Jay Rayner is tearing into a salad. Not on the page – in one of his famously scathing restaurant reviews – but on the plate before him. “Where’s the…? Hang on…? I ordered the smoked eel salad, didn’t I?!” He forks, frustrated, through the lettuce to find “potatoes, tomatoes, olives, some little deviled eggs which do look delightful, but I think they’ve forgotten to put the eel in here”.
He’s laughing now, salt and pepper curls jiggling in syncopation with the jowls. “Oh, this is funny. I’ve brought you to one of my favourite restaurants – a place where I spend my own money – and this happens. I mean, I don’t want to be ridiculously picky but…” he summons a waiter. “Ummm? The smoked eel?” Sir? “Where is it?”
We’re at Bentley’s, a discretely excellent little seafood place tucked into Swallow Street, just around the corner from London’s Piccadilly Circus. Arriving first, I felt a static charge go through the staff as I gave our booking name as “Rayner” and was shown to a bar stool beside my interviewee’s regular perch. Nicknamed “Acid Rayner” after his first appearance on MasterChef in 2007, Rayner was a restaurant critic at the Observer for 28 years until moving to the Financial Times in 2025 (of which more later). I’d interviewed Vinnie Jones two weeks earlier and more friends asked if I was nervous about hanging out with the restaurant critic than with the supposed hardman actor and ex-footballer.
