Jay Rayner Interview

Jay Rayner needs very little introduction. He is best known as the restaurant critic for the Observer and as a judge on the UK’s Masterchef and Top Chef in the US. He has also written several novels, is a chair on the worlds top 50 restaurant awards and  maintains a strong presence online through his column in the Observer and also on Twitter (@jayrayner1). We caught up with him this week to chat about writing and the food scene in London.. Enjoy
Do you feel the line between traditional food writers and bloggers is becoming blurred?….
Not particularly. It’s all defined by quality of writing. The only thing that separates me from bloggers is….. am I better?. Because I’m obviously being paid for it (and rather well), and the only justification for that is if I’m better than the bloggers. And that’s still, I hope, the case most of the time. It is true that these days, anybody can start a blog. But that doesn’t mean they’re any good. What is interesting is that bloggers who are any good, quickly stop blogging and start getting paid for it. A classic example is Simon Majumdar, who I know very well. Simon was a classic Blogger (you can find his blog at doshermanos.co.uk), but he ain’t really anymore. If I stop being any better than the blogger you can get for free, I would lose my job. What invariably happens is that those with any quality end up with a bigger platform.
I have heard you discuss before traditional print journalists being afraid or wary of online media is that still the case?
I think that was a discussion for five years ago. If there is a person in mass media who hasn’t understood that we’ve moved on and that print is just a part of what we do, they will have missed the point completely, and it won’t be long until their professional world crashes.
With many London restaurants spending big bucks on online PR campaigns and the cult of celebrity in the food world, do you think that smaller restaurants have a chance to compete?
Quality wins out. Generally if restaurants are doing something good, people find them. That is one of the benefits of social media, people find something they like and start telling each other.
Sure they’re all hiring social media teams, it’s hilarious, but generally we find our way there anyway. If you look a Brixton village, which is very close to me, people started tweeting at me saying there were some good things down there, so I went and had a look, and lo and behold they were absolutely right. None of those places had social media teams. In the age of free available social media (which is what twitter is), people can find their way to quality.
One of the gifts of this recession is that while there are still some stupidly expensive launches going on, there are a lot of budget launches going on where younger cooks, you know, put it on in the bar, and everybody is the winner on that side.
So you think the recession has been a positive factor for the restaurant scene?
It has made people look very seriously at what they need to do to run a good restaurant and conclude that it doesn’t necessarily require a 1.5 million pound launch. I don’t know what the Pitt Cue boys spent to launch but I suspect there was a lot of change from a £100,000 ……quite significant change from that.
What restaurants do you find yourself going back to?
It’s a very complicated thing, because of what I do for a living; I don’t get to go back to restaurants, in ways that I would like to. I have some places that I think are bankers, The Wolseley still does it for me, if I want that kind of thing. I have a little Chinese on Greek street called Y Ming, which I’ve gone to for years. I love the Polpo boys (Polpo and Polpetto etc ), but it’s difficult for me because all the time I’m meant to be going somewhere new.
Actually, I do spend a lot of time in Brixton village. If it’s the weekend, with the kids, I will go down there and go to the Thai place, Kaosarn, or Honest Burgers and it’s a wonderful, wonderful, marvellous thing.
Do you find there is a marked difference between critiquing food in front of a camera than with the pen?
Yeah, I mean obviously TV comes with its own particular complications. There are always certain things you have to do, there are various stock shots. The knife going down, the putting the fork in and showing the particular ingredient you’re talking about. For example, when we’re doing Masterchef, the first shot they need is the food shot, so we’ll hold while they get that, and then they will want a shot of the knife and fork going in then they will want another shot of the knife and fork going down. If you’ve done it enough, you know that that’s going to happen, but then when it comes down to it and you’re actually tasting the food, you’re looking at it and trying to analyse what’s happening on the plate, and then it’s pretty similar.
Actually it’s possibly a little more forensic, because when I’m doing it for print, I’m reviewing a whole restaurant. People sometimes criticise what I put in my restaurant reviews because it’s not just about the food. I’m not simply a food reviewer, I’m a restaurant reviewer. Whereas, when I do Masterchef, or when I was doing Top Chef Masters in the US a couple of years ago, there it really was just the food. So actually, what I’m working my way around to saying is that on television it is rather more in depth.
Does the nature of the filming effect the quality of the food, ie. cold food etc?
No. We do know exactly how much time has passed (between the cooking and the presenting of food), it isn’t a mystery. The contestants, certainly on Masterchef, are in staggered starts so that they can serve to us within seconds of finishing. We are getting a count down from a link from the kitchen to the dining room saying how many minutes away it is. So although we don’t know what sort of traumas have been going on in there, we know when they’re late. We know when it’s not coming together, they don’t have to tell us.
Is that when they ask for the obligatory wrist watch tapping shot (ed. laughing!)
We refuse to do the wristwatch shot anymore. We’ve rebelled. We’ve all rebelled and said we won’t do the wristwatch shot. Most of us don’t really give a fuss. If they are five minutes late we really don’t care.
What do you think about Japanese food culture and what could London learn from it?
Tokyo is an amazing city. They have the most restaurants of any city in the world. It’s not all wonderful though, and at the very high end, there is a not even thinly veiled, anti-western racism there. You can’t even get into some of those restaurants if you’re a Gaijin, a foreigner, they won’t have it. So I would never want to see any of that kind of thing in Britain. I mean, it really is quite offensive the way that they work it.
Actually I am not even sure it would travel, a lot of what they do in Tokyo, the idea of the restaurant that does a very very narrow menu. We are getting a little bit of it. Pitt Cue for example or Burger & Lobster, well they only have 3 things on their menu and I quite like that, you can have a burger or you can have a lobster, and that’s it. Again Honest Burgers in Brixton just do burgers and there’s quite a lot to be said for it, if you’re going to keep your menu narrow, and just do very small sets of things, very very well.
What’s the biggest mistake a restaurant can make?
The biggest mistake is thinking they need a concept. Don’t have a concept, just work out what you want to cook, have tables and chairs and a menu. I live in fear of waiters coming up to my table to say ‘can I explain the concept of the menu to you?’. If it goes beyond, ‘you give me the list, I’ll specify the items on it that I want and you bring them to me’, I’m really not interested.
There’s a great Tolstoy line that all unhappy families are uniquely unhappy and all happy families are happy in the same way. The same applies to restaurants, all bad restaurants are uniquely bad, they have their own ways of being bad, and they find multifarious ways to be bad. Whereas all good restaurants are good in the same way, they make it look simple. We cook nice food, we bring it to you, we smile, we go. All bad restaurants fuck it up by complicating everything.
Thanks so much Jay.
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