Comedy double-act David Mitchell, 33, and Robert Webb, 35, stars of Peep Show and Magicians, at the North London Tavern.

David: This is my local pub. I like it because it feels like a gentlemen's club, except when they play the music too loudly, which I'm not too keen on. When I first moved to Kilburn, four or five years ago, this pub was hilariously scary.

Very brightly lit, patterned carpet, banquette seating and about six old men sitting on their own drinking half pints of Guinness. On Saturday nights they used to show Casualty on the big screen. Two weeks after it closed they stripped out the carpets and did it up, and now it's always packed, which means that, effectively, the way it was run before was equivalent to a massive sign saying Fuck Off.

We're all for gastropubs. We don't fear for our lives when we go in here any more. I don't know where the old regulars are these days. Maybe in Cricklewood? Kilburn is fantastically characterful, in a slightly grim way, but it's nice to be able to get a kebab at any time of day or night. And if you want a bit of posh you can walk to West Hampstead. Kilburn feels like London should be though.

This pub is equidistant to where we live so we meet here to get drunk and try and think of ideas. You can't write when you're drunk though. Not just because it's hard to decipher. If you try and write dialogue it comes out like all the characters are drunk too.

The key to sketch-writing is what you chuck out. You've got to have more ideas than sketches, and write more sketches than you film, and film more sketches than you can transmit. Sometimes it feels like the easiest way to earn a living anyone's ever thought of, and sometimes it's incredibly depressing. Especially when you look back at your old stuff and see how funny we were then. You look back and say, 'We should get those guys to write this'.

I get quite depressed if I don't enjoy a meal. I feel as though I've wasted a hunger. And I plan my day around what I'm going to eat . In a pathetically small way sometimes. Like I'll plan my trip to the shop to buy bacon for a sandwich, and that gets me through the morning. Similarly, those days when you can justify having a curry to yourself. It's a treat. Though filming Magicians we had curry every day. And chips. Very good chips. The kind that kill you twice as much. We filmed in Skegness, where there are a lot of chips swimming around, mainly in the bodies of the people who live there.

Today I'm eating duck on a bed of lentils, which to me is very modern, and makes me feel that I'm going some way to shake off my 19th-century image. People think that, because I dress like Ian Hislop, I must be from the 19th century, but I'm not really. I love television, for instance, and the healthcare back then was appalling. Rob is having cabbage, which he likes because it adds texture to a dish. Which is vital. We'd tell that to any chef. If we knew what we were talking about we could draw a tenuous link between food and comedy by mentioning timing, but we don't.

When we're together we do get recognised sometimes. In a restaurant though, someone will spot you, and either come over or forget about it. Sometimes if we're walking around, people do recognise us and get a bit confused. They don't know where they know you from, or they don't quite believe that someone off the TV can exist in this reality. It's a bit frightening if they get excited. Especially because we don't know who they are - they have all the power.

We ate here once with Matt Lucas and his charming young man Kevin, which was nice. He emailed us to say he liked our work, so we met up. It was a mutual-wanking society really. We mean that in the metaphorical sense of course. We talked about comedy mostly. And he told us a bit about merchandising, but we couldn't really keep up with that bit. We did talk about working together at some point, but haven't planned anything concrete. It would be nice though.

We've had a few working lunches when we've been taken out by people. At the very first one, with our producer, Rob was tremendously nervous, and sprinkled sparkling water over his chips thinking it was white vinegar. I remember thinking: 'What a horrible waste of chips.' They fizzed!

I was best man at Rob's wedding recently. We ate duck there too. How did we have it? I had mine nervous and soberer than I'd have preferred. Because we're comedians people were expecting the speeches to be really good, so there was a lot of pressure, especially as I had to follow him, and he was crying. It's very difficult to follow tears with tawdry humour, like putting Only Fools and Horses on after Schindler's List. Still, Comic Relief - that works.
Interview by Eva Wiseman

· Magicians is out now

Andrew Davies and Kate Lewis

Screenwriter Andrew Davies, 70, and his script-editor/producer Kate Lewis at the Ledbury.

Andrew: I don't really like working with anybody who doesn't do lunch. It doesn't have to be a grand lunch but it has to be a proper lunch with wine. Script-editing is quite hard work so it needs to be lubricated with lots of lunches along the way. There is a move in TV to do away with lunching which I'm passionately opposed to! You need to have those markers to celebrate - a lunch when the piece is commissioned, a lunch when you have a first draft, then another lunch when you start filming ... We go to Julie's in Holland Park and ENO and the Ledbury, of course, when we're trying to impress somebody. We'll have scallops or the monkfish and I love foie gras.

We brought Alan Hollinghurst here but we completely forgot he's a vegetarian. We both went 'Ooh shit' but Kate proved what a marvellous producer she is and had a hasty five-minute conversation with the head waiter. Poor Alan is also allergic to red wine, but he was too shy to say so at the time. In fact it turns out he is really severely allergic to three things in life: cheese, red wine and chocolate. And we just thought, 'Poor bugger!' because we could happily live on nothing else.

I first met Kate in 1999 and I was a bit sorry because my usual BBC script editor had left. But then they found Kate and said: 'She's rather a posh girl but we don't think you'll mind that!' And we bonded because before she joined the BBC Kate used to lead walking tours in the Spanish mountains for the Alternative Travel Group, and I'd been on several of their holidays. It's mostly aimed at elderly middle-class types. You walk to eat: it's all about finding great food and wine, and they do tend to be led by utterly charming young women from posh universities, who are also superbly fit physical specimens. Although I've never been lucky enough to be led up a mountain by Kate. She also endeared herself to me because for the past 10 years I had been wondering if I was too old to work in this business. Kate was quite earnest at the beginning and she said: 'Oh no, I think that's dreadful. I'm thrilled to be working with someone who has all that experience.' And I don't think she was just buttering me up.

Our other connection is that we're both from Wales originally. Kate's grandfather was a Welsh minister. Although she did go to that posh school - Wycombe Abbey - which isn't very Welsh. At the moment Kate is swimming in babies. She's just had twins and she has a little daughter, Maia. But when we get our next project going - a massive adaptation of Anthony Trollope's The Pallisers books - we'll be back there. She's a big eater this Kate. She's a discriminating gourmet. We're not completely obsessed by work but we're always talking about ideas: things we've read and seen, and why so much telly is so crappy - not enough lunches probably!
Liz Hoggard

· The Ledbury, 127 Ledbury Road, London W11, 020 7792 9090

Tom Holland and Hugh Bonneville

Actors Tom Hollander, 40, and Hugh Bonneville, 44, at Loch Fyne

Hugh: Tom and I have known each other since 1985. His then girlfriend was an acquaintance of mine, and I thought he was extremely irritating, reminiscent of a yappy fox terrier. It wasn't until we were working together at the National Theatre that I learnt to tolerate him. By the summer of 1989, we were proper chums and spent many glorious summer days barbecuing in my parents' house in Sussex - the amusingly named 'Titty Hill'. Usually Tom's contribution was to bring luridly coloured meat from the supermarket. Sam Mendes was a frequent attendee, and once didn't bring anything to cook - it may very well be the sole time in his life when anyone has told him his behaviour was unacceptable.

Memorably, I once barbecued too close to the back door, and due to over-enthusiastic use of petrol to get everything going I set fire to the oil-fired boiler just inside. My parents were away so I tried to encourage the fire-brigade not to come, but they came nee-nawing up the lane anyway. I thought I'd got away with it by painting the boiler. But when they got back it was in the Midhurst Observer, a cutting of which someone kindly dropped through the letterbox.

Our friendship is sustained by oysters, which is why we are here eating oysters and drinking Black Velvets (which are champagne mixed with Guinness) today. I love oysters and all the rituals surrounding them. We talk work when we meet for oysters - we are good at calming the other one down. I have somehow been given the role of oyster-bringer for my family at Christmas, and I always order them from Loch Fyne - I once thought they had failed to deliver them, collected some from the nearest branch and got home to find the delivery on my doorstep, so we ended up with four dozen.

On my birthday in 1990 Tom arranged for Richard Eyre to present me with some oysters onstage between shows, which was very touching. We also went on an ill-fated holiday about five years later to Normandy where there are big oyster beds. The girl I was with wasn't a girlfriend as I was newly single and made me sleep with a bolster between us, and we all fought. The oysters were the only thing that kept us going.

I like food but I'm not a fan of what you might call foodies - certainly not of food critics. However Tom disagrees: he says that people who like food are the most attractive because they generally can't control any of their other appetites.
Rebecca Seal

· Loch Fyne, 2 Catherine St, London WC2, 020 7240 4999, www.lochfyne.com. Five Days, starring Hugh Bonneville is out on DVD on 10 September

Alex and Alexa

Channel 4's Popworld presenters Alex Zane, 28, and Alexa Chung, 22, at Hugo's

Alex: Hugo's is less than 500 yards from the Popworld office, so Alexa and I come here on Monday lunchtimes to write our script. But it's often used as a source of recovery from our fairly active social lives so it can take us 10 minutes to walk here.

The menu is heavily organic, which Alexa likes. It's not that important to me, although I do like eating eggs from chickens that were allowed to go anywhere they wanted. Alexa's also vegetarian and they've got a good vegetarian menu. Though she recently went to a Take That after-party in a sushi bar where she got so drunk that she had to eat the only nibbles available - raw fish. She'd been vegetarian for seven years and now she loves raw fish. I only recently started eating sushi as well but that's because I didn't understand how sushi bars worked and I didn't want to embarrass myself. But a friend's explained it to me now.

It's quite expensive here but we don't pay. I don't mean we run away without paying - no, we're allowed two lunches a week by Popworld. After dinner, we get into a cycle of latte, cold drink, hot drink, cold drink, so we do have some bad memories of trying to write here. Alexa tends to draw. A lot. When she should be talking a lot. It will be 4pm and we've written two sentences but Alexa's drawn pages and pages of birds.

For me, eating is functional, but I can cook. Alexa's really faddy. At the moment, it's muesli with blueberries and soya milk. Bonkers. She stopped cooking after she split up with her boyfriend and now she eats out loads. She's always talking about how she's getting fat but I have a pot belly and I don't care .

Annoyingly, there are a lot of young mothers with babies in prams here. Alexa swears a lot and I once heard a child say the f-word shortly after being in the vicinity of Alexa. And they play a lot of Jack Johnson, which is bad, although making fun of music puts us in the right frame of mind for writing.
Charlotte Heathcote

· Hugo's, 25 Lonsdale Rd, London NW6, 020 7372 1232

The Chemical Brothers

Tom Rowlands, 36, and Ed Simmons, 37, best known as the Chemical Brothers, at the Star of Bombay

Tom: In 1992, my girlfriend bought a flat around the corner from here and that was when Ed and I started hanging out at the Star of Bombay. Then we both moved to the area too and it became a stopping-off point every Friday night, usually on the way to DJ somewhere.We'd always have a takeaway curry on a Sunday, too. Curry has restorative powers if you've had a big weekend.

We also have a tradition of coming here at Christmas time for lunch with friends. Curry at lunch is a decadent option. It proves that you have nothing to do for the rest of the day. But a friend of ours managed to get the Star of Bombay Christmas card. We haven't made it to those echelons.

I remember my first-ever curry. I was about six years old and my dad took me to Veeraswamy in Piccadilly. There were big Indian doormen wearing turbans and it felt like the most exotic thing ever. When Ed got married, I was his best man, and he booked this whole restaurant out for his stag do. We went go-karting first and I got into a terrible crash but, after five hours sitting in A&E, I still made it here in a neck brace. We've probably dragged all our friends here at some stage. Of people we've collaborated with, Tim Burgess rocked up here a few times and Beth Orton likes it.

The area has changed dramatically. These days, you can't buy milk on Westbourne Grove but you can buy a Joseph cardigan. Ed still lives locally and he was very annoyed when Fresh & Wild went. I moved out to the countryside when the post office closed. Everything changes, but the Star of Bombay has been a constant.

My wife does a good curry, but about the only thing I can make is a chicken-and-avocado sandwich; and Ed even manages to burn water. He used to really hate eating out too. He didn't like waiting for the food to arrive. But as he's grown-up he's become able to eat in civilised company.

We've been offered our own range of noodles in Japan. Most Westerners want to eat Kobe beef or flash sushi whereas we always want noodles. We'll go on Japanese TV and be given a big plate of ramen. We used to live together, go on holiday together, tour together, go in the studio together. There was a time when that caused rows but not so much any more. We don't live or holiday together any more. But we like to eat together and this is where we do it, a lot.
Charlotte Heathcote

· Star of Bombay, 157 Westbourne Grove, London W11, 020 7229 6096. The Chemical Brothers' new album We Are The Night is out now

Anne-Marie Duff and Marianne Elliott

Actress Anne-Marie Duff, 36, and director Marianne Elliott, 40, at the Mezzanine

Anne-Marie: Sometimes as an actor you just need the time to breathe in over lunch because you've been exhaling all morning. Particularly if you've had a road to Damascus moment about how to play a scene. You go away and it's all still happening. You don't need to articulate it with anyone else: it's just an absorption time. I've no idea how a director like Marianne manages because you have to have this whole panorama going on in your head. She's so good at it.

I'm loving playing Saint Joan. Marianne and I have had fascinating discussions about making the play resonant for now. We've talked a lot about whether Joan is a terrorist or an insurgent. The other thing is she's 17 in the play. I'm 36. But we want to get beyond this beautiful shining image on a horse - with a great haircut. Joan was engaged in warfare, after all. And of course she's this iconic virgin. I keep joking that I'm putting the 'gin' into virgin. I either play ladies of easy virtue or virgins, which is a bit scary. I think I'm going to call my memoirs 'Madonna/Whore'.

Quite often I've played a wee bit younger as an actor - I think it's about accessing that self-righteousness of youth. Sometimes I think you don't get it when you're young and in the middle of it. It demands a level of objectivity without judging it. But it is quite useful to visit that planet - and discover what it feels like to be a child-woman, to visit all those emotional bus stops.

I'll eat at about 3.30pm before I go on stage, but I'm quite a gannet so I might have to have something else before a performance. I can't work if I'm hungry. And the great thing about burning adrenalin is you can have cake - and chips. At the end of a performance you're still very high so going out to dinner is a brilliant way of relaxing. You need to able to switch off. I love the fantastic sense of camaraderie that builds up between during a production, it's like a surrogate family. You get addicted to it. It is nice after rehearsals sometimes to hang out in the green room bar at the National and let your hair down. It is quite a linchpin of the working life. The real treat of course is going out to dinner with Marianne and other members of the company. It's good to be with each other not in character. To go: 'Oh hello it's you again. You who I used to have a cup of tea with and know all about your kids.' It's about remaining human. I still have private places I can go out to eat with my husband [actor James McAvoy]. It's never an issue in London. We're much too boring to attract that attention, thanks be to God. Please, please may it remain that way.
Liz Hoggard

· National Theatre Mezzanine restaurant, South Bank, London SE1 020 7452 3600. Saint Joan opens as part of the £10 Travelex season at the National Theatre from 4 July. Booking on 0207 452 3000 or online at nationaltheatre.org.uk.

Edna O'Brien and Sasha Gebler

Novelist Edna O'Brien, 77, author of Girl With Green Eyes and August is a Wicked Month, and her son, architect Sasha Gebler, of Gebler Tooth Architects, 51, at Cecconi's

Edna: I love coming here. When I go out to eat I confess I like a bit of glamour. I also like comfort. Cecconi's has all those things. It has a touch of style. It looks great, the food is delicious and the seats are perfect. One of the nice things about having an architect son is that he can build something, like this restaurant, that all your friends can come to. Cecconi's suits all seasons and all ages; it's not too raucous, not too formal. They've made it feel the way you might imagine Florian's café in Venice did in the Fifties - with that sort of romantic glamour. And a floor that Casanova might have walked on. Giacomo, the maitre d', a patrician, is above all, calm.

I can cook, but cooking takes a lot of time, plus nerves and energy. Alas, I am getting fonder of restaurants as I get older. I don't eat lunch, but I would like to eat out in a restaurant every evening - preferably at a corner table, preferably on a banquette.

My sons had an unusual and happy childhood, not without some excitements - often involving an outing. We'd go to Pinewood studios and have lunch with maybe Sean Connery and John Huston. Or to the Dorchester with the film photographer Sam Shaw. It was a banquet. 'What worries me,' I remember Sasha once saying out loud, 'is my mother going to have to pay for this big deal?'

Sasha and Carlo came everywhere with me. Nor were they strangers to drink at a young age. They used to have a large cocktail with a flower in it - the flower disguised the alcohol; it gave the illusion of harmlessness. Quite often Sasha would make buildings at the table with sugar cubes.

But it wasn't all dining out. I am a cook and a born slave. Not a born-again slave. A born slave. I did go off the boil for a brief epoch, due to romance or some such folly. Sasha, who was a young teenager then, was not pleased. Opening a dresser door to get out a tin of tuna I remember him once saying crisply: 'It wouldn't do to get out of the habit of cooking.'

I am a perfectionist even with cooking. Sasha is not. He starts peeling potatoes at 10 at night, then forgets to turn the oven on, even though the chicken's inside. But that hasn't broken our great love for each other.
Daisy Garnett

· Cecconi's, 5 Burlington Gardens, London W1 020 7434 1500. Edna O'Brien's latest book, The Light of Evening, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Michael and Emily Eavis

Glastonbury Festival founder Michael Eavis, 72, and his daughter, festival organiser Emily, 28, at Gigi's

Michael: We first started coming here about 20 years ago when Emily was a child. It's seen our family through the highs and the lows - happy, sad, pre-festival, post-festival, it helps us deal with the stresses of running it and then getting over it when it's over. Since Emily's mother died and I married again we still all come here. There's 34 of us altogether now, including 14 grandchildren. Farmers don't eat out that much, so a night at Gigi's is always special. It's all yucky on the farm, so we have a bath and put on our nice clothes. Gigi is from Sicily and reminds us of an old-fashioned mafia type - he's such great fun. We've no idea what his full name is, to us, he's just 'Gigi'.

If they know it's your birthday, they bring a pudding out with a sparkler and the whole restaurant stops to sing 'Happy Birthday'. For years, we all thought there was someone playing the piano out the back, but we think it's a tape now. The sparkler is a big highlight for us so every time we come, we have to pretend it's somebody's birthday, just to get the sparkler and the song. Once we said it was our grandson, Joe's birthday, and he shouted 'but it isn't!' but we told him to him he had to pretend. We think Gigi might suspect our birthdays aren't real, but we always get our sparkler. Recently, we pretended it was Emily's new boyfriend's birthday without telling him. A cake came out and Gigi and the staff gathered round. He did really well, he passed the Gigi test, didn't he darling? We use Gigi's to test Emily's boyfriends, you see, to make sure they're up to scratch. If they didn't like it, we'd all seriously worry about them, including Emily.

Gigi's has always been a testing ground in one way or another. Years ago, it was where Emily experienced her first independence. By the time she was 12 or 13, she really didn't want us hanging around. It's only six miles from the farm, so we'd drop her off with her friends and then pick her up. She thought she was really grown-up but really we were on the phone to Gigi throughout the evening checking up on her - she never knew that until today. Emily always chooses the same, a huge calzone thing, which she's having today and which she always finishes.

All of us eat too much food, nothing overly fancy, just classic farm food. Emily grew up with festival food. At the first one, before she was born, we had a free hog roast and milk. At the second one, we had a free food kitchen paid for by Jean Shrimpton, the model. The festival has been in our lives now for more than 30 years and in some ways has shaped our family life. And Gigi's has seen Emily through teenage meltdowns - now it sees her through festival meltdowns. When it's absolutely frenetic and we haven't left the site for two weeks it's an escape. We don't know what we'd do if it wasn't here.
Louise Carpenter

· Gigi's, 2 Magdalene St, Glastonbury, 01458 834612

· This article was amended on July 1 2007. We gave an incorrect box-office number for Anne-Marie Duff and Marianne Elliot's production of Saint Joan. The play is part of the Travelex £10 season at London's National Theatre from Wednesday, booking on 0207 452 3000 or online at nationaltheatre.org.uk.