Food has always been the way to a man's heart, but who needs a woman to cook it? Chloe Diski asked some of our favourite alpha males - from Men Behaving Badly to Boris Johnson, Des Lynam to Rod Stewart - to reveal what really gets their juices flowing and where they go to get it

Martin Clunes, actor

Sex or food?
'No comment'

People have seen me as a spokesman for the culture of Men Behaving Badly, but I was never a part of the 10-beers-and-a-curry thing. For me, an ideal meal would be a joint of lamb cooked in the Aga at home, with plenty of fresh vegetables from my garden. My wife and I both enjoy cooking. We are only four miles from the coast and tend to eat a lot of fish in the summer.

The Riverside is a lovely restaurant, right by the sea. It is incredibly light inside and feels like a family home. The food is straightforward. You get fish in a variety of ways, without fanciness. It was recommended to me and I have got to know Arthur, the owner, quite well. At the weekend the restaurant is full of local families and we'll take a huge table.

I like the odd end of the fish scale. My wife doesn't like squid so I often order that. She prefers the more straightforward stuff - plaice, cod. We bring our daughter here, but egg and chips and cheesy pasta is all we usually manage to get down her.

While filming Doc Martin down in Cornwall, we went to Rick Stein's a few times. We'd park and get the ferry, a marvellous way to travel to a restaurant. It is a fantastic place, with extremely tasty whelks.

During Men Behaving Badly, we only rehearsed in the mornings, so never had to endure set catering because in the afternoons we'd head to Soho to do voiceovers. Nowadays, set catering has become much better. Set Meals, which did the food for Doc Martin, sourced local products and did some great meals. We always used to have an 11 o'clock pastry from a local place called the Peapod to keep us going.

Before I started acting, I worked as a prep chef for Alistair Little at L'Escargot in Soho. I quickly became aware of how easy it was to eat well. At home we grow sweetcorn, beans, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, garlic and leeks. It's a relief to know what is going into my daughter's stomach, though getting your child to eat properly is a battle.

For the last few years, my family and I have gone to the Maldives and the food there is something else. They have a buffet lunch under the trees - freshly caught fish is prepared as sushi or sashimi and you can have a stir-fry of fresh vegetables that have come from the garden in the middle of the island. It's heaven.
NJ

· Riverside Restaurant, West Bay, Bridport, Dorset, 01308 422011. Doc Martin is on ITV1 on Thursdays at 9pm

Neil Morrissey, actor

Sex or food?

'Both together might get a bit messy, although I know that people do try to mix them'

Food has always had a male slant. When you think about the great chefs down the centuries, they have almost exclusively been men. Perhaps the reason the profession is so male-dominated is because of the extreme temperatures in restaurant kitchens, or it might have something to do with the chemistry of cooking. Women are usually the cooks at home, while men cook to impress the public with their culinary wizardry.

I recently stayed with some Bedouin tribes in Jordan, where the women did the bread-making while the men slaughtered and butchered the goat for us. It was all very macho, and not a million miles from our culture. We've only recently begun to realise that women can take the heat in the professional kitchen. The head chef of the club I own, Hurst House in London, is female and a fabulous cook. She trained under the Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett.

Those kind of old-fashioned rules never applied to my life. Usually my girlfriend Emma and I are in the kitchen at the same time, helping each other out. The thing that gives me most satisfaction is the thing I'm most familiar with: a big Sunday roast. I cook it if I'm going to show off. Everything will be al dente, crisp and gorgeous. I do caramelised carrots or parsnips, perfect goose-fat roast potatoes.

My son has an eclectic attitude towards food, which I recognise in myself. I'll try anything. I like to patronise local restaurants as well as ones that are exotic and new. My regular is Florians, a local we've been going to for years. The owners are northern Italian and Sicilian, so you get that range of wonderful dishes and a good selection of wines. Hurst House is a private social club for foodies and uses food bought and prepared fresh each day.

I don't know what it is about our country and stale grease. Our sausage-bacon-eggs-fish-and-chips attitude is a cultural thing, a propagandist hangover from the war: feed up your man, get him ready for war. Women are expected to eat like birds. The other week Emma was in a steak house in the US and they said, 'You wouldn't like the New York steak, it's 36oz - perhaps you'd prefer the nine ounce medallions of fillet.' She was shocked. 'No, give me a New York steak.' she said. 'Just because I look diminutive doesn't mean I can't eat 36oz of raw meat. Go on, slap it on the plate!'

Chloe Diski

· Hurst House, Mercer Street, London, WC1, 020 7240 6131; www.hurst-house.co.uk; Florians , Topsfield Parade, London N8, 020 8348 8348

Boris Johnson MP

Sex or food?

'They're both indispensable. They're both vital to human survival ... The answer's sex, by the way'

Food is good, isn't it? Except eggs. They're evil. Cinnamon too. Death to cinnamon. My favourite thing is bangers, mash and mustard, with red wine. I do drink quite a lot of wine and champagne, at least a bottle a day. It doesn't matter if it's expensive or not because all wine is good.

Every morning I wake completely famished. I normally go for a run, do a few push-ups, or just wander around with a newspaper. After all that I'll have a cup of coffee with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter and marmalade on toast. At this point I'm still wandering round reading the news, while my family eats at the table. I might even have some cold spaghetti or a chop or two, if there is some left over from my kids' meal the night before.

At work I don't snack apart from a few chocolate croissants mid-morning to keep the wolf from the door, and I'll always have a latte coffee. For lunch I eat any old thing. I go for lunch in restaurants quite a lot, but I don't care where I go. Why don't men cook so much? Because restaurants are so cheap and so good. There is no bigger fan of food than me, but I can't stand people writing about it. It must be some puritan streak in me, but I find the detailed discussion of tastes and sensations nauseating and very distressing to read. Like a sex scene, I want to get it over with.

I can cook fish pie, spaghetti, chicken, lamb, beef and pancakes. I've tried to make pumpkin pie out of all the mulch and gunk that you usually throw away. None of my family would eat any of it. The pastry was rather like a salty piece of mud.

As for bloody Hugh Fearnley bloody Whittingstall, he's got a lot to answer for. That man has persuaded thousands of innocent people to pick nettles and boil them up in the delusion that they are making something fit for consumption. I spent hours finding the one patch of nettles that

I haven't pissed on, I harvested them according to Hugh's recipe, ground them up, added the stock and it was exactly as you'd expect - just like eating a bunch of nettles. What else do I know about cooking? Here's a tip about spaghetti. Ketchup. You can't go wrong.
CD

· Ciao Bella, Lambs Conduit Street, London WC1, 020 7242 4119. Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of the Spectator.

Rod Stewart, singer

Sex or food?
Sex, most definitely

I never eat before a gig, because you need to keep the diaphragm empty before a show, so most singers eat afterwards, and even then I'll eat very, very lightly. Usually I'll eat on the plane afterwards because we'll finish the show, then run straight out the back door and into the car and straight to the airport and take off, and I'll have my meal on board, which is the grand way of touring nowadays. I don't have a personal chef on the plane, but usually we have our own chefs backstage, which is pretty standard now for most big touring bands.

My rider when I'm on tour has always been pretty simple. If you walked into my dressing room you'd find one bottle of Barcardi, three or four Coca-Colas and a bottle of wine, and that's it. No wine gums or any ridiculous request like that.

When I was first touring, managers didn't pay any attention to what you ate or drank, but then, when you're younger, I think you're able to eat more or less what you want. The other factor with me is I've played football all my life, so because of that I've always been very conscious of what I put into my body.

Drink is another matter, because we always drank ourselves into oblivion with the Faces. I've slowed up a little now of course, but I still enjoy a glass of wine or two, of an evening. But back then one of the Faces - I better not tell you who - used to wake up to a plate of eggs and bacon and a glass of Scotch every morning. We used to eat pretty much whatever we wanted to. We were all skinny little shits, and because of the hectic lifestyle we never put on weight. You can't do it when you get to my vintage age of 60; you have to be more careful.

Do I cook at home? Not at all, haven't got a clue! We have a couple of chefs at home, one of who cooks during the day, and one who cooks at night. They cook everything without fat and without salt, and we never eat great portion sizes.

I do tend to eat differently when I'm in Los Angeles to Britain. In LA we tend to eat lighter meals and drink a lot more water and when we're in England we tend to eat stodgier foods. I don't really miss any English food when I'm in Los Angeles, apart from maybe a nice Scotch egg down my local pub. But wherever I am I try to eat well, and eat in the best restaurants. I never eat large amounts and keep red meat down to twice a week at most, eat plenty of fish; I'm not too keen on fruit.

My fiancée, Penny, has also influenced my eating habits because she's a very healthy girl. How would I celebrate nowadays? Well, Penny says we'll be celebrating the birth of the new baby in the traditional manner, whatever that may be. As for whether I'll be having a traditional boy's night out to wet the baby's head -well, I'm always having a boy's night out!
LB

· Beverly Hills Hotel, 9641 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, California, 001 310 276 2251

Des Lynam, presenter

Sex or Food?

'It's a comfort thing. If a man feels comfortable, he'll enjoy life more. It can come from food, or sex'

In the old days, professional football players used to eat a plate of fish and chips or a steak before they went out on the pitch, which meant their body was much more concerned with digesting food than running around the pitch and winning the match. They were just blessed with the good fortune of being athletic, despite maltreating their own bodies. Sportsmen's approach to diet has completely turned around in the last 20 years. Now, football clubs have a very modern system in place. They do blood tests on their players, give them the right food balance and special menus if they are lacking in something. Consequently, players run at faster speeds, have much more stamina, and make it a better game to watch.

I've always thought that women are better at catering and dealing with food. My favourite restaurant, The River Cafe, is run by two women. They put so much effort and art into their food. When it comes to home cooking, women also do it much better than men. I've been too busy in my life to cook. I make porridge every morning, if you call that cooking. You're thinking: 'That's not cooking, that's just heating and stirring.' You're probably right.

I'm like most other men: when I do cook, I go for simplicity. Men are concerned about doing it quickly and not being over-elaborate. You don't want to have pots and pans all over the place. It's laziness probably, but it might also have something to do with never cooking when I was a child. I was born in the west of Ireland but I was brought up in Brighton. My mother was a great cook and my father was a keen gardener, which was a good recipe for eating the right things. When I was a small guy in the post-war years - back when chicken was a luxury and eating rabbit the norm - we used to eat a lot of what would nowadays be considered bad for you. I still carry around a hankering for bread and dripping, steamed pudding, and sweet macaroni, but I know they will do me no good, so I avoid them.

I've become far more aware of my diet as I've grown older. When I was a younger guy I had such a busy life that I probably skipped some meals and ate a fair bit of rubbish, especially when I lived on my own. But in recent years I've been living a more settled lifestyle with my partner, Rose. We eat at home a lot and cook the right stuff. It's not doctor's orders and I'm not sure that it makes an awful lot of difference to my health, but I try to be sensible.

Luckily I've never been over-heavy. If I could, I'd have a have a typical manly dish of hot chicken vindaloo every day along with Häagen-Dazs ice cream (wonderful for the soul). That is, if I was stupid, and wanted a huge fat intake and a big belly.
CD

· The River Cafe, Rainville Rd, London W6, 020 7386 4200; www.rivercafe.co.uk. Des Lynam is the presenter of Countdown on Channel 4. His autobiography I Should Have Been At Work! is out now (Harper Collins, £18.99)

Tom Parker Bowles, food writer

Sex or food?

'Both, though probably not at the same time'

Men and food are a fairly natural combination, but no more natural than women and food. It's all too easy to spout stereotypes and say that men are really messy and reticent cooks. The idea that men don't cook is rubbish. I do all the cooking in my house. In fact, I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to the kitchen. Although my wife Sarah is a really good cook, she lets me do it rather than having me hovering behind her, giving her tips.

When I was young we only had cooks when we were entertaining. I often helped out in the kitchen cooking meringues and cakes, the usual childhood stuff. I find pleasure in cooking because it is one of those things where you get a result in the end. It's much more fun than anything else. I always cook for myself because I'm so greedy; I love not having to share anything, and not having to worry about people's food likes and dislikes.

I might be a good home cook, but I certainly couldn't survive in a professional kitchen. There comes a point when you get too old to be shouted at. There is definitely an inconsistency between the sexes when it comes to restaurant kitchens. When you think of the top British chefs you could count the females on one hand. I think that's because men have carried on doing their usual 'we're the boss' sort of thing: it's a very macho environment. Men are supposed to be competitive about what they eat, but I think you soon grow out of that. I remember geting pissed at university and having a 'who-can-eat-the-hottest-curry' competition. Now I only do that with my wife, who loves chilli as much as I do. I can't beat her; we're equally matched.

What always depresses me is when either men or women don't like eating. My wife, my sister, my mother, all the girls I know eat as much as I do. That is, a lot. Hearty appetites are hugely attractive. I suppose men do go on diets just like women, they just hide it more.

I eat what I want but I know I would be a fat bastard if I didn't run. I hate exercising but that's the payoff. Anyway, I've resigned myself to being fat when I'm older.
CD

· Kensington Place, Kensington Church Street, London W8, 020 7727 3184