaurants take these people. He's also a regular panellist on The Kitchen Cabinet on BBC Radio 4 – the food show that cares more about why mayonnaise splits than celebrity chef grandstanding. Forensic, funny, rigorous – exactly Hayward's territory. When he's not writing or broadcasting, Hayward is baking bread. He co-owns Fitzbillies, the Cambridge institution that's been serving Chelsea buns and hearty breakfasts since 1920 – built, like his writing, on rigour, tradition and a firm disdain for frippery. READ MORE We're having lunch at Chapter One in Dublin, which isn't where Hayward would normally end up. He's a bacon sandwich man at heart – sliced pan, margarine and far too much bad bacon – but he's willing to be persuaded. We'll come back to what he thought of the meal later, because right now, somewhere between the second amuse-bouche and a triumphant Irish coffee, he's explaining how he got into food writing. Hayward didn't fall into food writing from a kitchen or a reporter's desk. He started out as a planner in advertising (not a copywriter, as many assume), in the age of expense accounts – long lunches, longer bills, minimal email. 'Throwing other people's money at the problem,' he says. He worked at what he calls 'crazy agencies, the ones with the beanbags and an aircraft hangar', where planners were 'quirky people they couldn't think of anywhere else to put'. Left-field and techie, he ended up head of new media, 'digital guru and all that sort of bollocks'. Advertising drilled into him what food writing often forgets: how to read a room, how to take apart an experience and see what actually matters. Before TikTok shrank attention spans to three seconds and X taught everyone to argue in headlines, Hayward had already found eGullet – the ferociously nerdy forum where restaurant openings were dissected like crime scenes and Anthony Bourdain was just another bloke trying to win an argument. eGullet was the feral frontier of early internet food culture – chefs, obsessives and insomniacs pulling apart new openings with microscopic glee. Mise en place, the 'napkin test' (folded, replaced, ignored) – nothing escaped scrutiny. 'It wasn't content,' he says. 'It was a community. You showed up with an opinion and you bloody well backed it.' Now that the restaurant critic work is behind him, the discipline hasn't softened – it's sharpened ... Same rigour, same methodical thinking – but aimed now at older, messier, more intricate things. Not the amuse-bouche – but the centuries of cookery, culture and craft behind it Writing about food came later. What came first – and has never left – was the obsession. Serious, never solemn. The career stayed stubbornly independent. 'I didn't read food writers,' he says. 'I read essays.' Hunter S Thompson, Pauline Kael, Clive James – stylists with teeth. You can hear it: arguments in every line, more interested in how restaurants work than whether the chicken was 'succulent'. Hayward didn't hustle his way into restaurant criticism – he slipped in sideways. Back then, food writing was a sealed ecosystem, run by a handful of old hacks who sounded exactly like the papers they worked for – same vowels, same prejudices. 'You didn't get in with a CV,' Hayward says. 'You got in because you were either married to the right person or sleeping with them.' In his case, it was simpler: the editor's wife read something he'd written and suggested he be given a shot. [ 'Bloodied but not bowed': Connemara's Misunderstood Heron food truck announces sudden closure Opens in new window ] That one shot became a second, then a third – not because he played the game, but because he didn't. Hayward wasn't posing as an authority. He was, by his own admission, a 'deep nerd' – a man who'd spent years on eGullet. When food pages still read like smoked salmon canapés, he turned up with essays that felt like real conversation. Not criticism – dissection. The same streak he learned in advertising still drives his work now, writing about food for the Financial Times. Two months of research for a single piece isn't unusual. No guesswork, no shortcuts. 'You never show up to a pitch without knowing everything,' he says – same rule now. A restaurant isn't just food: it's architecture, economics, sociology, marketing and bad decisions. 'The thing is,' he grins, 'you get obsessed.' Tim Hayward. Photograph: Alan Betson Hayward has aphantasia – not a flaw, just a different circuit – which means he can't summon mental images. No mind's eye. No internal slide show. So when he writes about food, he doesn't recall how it looked – he remembers how it behaved, how it felt. Over lunch at Chapter One, it's obvious how that plays out. He picks up on the amuse-bouche – a gel-topped dome concealing truffle – and notes how many visual tricks are at work to sell depth and richness. That old photographer's muscle memory – constantly scanning, clocking tiny mechanical details – never left him. Wired to a mind that deals only in facts, Hayward didn't guess, embellish or decorate. When he wrote about a meal, the description was brutally precise. It wasn't showing off – just the way his brain worked. [ Chob Thai restaurant, Clontarf: The most memorable thing here is the bill Opens in new window ] Restaurant reviewing, for him, was ruthlessly efficient. No notepads, no dictaphones – just a few quick photos to lock in the details. It wasn't nostalgia: it was data collection. Advertising had wired him differently – know how a spreadsheet works, how a whiteboard builds a campaign – and apply the same precision everywhere else. The discipline extended beyond the meal: write the column before the evening cooled, crash it out on the train, set a fake deadline. This gave him time to F&F – finish and file, time to reread, polish, sharpen. No overthinking. No indulgence. One meal, one mind, one strike. Of course, Hayward booked himself in for dinner at that London restaurant. The maître d' clocked him before he sat down – someone had clearly memorised the watch list. The staff had been briefed. At the end of the meal, Hayward offered his compliments. The food was very, very good, he said. Then, smiling just enough to make it sting, added, 'Though I do have one question ... do I really look like fat Jeremy Corbyn?' The staff blanched, braced for impact – then exhaled when the glowing review landed. Chances are, that photo's still on the door. As for the Chapter One meal? 'Yeah, that was good,' he said, with the calm detachment of a man weighing up a bevelled blade. No fireworks. No ego. Just clever cooking, by people who knew when to stop. The kind of place he might not usually seek out – but one he'd happily return to. Now that the restaurant critic work is behind him, the discipline hasn't softened – it's sharpened. Food writing is a bigger machine: months of research, towers of books, every piece pinned across an imaginary whiteboard in his head. Same rigour, same methodical thinking – but aimed now at older, messier, more intricate things. Not the amuse-bouche – but the centuries of cookery, culture and craft behind it. Food writing hasn't just evolved – it's mutated, warped by the image-first logic of social media. 'It's like a virus that escaped from the hospital,' he says. It's no longer about knowledge or writing skill. What matters is what grabs the algorithm's attention. It's about manufacturing the perfect scroll-stopping moment – a hit of clickbait dressed up as content – and hijacking a thumb mid-scroll. Tim Hayward: 'Why would you want a knife you're afraid to use?'. Photograph: Alan Betson He's not sneering. He's fascinated – as an early adopter always is. He tells the story of a guy with a serious YouTube following – not a critic, not a chef, just a camera and an audience – who visited a small restaurant, filmed it and filled every seat. No review, no Michelin nod, just raw digital gravity. The camera isn't reporting on the business now – it is the business. His next appearance – at the Ballymaloe Festival of Food, in conversation with Fingal Ferguson – feels like stepping off the scroll and into the forge. There, he'll be talking about work that lasts, not work that trends. When Hayward talks about knives, it's not about collection – it's about craft. 'Why would you want a knife you're afraid to use?' he says. The one that anchored his book Knife wasn't rare or precious – just his grandmother's bread knife. Not valuable, not Japanese, not especially sharp. But it worked. It had purpose. The thing that stuck with him was feel. People say 'balance,' but that's not quite it. There's no good English word for it – just something you recognise the second it's in your hand. While everyone else chased folded steel and carbon content, Hayward went the other way – into sheds and smithies, listening to people who made knives to be used, not admired. During the Knife photo shoot, £25,000 (€29,400) worth of Japanese blades stayed locked in a safe. It was the cheap, battered ones that had stories. That's what he'll be talking about at Ballymaloe – not reverence, not collecting, but purpose. Why the best knife isn't the fanciest – it's the one that feels right. Where food writing goes next, Hayward thinks, won't be with the TikTok millionaires. 'Those deals last a year,' he says. Influence burns fast and leaves nothing. What's coming back is the serious stuff – the methodical minds, the researchers. The ones who care about the why, not just the what. Not just the ingredients on the plate, but how it got there, and why it matters. 'It'll come back to the geeks,' he says. Not because it's fashionable – but because it's the only thing left when the noise burns out. The ones who still think about food the way a real craftsman thinks about a knife – not something to flash around, but something you trust with your life. And Hayward is sharpening his. Tim Hayward will be speaking at the Ballymaloe Festival of Food , which runs from May 16th-18th.
Irish Examiner
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
I went for lunch with legendary food critic Jay Raynor — here's what I learned
In London's Chinatown, on a street packed with restaurants, no one pays any attention to Jay Rayner. We stride down Gerrard Street in the midday sun, and enter a lively little Chinese joint called Four Seasons, which majors in duck. Rayner may be a regular, but no one seems to know who he is — neither staff nor diners — and, if they do, they don't care. His review may be stuck on the wall, but the restaurant critic of the Observer for 25 years, and newly of the Financial Times, barely receives a second glance. 'The hilarious thing is I come here quite a lot,' he explains. 'There's one [staff member] who occasionally [recognises me]. My review is by the door on the way in, and they couldn't give a toss. I think what they did was that, weirdly, rather than go and buy a copy of the paper, they printed it out from the net and laminated it without [my] picture. 'I finally reviewed it in February of 2020, when all the stuff out of Wuhan was causing a backlash against Chinese restaurants, and Chinatown was suffering. And so I said, 'well, as a mark of solidarity I'm going to go to the one I really like', I mean, in reality, all of the restaurants then closed.' Four Seasons is close to the studio where Jay records his award-winning BBC Radio 4 show, The Kitchen Cabinet, and he has picked it for our interview. I'd suggested we meet over lunch, because, frankly, who would choose Zoom over the chance to break bread with a professional eater of this stature? Jay comes here often to dine alone, fuelling up for an evening's show. 'They are complicated records, so you don't want to do them hungry,' he insists. 'And you're not going to get to eat dinner properly. I'm about to manage a panel and an audience of about 700 people, and there are a lot of things going on in my head, so an hour by myself with some Cantonese duck, and then a copy of the New Yorker, and it's good.' I ask him to order for us, and he falters. 'It's a very interesting thing because I normally come here alone. I'm trying to work out what's an appropriate amount of food for two. Are you hungry?' 'Always,' I reassure him, before he asks if I'm happy to ignore starters. Decisively, he chooses a half duck, boneless, half char siu, king prawns in salted egg yolk, deep-fried crispy beef ('just for a nostalgic thing'), stir-fried morning glory, and sweet and sour eggplant. We agree to skip rice and happily tuck into jasmine tea. I confess that my chopstick skills are below par. 'You'll get no judgment from this side of the table if you drop your food down your front, you know that?' he offers helpfully as I self-consciously wrangle slippery morning glory into my mouth. After 25 years with the Observer, restaurant critic and broadcaster Jay Rayner is now working for the Financial Times. He also recently released his first cookbook: Nights Out at Home. Picture: Andrew Dunsmore Before our meeting, I've been devouring his new book, Nights Out at Home, his first cookbook, and one that sees him recreate 60 recipes inspired by restaurant dishes he's eaten out professionally. I'm unlikely to cook anything from it — even the memorable flatbread that I scoffed in the edgy winebar Erst in Manchester, last year — but this is a storybook, too, and doesn't need to be cooked from to be of value. 'How far have you gotten?' he asks, before I whip out the dog-eared hardback from my bag. 'You've done all right!' he exclaims, clearly pleased that I've been doing my homework. 'I'm really enjoying it,' I confess, which prompts a sincere thank you. 'It's been like a primer on having lunch with Jay. Like a guide on how to eat with you before meeting you.' Sitting across the table from me, the man I know from his TV appearances as a judge on MasterChef, from his radio show, and from his columns, is exactly as I'd imagined him: earnest, sharp, witty. But is this real Jay or showbiz Jay? 'I have this thing that [my book] is me but it is a version of me. You play up to the cameras a little bit. 'Because you can't be half-hearted in print, you know, a lot of it really is me but there are bits of it which are slightly exaggerated. But you can decide by the end of lunch — can't you.' He surprises me by admitting his delight that the Irish Examiner has dispatched someone to interview him. 'I go to the North a lot. An awful lot. So I've been twice this month, weirdly. I mean I've been to Ireland loads of times but I've never really engaged with the food world over there like I should, which is a confession. 'It's one of the reasons I'm going to Ballymaloe because I've never been, I kind of thought 'that's a gap, yeah, you should go'. Plus, it sounds like a laugh.' I recall reading somewhere that the duck we are eating is from Silverhill Farm in Cavan. Is that right, I ask? 'I don't think anybody necessarily comes to Chinatown and asks about the sourcing of ingredients,' he grins. He's never been to China and isn't really interested in visiting. 'I mean, probably when I was a younger man. That kind of intrepid travel doesn't interest me now.' Jay Rayner recently released his first cookbook: Nights Out at Home. Picture: Andrew Dunsmore At one point in his early career as a general features writer, an editor was going to send him to Rwanda. 'And then he wanted to send me to the Vietnamese Lao border to chase down a mythical missing antelope or something. Well, I refused to do Rwanda. I refused Kurdistan, too, because they were both in the middle of wars and my partner had not signed up for [a relationship with] a war correspondent. 'But I didn't really have the hunger to travel the way some people do, and I don't know if that's a character failing on my part.' His reflectiveness is unexpected, and at one point, he interrupts himself to apologise for not speaking in quotable sentences. 'One of the great things about restaurants, and I said this in the book, is that you travel the world. You're going to get a different version [of a dish], and maybe it's not as you would find at point of origin. But it's interesting.' I remark that he is carefully side-stepping the word 'authentic'. 'How does 'authentic' help us? Take the British Chinese takeaway tradition. They are a thing in themselves. So, if all you're trying to do is benchmark food against some notion of truth and honesty, you're not going to get very far. 'This [pointing to the crispy chilli beef] is the one thing I've ordered which is pretty much out of the British take-away playbook.' It is delicious, I note. 'Delicious,' he chimes. 'I have no idea where there's anything like it. Or maybe there is. I'd need to ask [Chinese food expert] Fuchsia Dunlop. 'Two things can be true at the same time: one which is the food you're eating in a particular restaurant is great, and that there is another version of it, which is fundamentally different, at the point of origin at the place that inspired it.' Food writer Simon Hopkinson is the person who alerted Jay to Four Seasons' excellence. 'He swears that the Chinese are the best at roasting duck and this is the best in London. I do not know whether that's true. Because I haven't eaten in them all. There's a culture of sort of 'stamp collecting' now. Where's the best? What's the best? Well, that sounds exhausting. Just find something that's good and you like. Despite 25 years of restaurant reviews, he's ambivalent about Michelin stars. 'I always found it slightly weird that the people of Manchester have been so upset, as if [not] having a Michelin starred restaurant said something about them. It doesn't. 'And I stick to one particular line, which is the quality of a city is not marked by the number of gastro palaces it has, but by the number of bistros there. And I want to visit the city with lots of nice bistros I can eat in every night, not the place with a number of Michelin starred restaurants I could eat in once a year.' I ask him about his 2009 book, The Man Who Ate the World, which saw him dine at the world's finest restaurants. 'It was a weird idea. I sometimes wonder where the idea came from. There was a point to it journalistically, which was that it was slightly ahead of its time. 'It identified the globalisation of luxury, which has become a massive, massive thing. But it only works if you find the right tone. Tone is everything. You know, people will say, well, I'd love your job, all that eating. It's not an eating job — it's a writing job. And if you get the tone wrong ... 'I can think of various bloggers and whatever online. You read their writing, and you think, I never want to meet you and I never want to eat with you. I never want to spend time with you. This is miserable. And those Instagram reels? I've got nothing against it. I mean, I'm all over Instagram. 'There's a lot of really good stuff, but there's a particular kind of luxe restaurant reel. 'Come with me as we 'nah nah nah nah'. The voiceover. Aagh!' I agree, lamenting the dearth of knowledge. 'I don't really have a problem with that because if you start having a problem with people who aren't experts on social media, then you've got a problem with the weather. It's a fact of life. 'What matters is how it's presented. I mean, there are some good people who are sources of great information and there are some that aren't. That's all I care about. Is this interesting? Does it work? Despite what you don't know.' He believes that there's been a knee-jerk reaction to content creators. 'I think two things. One: a lot of it may be rubbish, but then a lot of stuff put out by mainstream media is rubbish. The other point that follows — the idea that people who work for newspapers and magazines are all universally informed and know their stuff — is not true. 'I remember one moment. It was a paper I was working for, and I came downstairs and I said to my wife, 'I read the newspaper so that the people who are cleverer than me and better informed than me can tell me what's going on in the world. The problem is I know all these people and they're neither'.' He is quick to add he is very happy at the Financial Times, while admitting that it sounds like pandering. 'I am somewhat besotted with my new home because I've been reading the FT for a good few years before I joined it. And the seriousness of the reporting and the journalism, and the informed opinion is beguiling. It's top class. 'When you look at it, there's a kind of discord dialogue at the moment, with people going. 'Oh, food media is dying. Nobody's taking it seriously.' And I'm always a bit suspicious of those things because it suggests there was a golden age. And I'm not sure when that golden age is meant to have been. There have only been restaurant critics in the British press since 1986, it's not something with massive longevity. '[People say] nobody takes it seriously anymore. When was the point it was really taken seriously? 'Or is it just that there were certain writers that you loved? So, obviously, Marina O'Loughlin and Matthew Fort wrote brilliant reviews, but I wonder whether they were that more serious than the rest of us.' He's already working on a follow-up to Nights Out at Home, and one of the essays is about how you write about food. 'I've been pointing out that really the language that we have — crispy, sour, salty, sweet, chewy, whatever — doesn't get us very far. It doesn't get us very far in describing the experience you've had, and, really, it's the least useful part of your armoury.' Jay seems to enjoy the fact that no one in Four Seasons restaurant cares a hoot about who he is — funnily, when we walk to the Trafalgar St James hotel for his photo shoot, there's a marked difference in the public's reaction and several couples in the hotel spot him and surreptitiously snap photos — though he clearly cares about his reputation. 'Competition is an important thing. People ask, are you in competition [with other restaurant critics]? 'On the one hand, no, I do my own thing, but on the other hand, I absolutely want people to think I've written a better review that week than whoever else is writing. And if you lose that, you should quit, and I don't think I've lost it.' Jay Rayner is taking part in the Ballymaloe Festival of Food, May 16-18. He hosts a cookery demo on Saturday May 17, and is in conversation on Sunday May 18. For tickets: Special thanks to The Trafalgar St James London, Curio Collection by Hilton, where Jay was photographed. Read More Restaurant review: A fine taste of home for Indian diaspora in Cork
