"We all like a good b****," says Jay Rayner, who is no stranger himself to giving a good old rant. The brutally honest writer is known for ripping restaurants to shreds in The Observer and making contestants sweat nervously on MasterChef, but now he is gearing up to let us tickle his soft underbelly.

Jay Rayner is bringing a brand new, two-part show to St Albans. The first part, My Dining Hell, is true to type where he examines the lousy restaurants he's been too and why they earned the bad reviews. In the second part, A Night of Food and Agony, he takes a gentler approach with a jazz quartet and entertains the audience with some blues, swing and jazz music from the Great American Songbook.

The 49-year-old says: "I have a very low boredom threshold so last thing I ever want to do is bore anyone. The first half is certainly a shared element, so whenever I write a negative restaurant review, the readers feel like I’m taking revenge on their behalf for every bad experience they've ever had. So when I start talking about terrible things at restaurants, people start recognising the things that drive them nuts."

Jay, who grew up in Harrow, explains that bad restaurant reviews are only a fifth of what he does, but they seem to be the ones that people remember. Talking about his pet hates, the father of two who now lives in Brixton, says: "What make me most mad are the expensive ones – the places in central London charging £15 just for a starter and £28 for a main course - so it’ll probably cost you £100 a head. And they think they are the best thing that has ever opened, but the food is stupid. Those are the ones that really get me angry.

"You can generally tell, when you are reading the menu, the way it is written whether or not you are in safe hands. It’s when they start over using the adjectives – telling you that something is ‘nestling’ on a bed of something or a ‘sumptuous’ this and ‘mouth-watering that’ – when they start overwriting you know straight away it is going to be awful.

"One of the things I do when I go to a restaurant is order the thing I probably least want. So if I pick up a menu and see something which sounds like a really bad idea, that’s the one I order. It’s to see if the chef turns out to be a genius and makes it work, but usually they can’t."

Jay, who claims he is a sucker for pork spare ribs, believes that the best cooks are the greedy cooks. They are the ones who want to be eating their own food. He adds: "The ones who are too technically minded end up making food that is soulless and unenjoyable. It becomes tiresome. I like chefs like Jeremy Lee and Simon Hopkinson. These are chefs who love to eat as much as they love to cook."

Jay admits that he is greedy and this is part of what makes him passionate about food. He says this stems from when he was a child - "I come from an unreligious Jewish family but there is always a greedy element to Jewish families. We communicate over food. My parents grew up during the war and I suppose they knew what it was like to go hungry and they were determined that we shouldn’t - so we turned out to be a bunch of greedy kids."

Jay is the son of famous agony aunt, Claire Rayner, who was never too shy to state her opinion and this is one of the things the food critic says he learnt from his mother.

"Before she died," says Jay, who describes himself as writer and a journalist foremost, "I had started to build up a public profile, so she gave me three pieces of advice. Always be nice to cab drivers, never turn down the opportunity to pee and never be photographed with a glass of wine in your hand - I failed on the last one.

"She was a very big and forceful character," he adds, "my mum was a campaigner for the NHS and I grew up with a sense of it as a brilliant and vital service. She trained as nurse just before it began and became a nurse with the burst of the NHS and it absolutely destroys me that this Government is intent on downgrading what was a Rolls Royce service."

The second part of Jay's show, the jazz quartet, he says happened by "accident".

"I've been playing piano for a very long time. I went to school at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Elstree – not very happily I must say, but I had my first piano lessons there from the age of ten and only for about two years. I quit them and started getting interested in synthesisers – this was the '80s – and played around with synthesisers for a while before I got bored and went back to piano."

He adds: "Then five years ago, a friend of mine encouraged me to sit down and play at this members' club alongside other musicians, and it was the most exciting thing I had ever done. I was thrilled by it and I wanted to do more of it.

"Then somebody heard that this was going on and invited me to do a whole show – first I wasn’t convinced that I was up to it but then I was given a year to pull something together – the tunes, the quartet and it snowballed from there. I don’t do a lot of it and yes it has gone beyond being a hobby, but I do not want it to become an everyday thing. I am delighted to be coming to St Albans – it’ll be one of three big gigs."

As well as the tour, Jay will also be appearing once again as a judge on MasterChef and will also be publishing a new book with recipes in for the first time, later this year.

Jay will be at St Albans Arena on March 3. Details: 01727 844488, alban-arena.co.uk