No Seconds.(The Talk of the Town)(My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals / Portraits, Interviews, and Recipes)(Book review)

Late-night conversation has a tendency to go existential: ghost stories, God talks, rounds of "Would You Rather?" involving death by drowning or, alternatively, by fire. Chefs, a new book asserts, have their own tradition of nocturnal morbidity. Anthony Bourdain explains, in an introduction:

After their kitchens had closed, sitting at a wobbly table on the periphery of Les Halles in nineteenth-century Paris and drinking vin ordinaire, or while nibbling bits of chicken from skewers in the after-hours izakayas in Tokyo, or perched at the darkened bar of a closed New York City restaurant . . . someone always piped up: "If you were to die tomorrow, what single dish, what one mouthful of food from anywhere in the world or anytime in your life, would you choose as your last?"

The book, a coffee-table number by the photographer Melanie Dunea, is called "My Last Supper," after the game. It features portraits of fifty chefs, each of whom replied to a questionnaire about his or her fantasy final meal. Truffles are a frequently requested palliative: thirteen respondents wouldn't go without a fix, whether white, black, shaved, coarsely grated, wrapped in thin slices of salt pork, served with grilled-shirako risotto, or minced on toast. Caviar (ten mentions) and foie gras (seven) are also popular, as are the humbler condiments cracked pepper (three) and sea salt (six), often accompanying bread, which, in its various forms--baguette, rye, Pullman loaf--seems to be the most beloved foodstuff of all. Duck fat is big. So is sea urchin, an aphrodisiac. Whiskey comes up a few times. Blowfish is mentioned just once, by Masa Takayama. He craves clear blowfish soup with temomi-somen noodles, wild-blowfish sashimi with liver, fried blowfish cheeks, and a pudding made with blowfish testicles. Oh, and it would be great if Mozart could perform live.

Dunea got the idea for the project after photographing several chefs for magazine assignments. "They were up for anything," she said recently. Judging from the roster she managed to assemble, mostly by cold-calling restaurants--"I just got on the phone and said, 'Hey, what's the e-mail of the chef?' "--she is correct. Still, the responses were unpredictable. "Who picks ratatouille?" Dunea asked, referring to Michel Richard's request. "I never would've thought that Jacques Pepin would choose a hot dog. A lot of them wanted to be on the beach or near water. I guess it's the opposite of the kitchen--airy, calm." (Daniel Boulud, however, has made an advance reservation for the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.)

The chefs weren't given any constraints on how to describe their farewell ...