NEW BOOKS FOR FALL
MY LAST SUPPER: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals
To quote
Amazon.com, for her new foodie book,
My Last Supper,
Melanie Dunea came up with the ingenious idea of asking fifty of the world’s famous chefs what, if given the option, they would choose for their final meal in life.
Well, hardly -- ingenious, that is. For the purposes of interviewing chefs, that particular question has been an old journalistic standby for as long as we can remember. In fact, Vancouver’s
West Ender poses it every week. So Ms. Dunea shouldn’t be given so much credit. However, one does have to give her marks for having the chutzpah to convince
Bloomsbury Publishing that such an old chestnut could be parlayed into an expensive, high production value tome.
As you might predict, most of the “World’s famous chefs� featured in the book, are in fact, the usual NY-based cast of celebrity suspects:
Anthony Bourdain,
Mario Batali,
Thomas Keller,
Daniel Boulud, la, la, la, la. And too many of them supply the predictable “Mama’s fried chicken� responses, although there are a few surprises and they are worth digging around for.
Masa Takayama, for example, would eschew eating for the chance to cook for Orthodox Jews.
However, what really makes the book worthy of your coffee table, is the amazing collection of photographic portraits it contains – some a la Annie Leibovitz style, some high graphic commercial, several Helmut Newton-worthy black and white numbers, plus a few arresting surreal treatments, such as the shot (above) of chef
Lidia Bastianich in her pasta hat.
But as for the text, is it all worth the fifty dollar cover charge? Well, we don’t know ….
Instead of querying the subjects on what they would eat if they knew they were going to die, perhaps a more interesting (and original) approach would have been to ask what food they suspected was going to be the death of them in the first place.
As television has discovered, the shame of reality can be so much more titillating than fantasy.
