My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals: Portraits, Interviews, and Recipes by Melanie Dunea

Melanie Dunea, an award-winning photographer, wrote to 50 famous chefs and asked them to describe their ideal last meal. Their answers, compiled in this weirdly absorbing and gorgeously designed volume, range from the comforting (Lidia Bastianich bids adieu over a plate of linguini and clams) to the cheekily self-aggrandizing (Laurent Tourondel wants nothing more than a BLT sandwich from his own restaurant). The meals are curiosities, and the few recipes included are pleasant enough; it's the photographs of each chef that make this book so irresistible. One needn't have heard of them, much less dined in their restaurants, to appreciate their portraits: from a graceful Gabrielle Hamilton nursing her son to a dashing Guillaume Brahimi reclining in front of the Sydney Opera House, each image is iconic, surprising, and quite often, oddly appetizing. Marcus Samuelsson poses, impishly, in a Japanese-style headband made of salmon; Wylie Dufresne leans like a centerfold on a table stacked with American cheese; and Anthony Bourdain poses totally nude, strategically wielding a butchered leg bone. But perhaps no picture is more memorable than Dan Barber's, a soft-featured New York chef, posing alongside a massive boar named Boris. His last meal is rack of boar, of course: "If I'm going, so is Boris."


Now I heard about this book because it was featured on Top Chef All-Stars as one of the final challenges for the top 3 - they had to give 3 other chefs their last meals.  So I was intrigued enough to find the book at the library.  I knew something or recognized about 75% of the chefs featured. My main complaint is the font - it is really hard to read and I wished the questions had been in the same order for each chef so I could have browsed easier.  Some chefs were very verbose and some said very little. But it was fascinating to learn a bit more about each one by what they love to eat.