Following years as a self-confessed foodie, as well as being the Food Editor for NottinghamLIVE, the name Jay Rayner is one well known to me. I have read many great reviews from the renowned restaurant critic, and many which would scare the living daylights out of me should I ever own a restaurant and see the great man appear.
The thought of carrying plates of food through those hefty doors on MasterChef is also a recurring nightmare, never mind thinking one Jay Rayner might be sat waiting to be fed on the other side of them. Now however, is my chance to see Mr Rayner without the nerves kicking in, as his show A Night OF Food and Agony which entertainingly combines his flair for storytelling and acerbic wit with a hitherto hidden talent as a musician is visiting Nottingham Playhouse on 2nd April.
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 novelsand 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.
For tickets visit: www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk or call 0115 9419419
By Tanya Raybould
@tanyalouiseray
