Welcome to the Nights Out in the Kitchen galleries

If you’ve stumbled onto this page by accident, Nights Out In The Kitchen is my new cookbook, a follow up to Nights Out At Home which was published in 2024 to mark my 25 years as the Observer’s restaurant critic. You can find out more about the new book here.

From the very first proposal for the first volume, I knew these would not be books full of flashy colour photography. As I explain in the introduction to both, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, it would make the books much more expensive. And secondly, while I have some full colour cookbooks that I adore, I do worry about some food photography being so sophisticated, that it creates an image of a dish which is impossible to replicate, and that can be off putting.

That said, I do understand that some people like a visual reference for what they’re cooking. Hence, these galleries. Throughout the research and cooking process I have always taken pictures of each dish, purely as a reminder for myself. So here they are. They are not professional photographs. Frankly, some of them are not the best. But they were only taken as a reminder to me of what the finished dish looked like, for when I came to write about it. 

They are generally organised in the order they appear in the book, by section, and are pretty comprehensive although a couple are missing. There is no commentary, because all of that is in the book; if you want to buy a copy a full set of links to do so is below. I hope the images are useful. Happy cooking.

Buy Nights out in the Kitchen→

NB. The eagle-eyed among those who have already purchased the book may have noticed an error on the caption for the Little Dumpling King illustration. Obviously, Hanley is in Stoke-on-Trent not London. The guilty are being punished and it will have been corrected come the reprint. Apologies meanwhile to Rob Mcintyre and the whole team at Little Dumpling King.