A NIGHT OF FOOD AND AGONY Jay Rayner has enjoyed a delicious career – an award-winning writer, journalist, a judge on Masterchef and a broadcaster, and even an occasional jazz pianist! And this April he's in Swansea, appearing on stage at the Grand Theatre in A Night of Food and Agony. Speaking exclusively with Taste Swansea, Jay talks about Japanese food, Soda Streams and his new show. What's your favourite kind of cuisine? If I had to eat the food of only one country for the rest of my life, it would be Japan. We are finally beginning to understand just how diverse it is. Plus I adore grilled eel.
What about a favourite drink? Sparkling water. I’m addicted to it. My wife banned me from having it in the house for a while because I was getting through a dozen litres a week. So I bought a Soda Stream. You know the food industry inside out – give us a fact that may surprise us. On a large scale carrots are always harvested in the middle of the night when it’s cool, because they’d start decaying more quickly if harvested by daylight. What do you know about the Swansea food scene? I must confess, not much. Once, after recording an edition of the Kitchen Cabinet – the food show I present for BBC Radio 4 – we did eat at some huge Indian restaurant on the hill above Swansea. Nice enough food but the place was odd. It looked like the setting for a wedding but I wasn’t getting married.
Photo: Levon Biss
And if you could eat just one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be? This sounds like the stuff of utter nightmares. The same thing? Day after day? My choice would be irrelevant because, after about a week, I’d be sick of it. You might as well give me a protein shake. You should read Taste Swansea more often! So what's the idea behind A Night of Food and Agony? It’s a night of two halves. The first is an hour of stand up comedy about dreadful restaurant experiences. In the second I’m joined by the rest of my jazz quartet as I take to the piano for an hour of songs about both food and drink, and that reflect my childhood being raised by an agony aunt, because my mum was one. What kind of thing can we expect? A lot of good laughs, some swinging music and some truly filthy stories of the sort people from Swansea love. Jay brings 'A Night of Food and Agony' to Swansea's Grand Theatre on Friday, 29 April at 8pm. 27 27