My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways To Have a Lousy Night Out (Penguin Specials). This item is unavailable.My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways To Have a Lousy Night Out (Penguin Specials)

I have been a restaurant critic for over a decade, written reviews of well over 700 establishments, and if there is one thing I have learnt it is that people like reviews of bad restaurants. No, scratch that. They adore them, feast upon them like starving vultures who have spotted fly-blown carrion out in the bush.

They claim otherwise, of course. Readers like to present themselves as private arbiters of taste; as people interested in the good stuff. I'm sure they are. I'm sure they really do care whether the steak was served au point as requested or whether the soufflé had achieved a certain ineffable lightness. And yet, when I compare dinner to bodily fluids, the room to an S & M chamber in Neasden (only without the glamour or class), and the bill to an act of grand larceny, why, then the baying crowd is truly happy.

Don't believe me? Then why, presented with the chance to buy this ebook filled with accounts of twenty restaurants - their chefs, their owners, their poor benighted front of house staff - getting a complete stiffing courtesy of the sort of vitriolic bloody-curdling review which would make the victims call for their mummies, did you seize it with both hands?

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.