‘It’s time to share a little more of my love for home cooking and the merry dance of appetite and technique that lies behind the dishes I make, to bring to the table more of the home cook that I have become.’
Following his bestselling Nights Out at Home, Jay Rayner returns to the kitchen to offer more inspiration to roll up your sleeves and reach for your favourite knife.
Nights Out in the Kitchen features an irresistible combination of recipes sparked by the dishes that Jay has fallen for during more than a quarter of a century as a restaurant critic, alongside 20 of his very own recipes; family favourites refined in his kitchen at home. From meatballs with braised spaghetti, to shaved fennel and lemon zest salad, tartiflette tart and slow cooked tandoori lamb shoulder.
There are accessible, home-cooked versions of Little Dumpling King’s haggis dumplings with crispy chilli oil, a take on Jacuzzi’s vitello tonnato croquettes, Claro’s squash three ways and a whole section dedicated to the joys of good things on toast, all created with the blessing, and often the help, of the chefs who inspired them.
As well as delicious recipes, Nights Out in the Kitchen is seasoned with stories which walk both sides of the ‘home’ and ‘away’ line in Jay’s life. From the problem with dinner parties and the route to a less painful Christmas lunch, through the lexicographical challenges facing a restaurant critic who wants to describe flavour without resorting to ‘mouth-watering’, ‘moist’ and ‘sumptuous’, to the burning question of whether, given the large number of wretchedly negative reviews he’s written, Jay might actually be a total scumbag.
Jay’s love of restaurants and his passion for great home cooking spill off every page of this beautifully written, warmly inspirational cookbook.
Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, musician, journalist and broadcaster. He is best known as restaurant critic, a job he did for the Observer from 1999 until 2025, and which he now continues for the Financial Times. As well as being a former Young Journalist of the Year and Restaurant Critic of the Year, in 2023 and again in 2025 he was named Critic of the Year in the UK Press Awards. He was also shortlisted for Cookery Writer of the Year at the 2026 Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards. Jay has published four novels and nine works of non-fiction, the most recent of which is Nights Out At Home, his first cookbook marking his 25 years as a restaurant critic which was a Sunday Times bestseller. He chairs BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and is a familiar judge on MasterChef. Jay regularly performs live, both in his one man shows and as the pianist in his jazz sextet. Nights Out in the Kitchen is his second cookbook.
