Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 23 May
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location
Sofitel Melbourne on Collins, West Tower Suite
Sofitel Melbourne on Collins (West Tower Suite), 25 Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000
Get directions
He’s described a Gefilte fish dish as so leaden it could ‘pull planets out of alignment’ and wondered if a mussel shell contained ‘the retracted scrotum of a hairless cat’ – there is truly only one Jay Rayner.
The loved and feared London-based food critic has won a huge following in Britain thanks to his sometimes curmudgeonly, sometimes rapturous, usually hilarious and always entertaining restaurant reviews for the Observer. He’s been outspoken, too, on many food-related issues – from the suspicious elements of the organic movement to the scourge of ‘superfoods’.
In this intimate meal and conversation with Michael Williams, Jay will discuss his book, My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways to Have a Lousy Night Out, and share tales from his years eating out across the world.
Featuring
Jay Rayner
Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster with a fine collection of floral shirts. He has written on everything from crime and politics, through cinema and theatre to the visual arts, but is best known as restaurant critic for the Observer.
For a while, he was a sex columnist for Cosmopolitan; he also once got himself completely waxed in the name of journalism. He only mentions this because it hurt.
Jay is a former Young Journalist of the Year, Critic of the Year and Restaurant Critic of the Year, though not all in the same year. In the 2014 British Press Awards he was shortlisted for both Critic of the Year and Specialist Journalist of the Year.
Somehow, he has also found time to write four novels and five works of non-fiction. Following the success of his 2013 book A Greedy Man in a Hungry World: How (almost) everything you thought you knew about food is wrong, his most recent book is The Ten (Food) Commandments.
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 and, since 2009, as the resident food expert on The One Show. He likes pig.
Michael Williams
Michael Williams is the editor of The Monthly. He was previously the Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne as its ...