Jay Rayner

Jay Rayner, as well as setting the benchmark for restaurant reviewing for over two decades, also has a keen journalistic eye for a good story. And earlier this year he discovered the amazing story of refugee-turned-restauranter Ghofran Hamza, who single handedly runs Arabic Flavour in Aberystwyth.

She grew up in Syria on the border with Turkey but was forced to flee in 2012 as the Syrian civil war flared. By way of Lebanon and a place on a UN refugee resettlement programme, her family arrived in Wales in 2018. “It was, she has said, a disconcerting experience of layered culture shocks,” Jay writes, “To cope with it, she and her mother came together with other Syrian refugees in Aberystwyth to create the Syrian Dinner Project, a series of supper clubs that both secured a cultural connection to their past and raised funds for local Syrian families trying to find their feet in the present.”

It also turns out that she is the only person in the kitchen, so “the lack of kitchen personnel means a dinner at Arabic Flavour is unlikely to be quick,” he continues, “Do not go ravenously hungry. Prepare a few conversational gambits. Perhaps do not go in a large group. But really, do go”.

But there was no such happy ending for his column on the Public House in Paris, a restaurant on a mission to bring scotch eggs, sausage rolls and pastry - to the French. Things went a little awry as the brainchild of London “pie king” Calum Franklin did not live up to expectations, or the price of a Eurostar ticket to Paris. “There are going to be many people in London’s restaurant and food world who will be dismayed and perhaps even angry that a Calum Franklin restaurant has received such a review. One of those people is me. But to stay silent after such a dreadful experience would have been its own kind of dishonesty,” wrote Jay.

Finally, to the glory of Fenix in Manchester, “an attempt to go so far over the top that everyone responsible is tumbling joyously down the other side. The design brief was clearly governed by a simple mantra: “What do you mean, that’s enough? Give it more.”

Here Jay gave full vent to his enthusiasm and his basic mission statement, which is to celebrate great food and great restaurants: “You have to give yourself to Fenix, much as you might to Disneyland or a cruise of the Norwegian fjords or a Soho torture garden. Perhaps you didn’t think this was your scene. But now you’re here it turns out to have a lot to recommend it.”