You know straight away that you are going to get on with Dame Eileen Atkins. “Oh God,” she says, in a stage whisper, when we sit down, “we’ve got the loudest man in the world next to us.” She winces as our neighbour booms out a wine order. “He wants us to know he’s been to the right school and he’s always commanded servants. I really try not to automatically take against those voices,” she says, louder. “But it’s so very hard, isn’t it?”
Atkins, a fit 87 – at one point she gets down on her knees without fuss to fish her bag out from under the seat – hardly eats out in London these days, but she comes here because she follows Jesus. That is Jesus Adorno, director of Le Caprice in Mayfair for 39 years, who now oversees this restaurant: Charlie’s at Brown’s hotel. On cue, Jesus works in mysterious ways and moves us to a quieter spot. “I encouraged one friend to come here,” Atkins says, as we decamp, “and she said the food was lovely, ‘But Eileen, how you can sit and eat with that wallpaper I will never know.’”
