Ernest Hemingway's Last Meal Was A Classic Steakhouse Dinner

Famed writer Ernest Hemingway was as much a gourmand as he was an artist, a Modernist lover of all life's decadence. The night before he died by suicide in July 1961, "Papa" Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, dined at Michel's Christiania Restaurant in Ketchum, Idaho, where they were regulars and had a usual table at which they sat. The pair were celebrating Ernest's return home after a stint in the Mayo Clinic psychiatric hospital in Minnesota, where he was treated for paranoia and depression. They were served by their normal waitress, June Maella, who recalled Ernest Hemingway as a kind and gentle man and said that he did not act any differently when she saw him that final evening.

Hemingway ordered the New York strip steak, a baked potato, and subbed a Caesar salad for the mixed house greens that generally accompanied the dish. We know why restaurant baked potatoes taste so good — they generally make sure the spuds are crispy on the outside and flaky on the inside. Hemingway washed this repast of quintessential steakhouse favorites down with a bottle of Bordeaux wine.

Steak and potatoes was said to be Hemingway's favorite meal, and it turned out to be his last. The next morning, as the sun was rising, Hemingway ended his own life. It was a sad final chapter in the story of a man who described the world in ways that still resonate generations later, and who always enjoyed the pleasures of a good meal.

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Ernest Hemingway was always hungry: for food, for wine, for personal connections, and for experiences. In his memoir, "A Moveable Feast," he spun lush descriptions of the nights he spent with lovers, of the sights of Europe in all its avant-garde splendor, and of the things he ate. From simple snacks of shelled nuts and mandarin oranges when he was a young, broke scribbler to mixed fruit wine sipped alongside fellow novelist Gertrude Stein as he rubbed elbows with literary legends in her famous atelier, much of Hemingway's tremendous life was tied to the food he was eating when he was living it. Like Anthony Bourdain, who also lived a sometimes tragic life filled with incredible world travel and poetic descriptions of food and human nature, Hemingway ate and drank his way across the globe, sharing the best of his meals with his readers.

Today, Michel's Christiania is still serving patrons. If you want to eat like Hemingway, New York steak remains on the menu, though it is now accompanied by pommes frites. The eatery currently offers both a grilled Caesar and traditional Caesar salad. For our money, we like a fish swap that improves the taste of a homemade Caesar, but the traditional is probably closest to what Hemingway ate. Drink a glass of rich red wine — or three — and toast to a man who lived life with perhaps as much passion for food as he had for the written word.