The best plate of the stuff I have eaten in years’: beetroot carpaccio. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer I am encouraged by various waiters to have their spicy wonton, which they all tell me is their speciality, and the sauce with that is a belter. Our waiter spoons a little of it over the taut-skinned dumplings, filled with a fine dice of unidentified but crunchy vegetables. It’s a deeply flavoured and inviting bowlful. I could do serious damage to a lot of those. I end up drinking the sauce. There is no dessert on the menu today, but at weekends they serve cherry pie. These have already been made in preparation for the rush. And yes, if I ask nicely, they will pop one in the oven. A note of warning: it is a dish with a sugared pastry crust. If you are livid about this being described as a pie because there isn’t pastry all the way round, please write to your MP. They’ve not got much on at the moment. Beneath that toffeed crust is what happens to fresh cherries cooked down in sugar syrup for a long time. On the side is a gravy boat of double cream. The dish is a tenner, and is designed to serve two, even if one of them is me. She and her colleague Jenny Stevens needed a follow up. “We were eager consumers of Indian food,” Rogers says. “We ate at the Diwana Bhel Poori House on Drummond Street and places like that. We thought it would be great to be able to cook this food ourselves.” They just needed someone to front the show. The second wife of the actor Saeed Jaffrey worked in the same department. “She was the one who suggested Madhur, Saeed’s first wife,” Rogers says. Edo in the centre of Belfast also has a smoky, live fire focus to its cooking courtesy of the wood burning Bertha oven at the heart of the kitchen. Much of chef Jonny Elliott’s menu is a robust take on classic tapas: there are croquetas, tortillas and padron peppers. But there are also salt room aged steaks and fish dishes sent for a spin through the intense heat of the apple and pear wood-burning Bertha ( edorestaurant.co.uk).

It led to a stint as a reporter for The One Show on BBC One, for whom I made more than 150 short reports. I came to love those which showed us exactly where our food comes from; not just the touchy-feely, niche artisan stuff of farmhouses and kitchen tables – although there was a bit of that – but the complex, large-scale business of freezing a pea crop within 45 minutes, or harvesting carrots in the middle of the night, when it is good and cold. I skimmed across a silvery Morecambe Bay at dawn’s low tide to fish for brown shrimps, and stood in a tank with a massive farmed halibut in my arms, while it was milked for its sperm. It was a varied life. A t the age of 16 I was the youngest child of an extremely successful and famous person [journalist and TV agony aunt Claire Rayner], and I was trying to find my own way in the world. My 16th was the most dramatic year of my adolescence, for a bunch of reasons. It was the year that I lost a lot of weight, and weight had been a preoccupation throughout my young life. It was the year I was thrown out of school for four months and plastered all over the national press. And it was the year that my closest friend was killed in a mountaineering accident. So it was a very, very dramatic year for me. The Apologist is a deliciously funny satire on the complexity and greed of international – and personal – politics, as well as a powerful paean to the diplomatic role of a well-made almond soufflé. I love the raucous variety of restaurants available today. I still quiver with excitement at being introduced to a culinary tradition I do not know. But there is a part of me deeply betrothed to the older things, done as well as they can be done. Bouchon Racine is all of that. If you feel my prior knowledge of this restaurant invalidates my opinion, fair enough. There will be another review along next week. Meanwhile, I’ll be the happy man with the ludicrous Mont Blanc and the spoon. They claim otherwise, of course. Readers like to present themselves as private arbiters of taste; as people interested in the good stuff. I'm sure they are. I'm sure they really do care whether the steak was served au point as requested or whether the soufflé had achieved a certain ineffable lightness. And yet, when I compare dinner to bodily fluids, the room to an S & M chamber in Neasden (only without the glamour or class), and the bill to an act of grand larceny, why, then the baying crowd is truly happy.

He was awarded the title Beard of the Year for 2011 by the Beard Liberation Front. [11] He plays piano with his jazz ensemble the Jay Rayner Quartet. [12] Books [ edit ] Fiction [ edit ] The Jewish Quarterly". The Jewish Quarterly). 16 March 2009. Archived from the original on 16 January 2013 . Retrieved 3 July 2012. Tofu is a blank canvas for the flavours it carries’: deep-fried tofu and pepper. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer But success is never simple. Before long pressures draw them away from the comforts of their roots. They find themselves cutting corners, taking risks and breaking the law. Finally Mal has to confront his life, his friendship with Solly and where their very different ambitions have led them.

In 1997 he won a Sony Radio Award for Papertalk, BBC Radio Five Live's magazine programme about the newspaper business, which he presented. He chairs a BBC Radio 4 programme called The Kitchen Cabinet. [9]

I am ashamed of my handiwork. Then again it does taste fabulous’: Saint-Emilion au chocolat. Photograph: Jay Rayner My family hates it, which just proves they’re ungrateful sods’: Jay’s version of the vermicelli pudding. Photograph: Jay Rayner There are cheerleading slogans on both the walls and the waiters’ aprons announcing its virtue, and a chalkboard comparing the nutritional value of eggs and tofu. (The tofu has zero cholesterol compared to the eggs, which are lousy with it. Go tofu!) But virtue is not a serving suggestion, however much some people may pretend it could be. Virtue can literally leave a nasty taste in the mouth, if the person doing the cooking isn’t up to the job. It’s in the nature of a column written for a newspaper supplement that some are tagged to events in the news, but many more have ranged far and wide across the edible landscape in a less time-fixed manner.

Neustatter, Angela (3 November 1996). "Is it time confessional man shut up?". The Independent. London. What really gives the volume its rolling swagger, though, is the outrageous text. “You’re buying White Heat because you want to cook well? Because you want to cook Michelin stars? Forget it,” the introduction begins. “Go and buy a saucepan. You want ideas, inspiration, a bit of Marco? Then maybe you’ll get something out of the book.” He was barely 30 and he was already talking about himself in the third person. One brooding White image is captioned: “At the end of the day it’s just food, isn’t it?” It’s food he’s willing to dismiss out of hand. “This is disgusting; it’s a horrible dish,” he says alongside a shot of his assiette of chocolate. “It’s vulgarity pure and simple. It’s a dish invented for suburbia; it should be called ‘chocolate suburbia’.” Hilariously, Harveys was located on a suburban shopping parade. He once announced that I was specifically not invited to his new restaurant in Cardiff’s Hotel Indigo Rayner was one of the panel of critics who made up the "enemy" on the daytime cookery show Eating with the Enemy, and performs a similar role on the UK version of MasterChef. He is the food reporter on the BBC magazine programme The One Show, and was on the panel of judges on the American programme Top Chef Masters. He appeared as a guest judge on the "UK" episode of The Final Table, season 1. Rayner, Jay (2 March 2003). "Tales my mother never told me". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 6 May 2010.

I have never hung around in Chinese restaurants for desserts and the two here – sesame rolls stuffed with red bean paste and the toffee-flavoured glutinous rice balls – do not detain me. Instead, we go next door to a branch of the ices chain Amorino. It does a good line in sorbets that also happen to be vegan. I don’t, however, end the evening feeling virtuous. I don’t glow with self-righteousness. I simply feel fed. News bites Hopkinson allows for additions, so I add a dollop of Dijon, a little grated parmesan and parsley’: onion tart. Photograph: Jay Rayner