蜜芽传媒

Hello Jay. For the uninitiated, please tell us: what is Out to Lunch?

Jay Rayner: Out to Lunch is a very, very simple concept, which is I take a well-known person out to lunch in a restaurant. We order some food and we talk.

Jay Rayner and Richard E. Grant. Image by Sony Music

This plays to two elements in my working life. People know me as a restaurant critic – quite reasonably because I did that job for 26 years for the Observer. I'm now on the Financial Times. So I'm known for my relationship with food. What they perhaps less well know me for is the hard graft of journalism, and that includes an awful lot of interviews.

So the restaurant element is important, but it's also pulling upon years and years and years of experience as an interviewer. And trying to get the best out of someone in a really interesting setting.

Could you suggest three episodes to act as starter, main course and dessert for new listeners?

JR: Start at the very beginning: Richard E. Grant coming in and sniffing everything. He's famous for smelling things. And I took him to Sartoria, then run by the brilliant Italian chef, Francesca Mazzei, and it was white truffle season. It was just extraordinary. When we did that first episode as a pilot, we were looking for proof of concept. The question we were asking was, can food translate into audio?

And the moment Richard starts sniffing stuff, I think the answer is a very clear yes.

As a main course, Jess Phillips MP – now Minister – expressed some very interesting thoughts about the middle class-ness of restaurants, and her discomfort with what had gone on during the Corbyn years for Labour. A very honest conversation was had about that. I think that's a great episode.

And then, I think I would direct you right at the end to…Jamie Dornan, because actually what you've got there is a very successful, significant film star, but being extremely relatable over food. He completely understands the food was not a mere side note to what was going on. He was in a very happy place.

What’s interesting about Out to Lunch is that it’s not strictly a podcast about food. It’s an in-depth interview show which uses the restaurant as a studio and the structure of the meal to facilitate open conversation. Why record in a restaurant?

JR: I do love restaurants. And one of the things that I love about them is that they are a brilliant vehicle for disclosure. There is something about the formal structure of a restaurant meal. Once you sit down at a table and people bring you a list of dishes and they pour you some water, and they pour you some wine, you choose some dishes. Once that's going on, there is an imperative to talk, or at least it feels like a better environment in which to talk. And if you know how to ask the right questions, people will talk.

There are technical things with this show. People have wondered: how did we record it? We concluded we needed a private room, so we could control the acoustic. But then we would put the microphones over the top of our heads. They weren't on the table in front of us, 'cause that's where lunch had to be. You can't pretend that it was an entirely natural restaurant experience [but] it also wasn't intrusive. And my job then was to show them a good time in the restaurant, as in guide them through the menu, get them to things that they like and keep them in their comfort zone.

The requirement of a private dining room must have reduced the number of restaurant options! How did you choose where to eat?

JR: All the way along, these had to be restaurants I could vouch for: either that I had reviewed positively or that I knew very, very well. I've got to know it's good. It's got to have a private dining room. So yeah, that limited the number.

But it is quite a common thing and we found some very, very good ones. It's not up [on 蜜芽传媒 Sounds] yet, but the Kathy Burke episode was recorded in the private dining room at Scott's, which is the most absurdly opulent single room I've ever been in. It's got works by Chagall and Picasso on the walls, the floor’s made of precious stones. It's just insane.

What did Kathy make of that?

JR: I think Kathy thought the room was hilarious. But the main thing with Kathy was she's had a few health problems, and so her dietaries were quite extreme. I took her for the poshest fish and chips in London.

Did you matchmake all of your guests to restaurants you thought they would like?

JR: I absolutely did do matchmaking and sometimes it was helpful. I knew that Jamie Dornan had a thing about roast meat. He's a Northern Irish meat and potatoes lad. So I took him to the Guinea Grill, which is a great pub/chop house, in Mayfair, where they are famed for their roast beef and so forth, and he was very, very happy.

The only thing I then had to do was…this is not casting aspersions on Jamie and I'm sure he wouldn't have embarrassed me! I knew he also liked red wines and so I then called ahead to the restaurant and said, you give the wine list to me and I will choose, because I wasn't letting him loose on the upper reaches of the great Bordeaux and burgundies. I found a nice pinot noir, which wasn't going to upset anybody. As a restaurant critic for a newspaper, I'm very good at finding the second cheapest bottle of wine on the list.

Out to Lunch uses the structure of a restaurant meal to punctuate the conversation, so the listener hears different courses arriving at the table and the guest reacting to them. Was this helpful to you as an interviewer, or distracting?

JR: It was never distracting. There was a little bit of management because it got quite well known very quickly, actually. And you'd find front of house would be a little bit reticent. There were a lot of hand signals from me. I would always be positioned with a view of the door, so I could wave them in at the right moments.

The one bit of direction I would give to front of house before our guests turned up – because we liked to be able to just roll with it the moment they turned up and keep rolling – was to say that: occasionally you may see me do this [Jay holds up a hand], and that means hold where you are. I want this person to finish the answer they're giving.

One of the key things of interviewing is listening, isn't it? If you just read off a list of questions and ignore what the other person's saying and hope it's all there at the end, you're not going to have the best interview. The arrival of food is a necessary narrative beat. And you need that to happen as well, and to keep feeding them.

Would you ever save a particularly spicy question for dessert?!

JR: No, I don't think I ever held back on something thinking [I’ll] keep that to a particular course or dish, because if you tried to synchronise food with questions, you’d drive yourself nuts. But you do have to unfold it as feels most natural.

Jay Rayner and Corinne Bailey Rae. Image by Sony Music

Early on in the interview with Gregory Porter, we talked about him losing his brother to COVID, and he wept. It happened twice during interviews where the interviewee became very emotional and as an interviewer, your job then is to do nothing. Nothing at all. Stay as silent as you possibly can, and just let them do what they need to do. You can never really be sure when it's going to happen.

And maybe Gregory was just having a bad day, and then I fed him something and then I asked him a question. And he burst into tears, which all felt very, very natural. But I would take that back to the environment, to the place of the table in our culture that it feels like…a restaurant table is not domestic, but it is on nodding terms to the domestic and therefore feels familiar and comfortable.

Did you ever have a situation where you felt like a guest was uncomfortable in the restaurant?

JR: Tracy Ullman…Tracy really wasn't sure what she'd come for. She brought a dog as well. I took her to a restaurant called St Leonards and I did think, oh, she's taking a while to ease into this and then I can't remember what the point was, but something happened and she completely relaxed and it was then a riot.

I got 25 impersonations [from Tracy]. I basically had lunch with 25 other people. There was Angela Merkel and there was Theresa May, and it was hilarious. It was absolutely hilarious, but she wasn't entirely comfortable with it right at the beginning.

And then Grayson Perry at the Drapers Arms. Grayson ticked a lot of boxes for me. I came to the conclusion that there were two qualities that would set me up for a perfect Out to Lunch interview. The first one was they'd been through a therapeutic process. People who've been through therapy know how to talk. They have a language for it.

Grayson had also been through therapy, but he had one other quality, which obviously was very hard to guarantee. But did I have a previous relationship with them? I didn't need to be friends, but a little bit of a relationship was always helpful.

But then, you know, I do have the journalist shard of ice through my heart. So I would never really want to do it with a very close friend, but I could get into it.

The Grayson Perry episode feels like quite a challenging conversation, but it seems very much like you rose to the challenge. Was that the case?

JR: I think I had enough previous with Grayson to actually get into it. It was a particular question that I'd been going to ask him, because I'd dodged it before, when he had [mocked] men for wearing floral shirts to express their femininity. And to which I'd wanted to shout, Grayson, you're wearing a dress. So, where are we at here? I had enough of a relationship with Grayson to be able to get into that.

As well as your previously mentioned experience in journalism, you’ve also done a lot of audio work: from Radio 5 Live’s Papertalk to The Kitchen Cabinet. Does podcasting feel different from making these programmes?

JR: I think we make a mistake often by overemphasising what is different about new media formats, not what is the same.

Now, it is true that you can do different things with them, but what I tend to find is that when people just blather on and run out a podcast at an hour and 35 it's almost unlistenable but actually, if you apply the eternal verities and virtues of old school broadcasting, which is…edit and for God's sake do your research. Then you get a much better quality to it.

The one thing that I loved about it was we were not dependent on commissioners. But to that, I'd say you're dealing with a team who really knows their stuff. The producers I work with have an awful lot of experience, both broadcast and non-broadcast, and really I think that's what matters.

People whinge about gatekeepers. I actually think that they’re not a terrible thing. Commissioners attend to the virtues of professional broadcasting. Don't dismiss them. Or all you end up with is two people talking at each other and thinking they're funny.

In lieu of asking you your dream dinner party guest list, because in this podcast the restaurant is the star…if you could interview anyone, anywhere, who would it be?

JR: I always wanted Jeff Goldblum, and if I could have had him anywhere…I'm not even sure they've got a private dining room, but there's a deli in LA called Nate ‘n Al’s. It's an old Ashkenazi Jewish deli in Beverly Hills. It's ludicrous because this is very heavy food under the burning sun of Los Angeles, but I think that would've been good. We did try! Jeff had been very kind to me on a couple of occasions [but] it never happened.

Out to Lunch is available now on 蜜芽传媒 Sounds, with episodes released every Tuesday.