Timothy Spall at the Palmerston, London

Napkin Fun is something you can only do with linen napkins. We have played it all over the world. You have to make the most beautiful or funny shape out of the napkin. You can go from a milkmaid in a Breughel painting to a struck-off bishop. It is played after the main course, before dessert.

I had odd tastes as a kid. I ate cheese-and-pickle sandwiches for breakfast. My parents were quite liberal about it. I remember going off Sunday lunch and demanding mushrooms on toast instead. And they let me have it. I also recall, when I was about seven, deciding that my favourite food of all time was chicken and chips. I told a labourer who was laying paving stones outside my house, 'I could eat chicken and chips for every meal for the rest of my life.' I don't think I've eaten it since I was 19. Back then, I was frightened of Gorgonzola. My brother and I used to run upstairs to my nan's room where she kept a cheese dish with Gorgonzola under it. We thought it was something from hell. We used to sneak up, lift the lid, scare ourselves and run away - 'the scary Gorgonzola'.

I am just old enough to have borne the brunt of the paranoia of rationing. There are photos of my brother and I wallowing around in a pool at Butlins in the Sixties like hippo embryos with our parents looking proudly on. Having fat kids meant you were good parents. I grew up as a fat kid and didn't want to be a fat actor. It didn't make any difference. Even when I was thin I still got fat parts.

I like the food here - it's seasonal, British, and it's my local pub. If I had to slaughter the meat that I ate I would be a vegetarian so I'm a hypocrite. I caught a mouse recently in a trap. I felt really sad. I picked it up and gave it a decent burial in the wheelie bin. This year I've eaten two cows, 100 chickens and four sheep so why am I being upset by a mouse? Sometimes one death is more profound than a thousand. It's only recently I've looked at animals and thought, do you deserve to be eaten?
Neil Norman

· Palmerston, Lordship Lane, SE22, 020 8693 1629

Meera Syal at Imli, London

I loved watching my mother cook. A lot of her recipes had a story, and memories for her of picking things in the fields - Indian food is soul food, bound up with a lot of emotion. I cook modern Indian about four times a week.

I held my birthday party here - 15 women all sharing plates of gorgeous things. I typed up a survey - I wanted answers to these questions we always talk about. Can men and women be friends? How do you keep the spice alive in a relationship? Why do teenage daughters hate their mothers? Most people took the piss, but there was a great deal of joy about it.

Half of us were over 40, so we've lived a bit, and now finally we're settling down. They all felt we were entering the best periods of our lives; they felt the most comfortable in their bodies, the most at home in their relationships.

Food for me is just about pleasure. That's what's so wonderful about sitting around and eating. I couldn't like anybody that didn't like food. I'd distrust them instantly.

There was a period where people would quote the 'going for an English' sketch to us, and ask if we wanted the blandest thing on the menu. It became our dead parrot. We had a lot of staff at Indian restaurants come up and say secret thank yous in our ears too. But that idea of Indian food as the stuff you shove down your throat after several lagers is dying out a bit now.

A lot of restaurants pander to the lowest common denominator, serving dishes no one would touch in India, to people who think that if it doesn't burn your bum it's not curry. But I was shocked the first time I went to eat at an English person's house. It was so formal. There was only enough food for one portion each! In Indian households there is lots of food, and you eat with your fingers.

I'm not faddish, or fussy. Some people think unless you've spent three hours in the kitchen and your arms are burned then you haven't cooked a proper meal. Mum, let me introduce you to the canned chickpea ...
Eva Wiseman

· Imli, Wardour Street, W1, 020 7287 4243

Vic Reeves at the King's Head, Grafty Green, Kent

The King's Head was the nearest pub to our old house, which was lucky because they do fantastic fish and chips on a Friday. I'd go there about once a month and have cod, thick-cut chips and mushy peas with vinegar, two slices and loads of tea. Afterwards I'd have a pint of bitter. A lot of other places put salad on the side of fish and chips and that's just wrong. I'd scrape it off, never to darken my doorstep again.

We've only been to the King's Head once since the twins [Elizabeth and Nell] were born in June but it's very family-friendly, so I can take my kids [Alice, 13, and Louis, eight], too. There's a lively atmosphere which is important. I can't bear eating in silence. When Nancy and I go for a meal, it doesn't stop. She eats a huge amount - more than me.

I've been cooking Thai beef salad recently. I made tom yam for a farmer friend who asked me to put some in a flask for when he's freezing cold on his tractor all night. Then he gave some to his mate. Then I had to make big vats of it because I had this queue of farmers coming.

I like to look through cookbooks and experiment. I've got vast arrays of them and they'll tell you how to do fancy things but nothing really plain. There's an opening there for a layman's cookbook. My mum was quite good at experimenting with food and I spent a lot of time in the kitchen, asking her what she was doing. Now, I cook every day and try to incorporate a herb in everything. I've got giant pots in our garden.

When I was young, my family sat round a table and ate good food. Although I hated cooked vegetables, eventually I ate them raw. If they had sprouts, I'd have raw sprouts. I'll eat cabbage a lot. There are a lot of things you can do with cabbage. A much-maligned vegetable.

Mum and Dad were health-conscious when it wasn't cool. I wouldn't go anywhere near a McDonald's. I don't like pizzas, either. I try to eat organically. I go to the village butcher and he gives me things to try out, like a bag of Chinese spices to put on lamb. Then I go down to the grocer and have a chat with him. I like to know where everything's come from. I keep coming home with carrier bags full; I need a little old lady's bag on wheels.
Charlotte Heathcote

· Me: Moir Volume One is out now (Virgin Books, £18.99). The King's Head, Headcorn Road, Grafty Green, Kent, 01622 850259

Paul O'Grady at New Picadilly Café, London

About five years ago, Mick Jagger told me, 'There are three things banned on the Stones' tour. Drugs, alcohol and you. You're a bad influence on Ronnie.' That should be on my tombstone; I was really pleased.

I first came here 30 years ago. I happened to walk past and thought it looked like something out of The Avengers or Expresso Bongo. It looks exactly the same now as then: it's the real McCoy and a real gem, like nowhere else.

Since my heart attack, I've knocked boozing on the head, although I drink Guinness. In the old days, I loved getting hammered. I do love Coke, though. I was on Richard and Judy once and they said, 'Have you got any addictions, Paul?' I said, 'Yeah, I'm addicted to Coke.' Judy froze. Then I said, 'I drink about three litres a day.' You could see them go, 'Thank God for that.'

I have quite a healthy diet so I'll go for something like sausages, chips and beans here because it's a treat. They serve great comfort food and when times were hard it saved my bacon. It sickens me when I hear this place might have to close because of high rents. We'll get another Starbucks. Ken Livingstone wants to get his finger out and protect places like this.

When I was doing Lily [Savage], me and a posse of drag queens would go shopping on Berwick Street in Soho then come in here with bags full of fabric, feathers and sequins.

I've never come here with famous friends like Cilla [Black]. It's a private place for me. Punters come up to talk but I don't mind, they're only saying hello. I'd rather go around anonymously but, if I feel like being left alone, I don't leave the house. Some days I've got no social skills whatsoever.
Charlotte Heathcote

· The New Paul O'Grady Show is on Channel 4, weekdays at 5pm. New Piccadilly, Denman Street, London W1,020 7437 8530

Leslie Phillips at the Neal Street Restaurant, London

My mother loved bananas, bless her cotton socks, and, during the war, I got them on the black market and passed her one every now and then. She thought I was God. I was an officer in the armed forces so I managed to eat well in the mess. You could never take girls in there though. One didn't mix business with pleasure. It didn't escape me - the success that being an army officer gave me with the girls. I'm glad I used my youth to have a good look around. And I absolutely enjoyed the looking, I'll say.

This is a great after-theatre restaurant. Look at these scallops. They're so meaty. They do marvellous mushroom dishes too. I've got an old place in Ibiza and it's surrounded by wild mushrooms. But I'm scared to death of them. You never know if you're going to end up with a poisonous one do you?

The other thing I adore is truffles. I'm a regular customer at Camisa & Son, an Italian shop on Old Compton Street in Soho. Camisa himself does all sorts of things like fresh pasta and truffles. I do enjoy cooking, especially when I'm at my house in Spain. There's always such awfully good things to buy in the markets. My place is the complete opposite to what everybody thinks about Ibiza. I don't have bikini-clad women by the pool. Well, not any more.

I've always been interested in living and eating well. I've done an enormous amount of travelling making films and that's opened up the world of food. In France and Italy, you don't start work until midday and, even then you have a good lunch and wine first. In England you get up at five in the morning and you're lucky if you get a sticky bun.

If you're courting girls, food always plays a part. If I ever took a different girl to the same place, the waiters were very discreet and never mentioned it. Mind you, that's not to say I haven't had some bad dates. But then you can always go, can't you? Have I left a meal in the middle? Sure. If it's not going well with the girl you're with, I think you can respectfully disappear. Who wants to stay there and suffer?

The funniest meal I ever had was with Ginger Rogers and her husband Jacques Bergerac at their house in Beverly Hills. Ginger didn't turn up for hours. Jacques and I sat there having an odd drink, and we carried on having odd drinks and it was only after three hours that she made an appearance. But when she did, was she looking a million dollars. During the meal, she didn't address one word to Jacques except through me. They weren't getting on and I was piggy in the middle. She arranged to see me in New York, but never came. But that meal was unbelievable.
Nicole Jackson

· Hello is published by Orion. The Neal St Restaurant, 26 Neal Street, London WC2. 0207 836 8368

Terry Jones at home, North London

As a child I ate the usual stuff: a fry-up for breakfast with eggs, bacon and fried bread. School dinners were totally tasteless. The only thing that had any flavour was the gravy. It took me a long time to realise that meat came from animals, because the stuff we got at school was like a leather sole. The vegetables and potatoes were cooked to a squashy mush. In the evening it was beans and toast for tea.

It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I realised food had taste. I used to go to a place called the Soup Kitchen with Willie Donaldson and Mike Palin. Then we started going to other places like Indian restaurants and I got more and more interested in food.

Food that hasn't gone through a factory has more taste than anything that has. Eggs and chickens have been ruined by processing and factory-farming methods. Not that I think of a farming idyll where everyone goes back to the land to grow their own, because I know it is very hard work.

I'm not very good at growing my own stuff. I had a potato patch in south London and rocket plants in flower beds, but that was about it.

I had rocket for the first time in Italy when my daughter Sally was young. It was near Naples and we found it wild by the sea. Later we had it in a restaurant in a rocket-and-tomato salad. You couldn't buy it here in supermarkets like you can now. Then one day we were walking Sally to school and we found some growing out of a crack in the street. We washed it and had it for supper. Pavement rocket.

I don't really regard myself as a cook. I'm more of a food arranger. I get bees in my bonnet about dishes. A neighbour gave us a fish pie like a shepherd's pie but with fish, and so I did a version. And then I did another version and another. I latch on to a theme and keep wanting to do the same recipe over and over.

The funniest meal I've had recently was in France. Anna and I were staying at a Logis Hotel in Perpignan and it had an ace restaurant. It was food theatre, unbelievable. We were given a weird-looking plate on its side with a bowl at the bottom. It looked like a urinal. In the bottom of the dish was a pile of cep and red mullet. A honey spoon with rouille was hung from the top. Then the waiter brought a Portuguese flask with hot soup in it and poured it over the rouille and on to the fish. It was so theatrical; the effect was like pissing in a urinal.

The weirdest thing I ever ate was in China. The food was all alive in cages or in aquaria. You choose your live food and they cook it for you. Our selection was called something dog - it wasn't a dog, I hasten to add. But it was a black thing with a bullet head and a tail. They brought it to the table and weighed it. It tried to jump off the scales. But they caught it and chopped it up and cooked it. To this day I have no idea what it was.
NN

· Erik the Viking 2-disc special edition Director's Son's Cut is available on DVD from Arrow Films

Rob Brydon at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, Oxfordshire

I'll wake up in the morning and my wife Claire will have already baked a cake. I don't cook. She does it so well it'd be wrong of me to interfere.

I was a pasta and steak man. I was an Italian restaurant. It fitted in with my delusions of being a member of the Corleone family. Now I'm a great fish fan. And the smell and taste of hot buttered toast takes me back to my grandmother's - toast and Ivor the Engine on the telly.

I didn't drink alcohol until my mid-thirties. I started with champagne. It was after The Treatment on Radio 5; after the show we'd go to the bar and I'd wonder why everyone was talking so much about nothing. So I decided to try it. And I got it. It relaxes you! It takes very, very little to have an effect on me. Before that, whenever I was invited to a dinner party I'd feel 12 years old. Everyone would have wine and they'd bring me a Diet Coke.

I get annoyed with people who eat anything. It's a genetic lottery. My son has a peanut allergy. I have a sensitive stomach. The strangest thing I've ever eaten is a bear. He was going to eat me but I turned the tables on him. I started with his knee and worked my way up.

NN

· Keith Barret - Live is out now on DVD. Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, Great Milton, Oxford, 01844 278881

Stephen Mangan at the Engineer, London

The worst thing I ever ate was in Nicaragua when I was younger. A friend and I went trekking up into a cloud forest, and because we were staying in an empty hut overnight we had to buy our own food. We went to a shop in a tiny town and I bought what I thought was a delightful tin of chicken pâté. I ate it that evening and spent the night being violently ill. Once we'd deciphered the writing on the tin, it was clear that I'd been eating cat food.

They do fantastic breakfasts here, good porridge, and fruit - I'm obsessed with fruit. I'm partial to a whole lemon, peel and all. You get an endorphin rush off the flavour. I love pig in all it's forms. A finely turned sausage will always catch my eye. I know sausages are like bits of pig labia and sweepings off the floor, but I still love them. Having an Irish background is something I've discarded culinarily. The potato featured large at home, so I love a decent waxy potato with huge amounts of butter and cream - I should get Dyno-Rod to look at my arteries.
Rebecca Seal

· Confetti and Green Wing series two are now out on DVD. The Engineer, Primrose Hill, London NW1, 020 7722 0950

Dom Joly at J Sheekey, London

My office used to be right opposite J Sheekey and, during Trigger Happy, when we had our first quids rolling in, we'd go into work and get our costumes and then think, right, we'll just have lunch before we start filming. And then we'd sit in here for about four hours and eventually give up for the day, which is why it took about a year to make every episode.

If I'm hung over, I'll have the eggs Benedict with caviar, which is just the best. I really like caviar. God, I'm such a man of the people. Or I'll have lobster bisque, or lobster and chips. You know, ordinary working-man's food.

Weirdly, for someone who has just done a show on alcohol in Russia, I'm not much a drinker. But obviously for the sake of 'professionalism' I did some vodka tasting for the programme. We went to someone's flat and cooked up samagon, which is homemade vodka, but with a kick. It's 80 per cent proof. I've never taken crystal meth, but I imagine it must have pretty much the same effect. I can't remember anything else, but of course the one time in my life I have a complete blackout, there's a crew filming me hugging a donkey and hurling abuse at people in St Petersburg. I had told my wife I was off 'working' and when she asked to see some footage of my 'work', that was all I could find to show her. The other thing I loved about Russia was the menu translations. We went to this posh place and they had this enormous menu. They had obviously let some 20-year-old English-exchange student do the translations. My favourites were 'sad-faced cod', 'depressed soup' and 'monkey dung'.

They asked me to be on Ready Steady Cook and I said yes, provided I could catch fire and run around the studio, but they didn't think it was a very good idea. We then rang up Ainsley Harriott's agent and I said I had used his barbecue book and he had said to put too much petrol on the barbecue and my family had been burnt to death. Funnily enough, I never heard back from them.
Nicole Jackson

· Dom Joly's Happy Hour is on Tuesdays at 9.00pm on Sky One. J Sheekey, St Martin's Court, London WC2, 020 7240 2565

Lucy Davis at the Little Door, Los Angeles

The first time I came to LA, BBC America had brought me out to promote The Office and the Little Door was the first restaurant I went to. It's pretty, relaxing and casual - an English country garden with a Mediterranean feel.

They do a good homemade steak with butternut squash and I'll have that with a rocket-and-parmesan salad. I'll start with this Mediterranean platter with humus, bread, Parma ham and olives and, oh God, it's huge. They always go, 'Do you want to share it?' but they get this glower from me, like, 'Why would I?'

It's like when I order pudding and my boyfriend doesn't, but it still comes with two spoons. The presumption of it! They do this gorgeous flourless chocolate cake. It's very stodgy with hot chocolate-fudge sauce. He doesn't order anything, then goes, 'I'll just have a bit of yours.' Don't do that.

I'm not the kind of person who would ask, 'Is the steak cooked with butter or oil?' But, in supermarkets, I only buy organic food. I think it's important to eat healthily and to focus on what you're putting in your body rather than your waistline. It's a fact that slim actors get more work but the weight thing for me is not about LA. When I was in The Office weighing 10-and-a-half stone, I never felt happy. I feel happier now and definitely have more energy.

I'm getting married in London next month and, about four months ago, I had my wedding dress made. Then I ate like a donkey and put on 20lb. I had to desperately diet to lose it so it's good to talk about food now.

I'm a basic eater. I love pancakes, burgers, salads and pudding but not fussy food like sushi and duck. I'm not vegetarian but I work for PETA so stuff like foie gras is a no-no. I don't like wine with food, either. I like bourbon with Diet Coke. I'm diabetic and alcohol can lower your sugars but I make sure I have some carbohydrate before bed. I never think about having a drink in the house, though. In LA, people get in their cars after a few drinks and I'm very against that so one of the things I miss most about London is black cabs. My wedding car is a black cab.

This is going to sound so LA, but I have my meals delivered at the moment because I'm doing Studio 60, Aaron Sorkin's new drama with Matthew Perry, and I barely have time to go to the shops. I take a bag to work containing healthy, balanced, nutritional meals. Breakfast will be scrambled egg with bacon; there'll be a salad with turkey and chicken; some ribs and vegetables; and three snacks of fruit.

There's a store up the road that sells English food - baked beans, Branston Pickle, digestive biscuits. We're not good at getting meals together because we'll just pick at Monster Munch. Anyway, my cooking's rubbish. Though I did make macaroni cheese the other day. Without any help.
Charlotte Heathcote

· The Little Door, 8164 W 3rd St, Los Angeles, CA 90048. 001 323 951 1210