Mark Gatiss: 'I'm terrified we'll lose coffee forever'

I'm going to disappoint you with my terribly proletarian tastes. If I were to be hanged in the morning, which is entirely possible, I would have beans on toast. Because I love it and I have it on Sundays very regularly because it just makes me happy. I've tried to be a lot more adventurous over the years, but I'm basically working-class proletarian scum and it's very hard to eradicate some of that stuff.

I was a vegetarian for 15 years and quit around 2000, a year after The League of Gentlemen first aired on television. Even though things had gotten so much better for vegetarians, I remember sitting somewhere in Soho and looking at this menu and there were three things I could eat. And I just thought, "Fuck it!" So I ate chicken and it was incredibly bland and I was like, "I've ruined everything, I've wasted 15 years of sobriety for that bland chicken!" Then the next day I had a bacon sandwich and it was fine.

I'm a hopeless cook. Terrible. I can make a pretty good chilli and I like to make lamb tagine with apricots. But I also have a sort of anti-Midas twist: I can take the world's most exotic ingredients and make them bland.

I'm really, really terrified of idea that we are forever losing the caff. And I mean that very precisely: the caff not the coffee. This is a campaign that I would like to launch. I was in town a few weeks ago for a meeting, was a little early and absolutely couldn't find a place that wasn't Ready. I'm not even talking about an amazing greasy spoon. I mean literally somewhere that did eggs and chips and a cup of tea. They are truly disappearing and it's such a shame because there's nothing quite like it.

An army walks on its stomach, and that's very true with a film crew. I've seen it often, you can have a rebellious film crew because they don't like catering. They just start disappearing at lunchtime, and go to the pub and have something there. And if you've lost them, there's something wrong. Once I was running something in the middle of a heat wave and sent someone to get as many popsicles as possible in this rare environment. Oh my God, what a difference it made in everyone's mood!

I vividly remember asking for steak tartare and asking that he be well cooked. Because I had no idea; it was just some words i had heard in a james bond movie or something.

Again, going back to my roots, i am a very fast eater. And that's a problem. I have to consciously slow down. I think it's because we all ate really fast when I was a kid, because my dad would have if we didn't. But it casts an interesting shadow even when trying to enjoy a meal. I'm in the middle of a conversation, and I look down and I'm almost done and everyone is talking, "Oh no, I did it again!"

One of the funniest experiences of my life was when my partner and I went to Paris many years ago. We decided to stay at the George V and really push the boat out and, madly, eat at the hotel restaurant. The service was of a stifling quality, when there are about 13 people to show you to your table. And in a very English way, you just start to squeeze because it's not fun. Anyway, there was so little food that when we finally fled – and I think we fled – we went right around the corner and ate an omelet because we were hungry! And it was £500 each for that little meal. Oof, that was a lesson, a lesson.

My favorite things

FoodItalian food, overall, is my favorite. I love all kinds of pasta dishes and there's something about the simplicity of the Mediterranean diet that really ticks all my boxes. Maybe it goes back to my professional roots.

DrinkSauvignon blanc, fresh. On a good day, I don't think there's anything like that.

Place to eat Katsuya in Los Angeles. They do a spicy tuna, it's the most delicious thing. You ...