Jay Rayner is bringing his new show to Chipping Norton Theatre

Jay Rayner is within my sights, the famous restaurant critic and generally angry man, who has a stare Clint Eastwood would envy and a presence akin to Jesse James walking into a saloon.

Claire Rayner’s son, TV presenter, journalist and author, he of the rhinocerous hide and the temperament of a bull faced with a matador in tight, shiny red trousers, is coming to The Theatre in Chipping Norton with his new show A Greedy Man In A Hungry World.

And he agrees to be interviewed. So fully armoured and ready for a verbal tug-of-war, I am then totally blown off course by some astonishingly mistimed crossed wires which meant I got the interview date wrong, keeping him waiting. And of all the people not to piss off it’s Jay Rayner.

Not only that but his new show is not ‘an evening with’ as I’d been led to believe, but is about his book of the same title which of course I hadn’t read. “I can’t talk to you...

It would be too frustrating,” he tells me, quite rightly.

So here I am. Day Two. Book read, no sleep, a 12-hour reading marathon behind me in a vague attempt to impress this Goliath of a man. And he’s finally here, the real McCoy, and I’m shaking in my ankle boots.

So come on then, Jay! How does it feel to get through life striding around like a Transformer in one of those awful sci-fi blockbusters? Is he aware, does he care, is it all a front? How does anyone get to be that thick-skinned?

Disarming me utterly by laughing in surprise he says: “ I’m really not that scary. In fact, I like to hope I’m reasonably affable!”

like the wolf wearing Little Red Riding Hood’s cape. Yeah right.

“No really, it’s a persona I’ve developed,” he assures me. So what about when he hauled the Tesco bosses over the coals over their treatment of British farmers? What about when he turned down a lucrative contract because it was associated with Sainsbury’s ready meals? “Yes that was me.” What about when he appears on Masterchef? “Yes, that’s me too. Maybe I am that hardcore,” he agrees.

Does he care? “Not really.” Or notice? “No, but then I make an active effort not to notice what is going on around me. My friends and family know who I am and I’m happy with that,” he says taking the wind out of my sails. “Call it tunnel vision.”

The thing that disarms me most, as effectively as if he’d removed the loaded gun from my hands himself, is that he cares.... who'd have guessed? Not about what people think of him, the 47-year-old couldn’t give two hoots about that, but about food and what we are doing to the planet, how it’s farmed, produced, about waste and obesity, diabetes, supermarket domination, the state of British farming, about malnutrition and over population, corruption, factory farming and pollution, GM crops. The list goes on and on.

And to prove he cares he’s travelled around the world, leaving his beloved wife and two sons at home, interviewing the experts, meeting the farmers, talking to the men in suits, the aid workers, the scientists, seeing the results for himself in an effort not only to lay out his arguments as clearly as possible, reveal the truth in a way we can all grasp, and arm us with the facts, but also to help find a solution to the problem. A restaurant critic with a conscience. The irony.

“I’ve always been gobby and very verbal, and coming from a noisy family meant you had to join in to keep up. I still have size issues though. I’m not good on body image even to this day.” he says with an uncharacteristic flash of insecurity.

“But its hardly accidental I suppose, when I look back, that I was made for this gig (food critic for the Observer). Because my mother was one of the first TV chefs and she did love a good restaurant. Theatreland was her big thing and everything that went with it, which included restaurants, and through my mother’s celebrity we experienced a lot of them.

“Although I can honestly say I didn’t have any ambition to be a restaurant critic until I became one. The idea was always to be a writer and a journalist. and I was quite good at that, writing about almost everything for almost 15 years, so even now I still think of myself as an old-fashioned reporter.”

Which has stood him in great stead with A Greedy Man In A Hungry World, enabling Jay to use the food reporting undertaken for the BBC’s The One Show, from seeing famine first-hand in Rwanda to doing shifts in an abattoir, visiting the US grain farmers, infiltrating Chicago’s Stock Exchange and chewing the fat with apple farmers in Kent, pulling no punches, and saying it like it is, goading us into sitting up and taking notice, to buying British and eating less meat, to care.

So where did he start? “With a narrative that makes sense. You just have to wade in and start cutting through the crap. But I have an absolute hatred of pompous, dreary, pious writing, although no one sets out to be dreary I’m sure, so I knew what I needed to do — find a way in. I set out to be the vehicle through which the story is told.”

Wasn’t that intrusive? “My job was to write something compelling and convincing, and if you put yourself into the public domain you need to stop whining.”

Now touring the country to hammer that message home, he’s rather enjoying himself. “It’s a pleasurable thing. I try to make the show fun and entertaining, it’s not death by powerpoint. I want to give people a good night out and let them ask lots of interesting questions. So it’s 45 mins of me and 15 of them.”

So what do they ask? “They all want to be restaurant critics because they like food. I have a standard letter now that I send out to people saying I get paid because I know how to write not because I know how to eat,” he replies, as wincingly forthright as ever, before uncharactersitically relenting and adding: “Look all writing is narcissitic, so writing about yourself is narcissm squared. All I know is that when you reach your 40s you question what you do enjoy, and what you actually do becomes more acute. There are no shades of grey.”

Jay Rayner’s A Greedy Man In A Hungry World comes to The Theatre Chipping Norton on Thursday May 29. Box office on 01608 642350.