Fig Tree acquires Jay Rayner’s ‘entertaining, delicious, and utterly unique’ memoir-in-recipes, ‘Nights Out at Home’.

Helen Garnons-Williams, Publishing Director at Fig Tree, has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights at auction, in Nights Out at Home, by award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster Jay Rayner, from Jonny Geller and Sabhbh Curran at Curtis Brown. Fig Tree will publish Nights Out At Home as a lead title in Autumn 2024, to mark Jay’s 25th anniversary as a restaurant critic.

Photo: Joe Magowan

Nights Out At Home is an entertaining, generous-spirited and utterly unique memoir-in-recipes inspired by Jay Rayner’s quarter of a century at the table.

Jay has long transported readers into restaurants and in Nights Out at Home, a love letter to eateries high, low and everything in between, he goes one step further.  In a ‘sweet act of greedy remembrance’ he will help home cooks to create brilliant dishes inspired by some of the best and most exciting food he has sampled at his favourite culinary institutions. From a cheat’s version of chef Mark Hix’s famed crispy duck salad beloved of celebrities at the original Ivy, through cumin-crusted spare ribs from a hole-in-the-wall caff in Chinatown, to a Steak Bake from high street favourite Greggs, he tells the stories of the places and the dishes that have stolen his heart over the years. From delis and diners in New York and New Orleans, through classic bistros in Paris, to the most humble of Pakistani grill houses in London’s Whitechapel, Rayner will take us from a seat at the table and into the kitchen. With the blessing and often the help of the chefs involved, he’ll engage in fond acts of ‘reverse engineering’ to unpick the tastes and techniques behind recipes that can then be conjured up in our own homes.

Nights Out At Home is also a deliciously engaging, funny and moving memoir of Jay’s experiences during his long career being paid to eat out on someone else’s dime.  In it, he lifts the curtain on the craft of reviewing and the life of a critic, exploring topics including anonymity, health and the role of the restaurant critic in the twenty-first century.

Garnons-Williams says:

‘We are thrilled to welcome Jay Rayner to Fig Tree. His glorious Nights Out at Home is a testament to his truly insatiable curiosity: a book to curl up with, cook from and be inspired by. The deep, enquiring affection he has for the dishes he describes, and the places they come from, shines off the page and the stories he tells of his culinary adventures sparkle with his inimitable wit and élan’

Jay Rayner says:

“I am delighted that Nights Out At Home has found its own welcoming home with Helen Garnons-Williams at Fig Tree. It’s a joy to be able to share with everyone my nerdy habit of reverse engineering my favourite dishes from a quarter of a century of professional restaurant going, writing my own recipes, and to be able to explore the curiosities of a greedy life lived at the table. This is a book that will be as at home on the bedside table as in the kitchen.”

Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has been the restaurant critic for The Observer since 1999 (garnering millions of views per year), has presented the award-winning BBC Radio 4 show The Kitchen Cabinet for over a decade and is the author of a dozen books, most recently My Last Supper and Chewing the Fat. His varied television work includes his role for 15 years as a critic on MasterChef, food reporting for the BBC’s One Show and forming part of the expert panel on Top Chef Masters in the US. In March 2023 he was named Critic of the Year, in the UK Press Awards.