When we meet for lunch, Adrian Edmondson has spent most of the previous five months in Thailand, filming a TV series based on the Alien films. He is in need of a sense of home, so before he heads to the real thing in Devon that evening, he’s chosen a proxy. We’re at Arlington , Jeremy King’s new revamp of his much-loved former restaurant Le Caprice in London’s St James’s.
Edmondson used to come to the original, back in the day, long before King was ousted from his restaurant group and had to rebuild. “It was awful, what happened to Jeremy,” Edmondson says. “He’s such a good man.
I loved every place that he ran, the Wolseley, Fischer’s, but particularly here. All brasseries, not too fussy. I avoid Michelin stars, I always think of it as over-fingered food.
I want food to be delicious but I don’t want it to be the centre of attention. I don’t want to admire it.” He orders caesar salad and salmon fishcakes.
He and his wife, Jennifer Saunders, “used to come here when we first made it – is that the phrase? – at least when we could afford to come. It was a cool place. Rod Stewart might be in the corner.
Or George Melly. And all the mirrors on the walls mean you can look at people without them knowing you’re looking.” Food has a walk-on part in Edmondson’s cracking, heartfelt memoir, Berserker! , titled for his Viking surname, and his general state of mind as a younger comedian and actor.
There is, for example, a poignant section about how he fi.