A celebrity photographer discovers what chefs would eat on their way out.
By Joseph Guinto

It's easy to imagine that when chefs get together, they ask each other things like, "So where do you source your Patagonian toothfish?" Melanie Dunea knows better. A Manhattan-based freelance photographer who has shot for everyone from Vanity Fair to Gourmet to Inc., she spent months finding out what chefs really talk to each other about.
As it turns out, there's a parlor game - a conversation-enabling query - that goes something along the lines of, "What would you have for your last meal?"

For her just-released photo book, My Last Supper (Bloomsbury, $40), Dunea went one question further. She got 50 of the world's best-known chefs - Ferrán Adrià, Alain Ducasse, Thomas Keller, Gordon Ramsay, and Nancy Silverton among them - to elaborate on not only what they would eat but also on who would prepare the meal, where it would be consumed, and who would be present. For fans of these chefs' work, the answers are enlightening. Iron Chef Mario Batali, whose Babbo Ristorante has single-handedly changed the face of Italian cooking in the United States, would dine before his demise at a "small beachside trattoria on the Amalfi coast." Things would kick off with raw radishes with extra-virgin olive oil and salt, and would finish with sponge cake in rum syrup, with lots of shellfish in between. Oh, and R.E.M. would be there, playing a set with U2. Sounds nice. Too bad he'd get to have it only once.