Welcome to the Nights Out At Home galleries

If you’ve stumbled onto this page by accident, Nights Out At Home is my cookbook, published in 2024 to mark my 25 years as the Observer’s restaurant critic. You can find out more about the book here.

From the very first proposal for Nights Out At Home, I knew it would not be a book full of flashy colour photography. As I explain in the introduction, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, it would make the book much more expensive. And secondly, while I have some full colour cookbooks that I adore, I do worry about some food photography being so sophisticated, that it creates an image of a dish which is impossible to replicate, and that can be off putting.

That said, I do understand that some people like a visual reference for what they’re cooking. Hence, these galleries. Throughout the research and cooking process I was taking pictures of each dish, purely as a reminder for myself. So here they are. They are not professional photographs. Frankly, some of them are awful. But they were only taken as a reminder to me of what the finished dish looked like, for when I came to write about it.

They are generally organised in the order they appear in the book, by section. A couple are missing but over time it should become complete. There is no commentary, because all of that is in the book, a link for which is at the top. I hope they’re useful. Happy cooking.