Texas Death Row chef who cook for hundreds of inmates explained why he refused to serve one last meal

Brian Price would earn the title after 11 years cooking for the condemned

In the unlikely scenario that you ever find yourself on Death Row, approaching your final days as a condemned man, what would you request for your final meal?

Would you push the boat out and request a full steal dinner or play it safe and opt for a classic dish such as pizza or a burger?

For most of us it's something that we'll never have to think about, but for one man who spent over a decade working as a 'Death Row chef' encountering prisoner's final requests wasn't anything out of the ordinary.

After being convicted for assaulting his ex-wife and kidnapping his brother-in-law in 1989, Brian Price would be incarcerated for 15 years at Texas Huntsville Prison.

He would soon find himself assigned to kitchen duty - a world away from his life as a musician and photographer on the outside - and, given that Texas is a state which still employs the death penalty, found himself occasionally cooking his inmates' last requests.

This tradition existed in Texas up until 2011, with Price spending 11 of his years inside fulfilling his inmate's last requests.

He would go on to prepare around 300 final meals and later record his experiences in his 2004 book Meals to Die For.

In his time cooking for the condemned, Price would only refuse to prepare one meal — due to personal reasons.

The declined request belonged to Leopoldo Narvaiz Jr., who was sentenced to death for stabbing his ex-girlfriend, her two sisters and brother to death in 1998.

Explaining his reasoning in a 2011 interview with The New York Times, Price explained that he had a connection to the victims - they were all friends of his daughters.

Narvaiz Jr was convicted of four counts of capital murder in 1998 and all four of his victims were aged between 11 and 19, so because of all this, Price handed the responsibility to someone else.

This would be the only man Price refused to cook for, recalling in other interviews how he once prepared a meal for a man who had shot another man dead in a grocery store robbery and received a thanks from the soon-to-be dying man via a police sergeant.

"That blew me away. I went back to my cell that night, and I really reflected upon it and that was probably the last thanks that guy gave anyone before he left this world," he told the New York Times.

According to Discovery, several US states offer prisoners a meal of their choice prior to execution, with restrictions differing depending on the state they've been jailed in.

RELATED | Big picture: Death Row Prisoners’ Last Meals, by Helen Thompson

But now, nobody in Texas gets to request their final meal after the actions of Lawrence Russell Brewer in 2011, when he ordered a feast, and refused to eat any of it.

Responding to the ban, Price told KSAT: "We should not get rid of the last meal. Justice is going to be served when this person is executed, but can we not show our softer side? Our compassionate side?"

Source: ladbible.com, Brenna Cooper, March 15, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde