There's a unique cooking marathon planned for next weekend as part of Le Grand Fooding, the whimsical French-born culinary festival that's been rolling into town for a few years now. Called "The Exquisite Corpse," the three day event will feature a relay team of local and international chefs cooking in the kitchen for four hour blocks, around the clock, for 52 hours non-stop. It all starts the night of September 23rd at a Chelsea event space designed by artist Thomas Beale, with dinner by lead-off chefs Andrew Carmellini (Locanda Verdi, The Dutch) and Hugue Dufour (M. Wells).

It's called Exquisite Corpse in homage to the French Surrealists, who would sometimes use a collaborative process to collectively assemble art or poetry. In that spirit, each chef will use a bit of stock from his predecessor's meal in the creation of his own dishes, and the stoves and pans will be passed from chef to chef like batons, to prepare meals for 40 diners at a time. Tickets cost $100 each and include four courses plus a half bottle of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label.

The other Le Grand Fooding event is a more casual shindig taking place this Saturday night, September 17th, when the Elizabeth St. Garden (the green space adjacent to the Elizabeth St. Gallery) will be transformed into an outdoor concert and dining venue. Called the "Campfire Session," the evening will be "devoted to exploring the relationship between food and music," with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem at the turntables. Chef Iñaki Aizpitarte from Le Chateaubriand in Paris will be handling the vittles, while Richard Boccato and Sasha Petraske of Milk & Honey serve whiskey-based cocktails.

Sounds like a fun party, so naturally it's sold out. But tickets for the Exquisite Corpse happening are still available, and if you've got a MasterCard and want to attend both events, there are a limited number of combo tickets to be released any minute now, for $150 total. (That gets you into both Exquisite Corpse and the Campfire Session, with $15 going to Action Against Hunger | ACF International.)