Last time food critic Jay Rayner visited Erst in Manchester he hailed it “one of the best meals of the year” in his weekly column for The Observer. Just over a year later, as he tears into a beef fat flatbread, does this still stand?
“This is outrageous, but in a good way,” he says, as the kitchen staff breathe a collective sigh of relief. As many restaurateurs will know, a glowing review from Rayner can make all the difference.
Just last month, a restaurant in Cardiff received thousands of bookings following the critic's write-up, in which he described the ramen shop as “inventive, geeky and superb”. A similar effect has been felt in Manchester, where he’s dished out plenty of compliments over the years - most recently for The Alan, Climat and The Black Friar.
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A frequent visitor to the city, his admiration for Manchester’s food scene is well documented, but on this occasion he’s here to record the latest instalment of his BBC Radio 4 culinary panel show, The Kitchen Cabinet. Although, he’ll be back again in just a few weeks, behind the ivories, as The Jay Rayner Sextet takes to the stage at the Albert Hall.
“We put my name on it because it’s my fault, so I take full responsibility,” he offers. The night will feature performances of iconic tunes from jazz greats like Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver and Dexter Gordon, seasoned with stories from Jay’s life in food and journalism, as well as insights from growing up with his mother, the well-known agony aunt and sex columnist, the late Claire Rayner.
“I won’t spoil it for you, but there’s an anecdote about getting my parents ashes into the urns on the stage of the production of Fiddler on the Roof - and that leads us into playing Sunrise, Sunset from that show,” he smiles.
Last year, the band celebrated ten years of gigging by expanding its ranks to six, and began performing a new repertoire of arrangements celebrating 80s chart hits from Sade, Matt Bianco and Everything But The Girl. “As we reached that milestone I said to the singer who I sleep with every night - because she is my wife of 30 years - we need to do something, we need to move on.
“I’ve long been fascinated by this repertoire of music, which doesn’t just have jazz inflections, but is jazz. I wanted to explore it, not as a cover band, but in this tradition in jazz of taking standards and doing them your way. So we take a whole bunch of brilliant bangers from the 80s, treat them like they're songs from the great American songbook and celebrate the jazz in them.”
While it might seem pretty straightforward, there’s the not-so-small issue of getting Jay’s piano into the hall. After striking up a relationship with Manchester piano showroom C Bechstein Centre on his last visit, he's kindly been lent one for the evening - though the logistics are still a minefield.
“It's actually a ridiculous thing to do because Albert Hall is a very complicated venue. I don't play keyboard, I play piano, and getting a piano up there - a good one - will be a challenge. (Bechstein) are supplying one of their concert pianos, which costs as much as an upright piano would cost to buy.”
After the show, I wonder if he might head downstairs to Albert Schloss for a nightcap. In a review from 2018, he famously said he wanted to hate the Bavarian-style bar and restaurant, but loved it - the food could have been phoned in, “but was the star of the show”. From the sounds of it, he still has warm feelings about the Manchester-born beer hall.
“I love Albert Schloss and what they do,” he happily admits. “The food doesn’t need to be nearly as good as it is.”
Having reviewed restaurants for 24 years, you might think he would be over it by now, though the esteemed journalist and food writer is still enamoured. “I'm constantly getting emails from people saying ‘I like food, I'd like your job’, and I think well yes, of course you do - but my response is usually 'learn to write, it's a writing job, not an eating job'.
“There's a brilliant line by Brian Hanrahan, who was a great BBC journalist, and in the intro to his memoirs it says something along the lines of, ‘as a journalist, you're paid to report what you see and hear, and as a result, you see and hear some pretty extraordinary things', and that still applies.
“The next bit, the writing, the reporting, the communication of that - you have to keep working on. You also have to be slightly sociopathic. Because you want to get people to talk to you, and the best way is to get them to like you, or at the very least comfortable with you, so it's a bit of a mind game.”
His word counts for a lot too. While he’s lavished praise on many establishments over the years, he’s also brought some down a peg or two. However, it’s clear he thinks long and hard about the impact of his reviews, whether good or bad.
“When it comes to reviews, do not be casual about it,” he warns. “Be absolutely clear that what you're saying - even if it doesn't feel fair to them - is right. The one thing that has changed post-Covid is this feeling that smaller places are not fair game, if they’re small and failing leave them to be small and failing.
“But then you have to put yourself in the diners' shoes too. If you've been to a restaurant and it's shocking and they’re charging you money, you should say something. Sometimes people ask how I get normal service given my face is slapped all over TV and in newspapers, but even if I book under a pseudonym, pay my own way, some places are still shocking.
“Restaurants are like theatre, they have their scripts, they have their sets and actors, they can't change any of that just as I arrive, it's because they were awful and always were, regardless of me being there. There are some places that have been so bad I've just not written about them, left them to die quietly all by themselves.
"I've always said I don't think food critics kill restaurants, they're the pallbearers who carry out the coffin or doctors who diagnose the disease."
During the pandemic Rayner wrote a piece explaining he wouldn’t be writing negative restaurant reviews for a while, as ‘kicking anyone in this business at the moment would be the act of an a***hole’. However, just over a year later, he felt compelled to set the record straight on the plush London hotel charging £16 for a lacklustre bread basket.
The critic eviscerated The Dorchester’s rooftop restaurant, Polo Lounge, branding the offering “cack-handed food that’s a gross insult to good taste, manners and commercial decency.” While this was seen as fair game, some reviews don't go down as well.
Casting his mind back to 2013 and his infamous review of Aidan Byrne's Manchester House, which he described as "maddingly overbearing", he recalls Mancunians being up in arms over his take. While he praised Byrne's "brilliant cooking", his description of the £3 million restaurant as "just so damn Manchester", and the city's "tendency to tip into overkill", certainly ruffled some feathers. "I still don't think some people have forgiven me," he says, raising his eyebrows.
That said, and despite a few less-than-positive reviews here and there, the critic has also been one of Manchester's most prominent advocates. "Manchester’s developed apace and one of the reasons I’ve seen in action is an interesting approach to urban development," he explains. Somebody comes along and decides a block is right for redevelopment or for apartments and offices, but at a ground level they need a restaurant because that makes it an attraction - and Manchester is very good at that.
"Manchester also has a very strong set of local media and likes its food and drink, it used to be a drinking city first and everything was driven by booze and then food came afterwards."
He uses his fingers to reel of some of his favourite Manchester restaurants, from Erst and Climat to Albert Schloss - when he's got his music hat and beer goggles on - as well as Pho Cue - "not only because of the name", and newcomer, Peace Garden - "I definitely like to go back there and give that menu a shakedown," he laughs.
Though, for all the thriving independent establishments, he notes what he calls Manchester's "frothy top". As he says, "There is still an element to this town though, which was summed up by the wife of a footballer, which is about being seen and looked at. There is an Ivy Asia with a Geisha room, there are restaurants with massive trees in the middle because that’s what some people want. If you want that kind of thing, that’s still available, but it is falling away."
On Michelin stars, he doesn't think Manchester needs to covet them so much. "I have to say, that has always baffled me, this sense that a city hasn’t got something to be proud of unless it has a Michelin-starred restaurant - it’s always left me cold," he says, almost shivering.
"I’m not commenting on Mana as I haven't been, but this whole thing of a star for Manchester, what does it really say about your city? Nothing really, because the strength of a gastro-culture is not made by one restaurant, it’s made by 15 bistros. A city with 15 bistros you really want to go to is so much more interesting than one with one restaurant where they’ve learnt to iron the napkins and blow air into their vegetable foam."
Jazz Up The '80s with The Jay Rayner Sextet will be performed at Albert Hall on Thursday, March 16.
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