Renowned restaurant critic, MasterChef judge and sometime jazz pianist Jay Rayner is coming to The Courtyard on Tuesday, April 5th. My Dining Hell entertainingly combines Jay Rayner’s flair for storytelling and acerbic wit with a hitherto hidden talent as a musician.

My Dining Hell will see Jay examine our love affair with lousy reviews. As a restaurant critic for the Observer for over 15 years, if there is one thing Jay has learnt it is that his readers delight in reviews of bad restaurants.

In this accompaniment to his book of the same name, Rayner rants about his most hated restaurants fads, describes some of his most excruciating nights out and – just to balance things – reads from the worst reviews his own work has ever received. Having already had a successful run in 2015, this is a hugely entertaining show in the company of the man recently voted the best food and drink journalist in Britain.

An award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster with a fine collection of floral shirts, Jay Rayner has written on everything from crime and politics, through cinema and theatre to the visual arts. But despite his stint as sex columnist for Cosmopolitan, he is best known as restaurant critic for the Observer.

Jay Rayner is a former Young Journalist of the Year, Critic of the Year and Restaurant Critic of the Year, though not all in the same year. In the 2014 British Press Awards he was shortlisted for both Critic of the Year and Specialist Journalist of the Year. Somehow he has also found time to write four novels and three works of non-fiction. His latest book is A Greedy Man In A Hungry World: How (almost) everything you thought you knew about food is wrong.

Jay chairs BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and is a regular on British television, where he is familiar as a judge on Masterchef and, since 2009, as the resident food expert on The One Show.