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. Read on sofas and poured over in kitchens, it offered inspiration and permission to roll up our sleeves and start cooking our favourite restaurant dishes at home.

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.

With each dish, we’ll get to peek behind Jay’s kitchen door to discover how he cooks these family favourites, and the dynamic mix of restaurants, chefs and cookbooks – as well as Jay’s own creative flair – that inspired them. Including 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, Nights Out in the Kitchen is also 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 at home, to the lexicographical challenges facing a food 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 warmth and love of the restaurant industry and of great home cooking spills off every page of this beautifully written and inspiring cookbook. (Includes colour inset illustrations)

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.