Nights Out At Home

A memoir-in-recipes inspired by Jay Rayner’s quarter of a century at the table, recreating dishes he has loved from high-end restaurants, high street grills, and everything in between

‘For the past twenty-five years, I have been reviewing restaurants across Britain and beyond, from the humblest of diners to the grandest of gastro-palaces. And throughout I’ve been taking the best ideas home with me to create glorious dishes for my own table. Now I get to share those recipes with you.’

In Nights Out at Home, Jay Rayner’s first cookbook, the award-winning writer and broadcaster gives us delicious, achievable recipes inspired by the restaurant creations that have stolen his heart over the decades, for you to cook in your own kitchen.

With sixty recipes that take their inspiration from restaurants dishes served across the UK and further afield, Nights Out at Home includes a cheat’s version of the Ivy’s famed crispy duck salad, the brown butter and sage flatbreads from Manchester’s Erst, miso-glazed aubergine from Freak Scene and instructions for making the cult tandoori lamb chops from the legendary Tayyabs in London’s Whitechapel; a recipe which has never before been written down.

It also features Jay’s MasterChef Critics-winning baked chocolate pudding with cherries, and his own personal take on the mighty Greggs Steak Bake.

Seasoned with stories from Jay’s life as a restaurant critic, and written with warmth, wit and the blessing, and often help, of the chefs themselves, Nights Out at Home is a celebration of good food and great eating experiences, filled with irresistible dishes to inspire all cooks.

Author Biography

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. He has published four novels and eight 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 regular on British television, where he is familiar as a judge on MasterChef. Jay regularly performs live, both in his one man shows and as the pianist in his jazz sextet.