My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways to Have a Lousy Night Out

Jay Rayner

Jun 2012 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

I have been a restaurant critic for over a decade, written reviews of well over 700 establishments, and if there is one thing I have learned it is that people like reviews of bad restaurants. No, scratch that. They adore them, feast upon them like starving vultures who have spotted fly-blown carrion out in the bush.

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 souffle had achieved a certain ineffable lightness. And yet, when I compare dinner to bodily fluids, the room to an S & M chamber (only without the glamor or class), and the bill to an act of grand larceny, why, then the baying crowd is truly happy.

Don't believe me? Then why, presented with the chance to buy this ebook filled with accounts of twenty restaurants - their chefs, their owners, their poor benighted front of house staff - getting a complete stiffing courtesy of the sort of vitriolic bloody-curdling review which would make the victims call for their mothers, did you seize it with both hands?

About the author

Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer and broadcaster, best known as restaurant critic for the Observer. He is a former Critic of the Year and Restaurant Critic of the Year, and in the 2014 British Press Awards he was short-listed for both Critic of the Year and Specialist Journalist of the Year. In a recent survey of journalists and the public by the Press Gazette, Jay was voted the most influential food and drink journalist in Britain.