Jay Rayner on 25 years of restaurant reviewing and the inspiration behind his first cookbook

"I have for a very long time been taking my favourite dish ideas home from restaurants to see if I can make them – reverse engineering it, seeing if I could unpick it. I thought actually that would be fun, 60 recipes inspired by my favourite dishes, with the blessing of all the chefs involved and a lot of stories from my life as a restaurant critic, essays about the business of eating out."

With his critical career spanning over two decades, the book draws together recipes from all over the world, as well as historical moments.

"Because I started in '99, I've been reading critics going back to the 80s. You know, there are references here to what's going on in the 70s. So, I think it is a bit of a history of eating out both in the UK and elsewhere, because some of the dishes that have inspired the recipes in this book are from restaurants in the States and France and all over the shop."

Tracking down his favourite recipes involved delving into many years' worth of old columns.

"One of the absolutely brilliant things I discovered was that my digital hoarding had not been in vain. Having gone through a series of different desktops, but uploading all of my folders, I discovered that I had almost 98 per cent of my raw copy in folders, in date order, that I could search.

"So, there's a particular section in there on charred hispi cabbage, which we all know is a thing now. I put the word 'hispi' into the search function and there was an enormous stream taking me back to my very first reference to charred hispi cabbage, which was something like 2013."

The process of selecting and creating the recipes

Jay made a concerted effort to not include "dishes from big-ticket restaurants."

"You know, the big-name chefs: Raymond Blanc, Marcus Wareing, Angela Hartnett. They all have their own cookbooks. You do not need me to reverse engineer a dish for which the recipe is already available. I thought it would be more interesting if the main recipes – there are some exceptions – were lesser known, smaller, a little more obscure."

He also made sure that these were the types of recipes that the general home cook could replicate at home.

"You can have a plate with a lovely duck breast, great jus, some cavolo nero and a fondant potato. That's the coming together of six chefs on different sections. There's no point giving a recipe for that. If you're going to do something like a Malaysian chicken curry or stuffed artichoke dish, you need to find a way to make them accessible to people.

"Some of them were just a lot of fun. Jeremy Lee, the great chef of Quo Vardis, had a delightful smoked eel sandwich on his menu at Quo. What I offer is a smoked mackerel sandwich."

From Quo Vardis, to recipes inspired by Greggs and McDonald's, Jay Rayner has no qualms about including high street classics.

"I want to make the point that this is a book of recipes from quite high-end to, well, Greggs. There are challenges with those things. It took me a while to realise that it's all about deep cold and great heat when you're working with puff pastry – shop-bought puff pastry, because nobody wants to make it at home. It has to be absolutely as cold as possible before it hits the very hot oven tray. And then you will not have a soggy bottom."

He also made the decision to not fill it with shiny photos of all the dishes.

"I became increasingly suspicious that food photography is so sophisticated that they can be a bit of an invitation to fail. Your food, what you produce, will never look as good as the picture in the book. But, I do recognise that people like having some kind of visual reference."

Instead, he offers images he took of the dishes using an iPhone.

"There is a QR code that leads to a new section of my website, which has photographs of every single dish as I cooked them. You can go and see them – jayrayner.co.uk – without buying the book. They won't tell you how to cook them, though."

On the theatrics of restaurant reviewing

How does he deal with the staff recognising him as soon as he walks into the restaurant?

"Restaurants are like theatre. In theatre, the script has been written, the cast has been chosen, they've rehearsed, the sets have been built, and it doesn't matter who's sitting in the audience – that's the production. With a restaurant, the ingredients have been bought, the staff have been trained, the recipes have been written.

"I don't give anybody any warning that I'm coming. I book under a pseudonym – don't ask me what it is – and then I turn up. Now, they can try to give me a different experience, but I'm quite wise to that stuff.

"If they attempt to send me things I didn't order, they'll go back. If they attempt to increase the size of my portion, I will spot it. If they attempt to give me preferential service, I will see it. I've had situations where I've been served or they've attempted to serve me before the table that was already seated when I got there, at which point I'll call it and say, 'I think you ought to attend to them first.'

"I'm paying attention to what's going on in the entire restaurant. A good restaurant is a machine that functions through various gears and cogs. You can see when it stops functioning and you can see when it's running well."

Does he think he will be doing it for another 25 years?

"No, I don't. I think that would be injurious to me. I intend still to be writing, but I think it's unlikely. Let's put it that way."

Listen to the full episode then discover the Good Food podcast archive for more culinary adventures.