An Intimate Evening with Jay Rayner: Nights Out in the Kitchen

Join us for an intimate evening in the bookshop with beloved restaurant critic Jay Rayner to celebrate his new book: Nights Out in the Kitchen.

In his bestselling cookbook Nights Out At Home, Jay Rayner reflected on his quarter-century as a restaurant critic and outed himself as not only a professional eater, but someone with a profound understanding of how the very best meals are crafted.

Now, in Nights Out in the Kitchen, readers will encounter Jay in his kitchen, with another 40 cleverly reverse-engineered recipes, taking inspiration from restaurants and chefs across the UK, alongside 20 of his very own recipes, including meatballs with braised spaghetti, shaved fennel and lemon zest salad, tartiflette tart and slow cooked tandoori lamb shoulder.

Jay's warmth and love of the restaurant industry and of great home cooking spills off every page of this beautifully written and inspiring cookbook.

Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, musician, journalist and broadcaster. He has written on everything from crime and politics, through cinema and theatre to the visual arts, but 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.