In her new memoir, Care and Feeding, Laurie Woolever looks back on 20 tumultuous, exhilarating years with two of America’s biggest celebrity chefs. Photo / Jonah Rosenberg, The New York Times
The compelling new memoir from Laurie Woolever - who worked as Anthony Bourdain’s assistant - reveals the truth about being a woman in the restaurant world.
In a sticky-tabled strip club in Atlantic City two naked women are dancing on stage to AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. It’s 1999 and Laurie Woolever, an aspiring food writer in her mid-twenties, is in New Jersey on a work trip with her boss, the celebrity television chef and restaurateur Mario Batali, who has led the charge to Bare Exposure.
Beforehand the pair had eaten dinner at a swanky restaurant. “I thought, I’m not that hungry, I’ll just get a salad,” Woolever recalls. “Mario made it clear that’s not how we roll. You’re going to eat everything, you’re going to drink everything, we’re going to a strip club, and that is part of your job.”
Woolever was exceptionally good at her job. As a celebrity-chef assistant and trained cook, she could handle the excess boozing, excess egos and excess toxicity in the restaurant world in late-Nineties New York.
Then, years after leaving Batali, after a stint as a food magazine editor and working as a web editor for a wine magazine, and becoming a mother, she was hired as Anthony Bourdain’s assistant. Woolever travelled and wrote with the chef turned media rock star for almost a decade until he took his own life in 2018. “He was the greatest boss I ever had,” she says, speaking from her New York flat. “He would be hyperbolic about your abilities and accomplishments in a way that felt really good, but also felt a bit like, ‘Are you bullshitting me?’”
Bourdain wasn’t full of bull. Woolever, 50, is clearly talented and has written an extraordinary memoir about her addictions, insecurities and infidelities as she built a career under two famous bosses. Care and Feeding takes us from booze-fuelled food festivals in Australia to exploring Japan with Bourdain to struggling with early parenthood in Queens.
She writes about how Batali, who was then a superstar chef, grabbed her bottom in Babbo, his scenester Italian restaurant in the West Village. When she told him to not do that again, he allegedly replied: “What are you, a lesbian?” (In 2017, four women accused Batali of inappropriate touching and he apologised. “I have made many mistakes and I am so very sorry that I have disappointed my friends, my family, my fans and my team,” Batali said in an email newsletter. “My behaviour was wrong and there are no excuses. I take full responsibility.” In 2021 Batali, his former business partner and their company paid US$600,000 ($1 million) to at least 20 former employees who claimed they had been sexually harassed while working at his three Manhattan restaurants. Batali no longer has a stake in the restaurants.)
As a full-time food writer who is no longer on the restaurant front line, Woolever is in two minds about whether behaviour is improving in the industry. “I have no doubt that things are probably still rough,” she says. “I don’t think you can legislate out certain human qualities of quickness to anger, thirst for alcohol and power dynamics.”
Early readers of the book have relayed that their experiences in the restaurant world were similar. “Not so much, ‘Oh, somebody harassed me too,’ because that’s extremely common, but this more nuanced experience of the transgressive aspects of [the industry] being exciting and having a lot of pull,” she says. “And also recognising that it’s maybe not the greatest environment for women, or really for anyone.”
In the memoir Woolever recounts sleeping with various “boy-men cooks” who also worked at Babbo and describes, in hilarious detail, the “bad sex on dirty sheets” with line cooks, barmen and bog-standard bad boys. During her twenties and thirties she smokes pot, snorts coke, drinks wine/whisky/vodka tonics (“my internal combustion engine, which ran on booze, had gotten stuck in the highest gear”, she writes) and runs towards mayhem in the search for connection. “There was always a good story that would come out of chaotic behaviour and chaotic situations. I couldn’t stand the idea of being bored,” she says. “As the years went on I struggled more and more, because the idea of just sitting still, alone in a room, and writing felt scary, so that’s, I think, where my attraction to chaos came in.”
Before the fast life in the big city, Woolever had a middle-class upbringing in Chittenango, a small town that’s a four-hour drive north of Manhattan, with her mother, Patricia, a nurse who had multiple sclerosis, her father, John, a pharmaceutical chemist, and her older sister, Gretchen. Meatballs with jarred tomato sauce, cheeseburgers and home-baked grape pies were childhood staples.
After graduating from Cornell University, she moved to New York City, went to culinary school and then cooked (solely steamed fish and vegetables) for a super-wealthy family before landing the gig with Batali. “I was 25 years old, deep in debt, and thirsty for attention and alcohol. I was ready to work hard and get f***ed up,” she writes.
Fast forward to 2009, Woolever was an unhappily married mother of one when she became Bourdain’s lieutenant; after being introduced by Batali, they had previously worked together on Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. Tall, dark and damaged, Bourdain was an adored phenomenon thanks to Kitchen Confidential, his 2000 memoir about chef life that included details of his past as a heroin addict. Woolever managed his endless media requests and relentless schedule, fended off the rabid fans and occasionally travelled with him while he was filming his acclaimed TV show Parts Unknown.
“It was the total package of here’s someone who’s saying something that’s making me laugh, or think, or feel seen …against a backdrop of something gorgeous, stimulating, horrifying, whatever it is, it’s getting my attention,” she says, reflecting on Bourdain’s appeal. “He had that magnetic combination of factors.”
Her memoir paints a picture of Tony, as she calls him, as a generous, complicated, lonely romantic who never stopped working. “He was very open and aware that his way of staying on track was to stay very busy,” she says.
In June 2018, aged 61, the chef killed himself, leaving behind his daughter, Ariane, then 11, whom he shared with his second ex-wife, Ottavia Busia. In the wake of his death, Woolever wrestled with feelings that she could have done more to save her friend and boss. “It’s a very common thing, survivor’s guilt, and reckoning with how things might have gone differently,” she says. “But it’s not useful to anyone to live in that place of guilt for years.”
She published Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography in 2021 after speaking to nearly a hundred friends and acquaintances from his orbit. “The way I feel responsible for his legacy is just to say my experience with him,” she says. “He wasn’t a saint, he wasn’t a perfect person, but this was how I related to him and I’m so grateful to have known him in this way.”
In her memoir, however, it is Woolever’s own story of ambition and addiction that is the most gripping. She writes powerfully about drinking until she blacked out and regularly cheating on her ill-suited TV crew husband with men who treated her cruelly. She details her divorce and (eventually) attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “I was no longer drinking and I felt like all turtle, no shell,” she writes.
Gloriously frank about sex and desire, Woolever also writes about booking a male escort to give her an erotic massage in Japan. “In the past 10 or 15 years I think that has been sort of destigmatised for women, or at least it’s more openly talked about,” she says, admitting that she was nervous about her son, ex-husband and father reading the book. (Her mother died in 2021.) “We can love each other, we don’t necessarily need to know all the dirty laundry,” she says, laughing.
Now more than six years sober, Woolever is in a relationship with a law professor and on good terms with her ex-husband, with whom she shares custody of their 16-year-old son. “I’m in a very different place from the person in the book,” she says. “The idea of the pursuit of the thing that’s just out of reach, to try and chase after the person who’s not quite interested in me but giving me enough breadcrumbs, that used to be very intriguing.”
Boiled down, Care and Feeding is about ambition, addiction and a hungry-for-adventure woman working out how to be comfortable with herself. “I’m in an era of acceptance that took a very long time to get to,” Woolever says.
Bourdain has come to epitomise an Instagrammable ideal of how to live life well: travel spontaneously, meet old friends, find new ones, drink cold beer and eat spicy noodles on the street. “It’s all an illusion,” Woolever says, talking about the teams of television producers and fixers who created his shows. “But if that continues to give people a blueprint for travelling in a thoughtful way, then it is successful. He was an avatar for that philosophy of travel.” Remember, she adds, it is also fine to nap on your overseas adventures and to order room service cheeseburgers - “That doesn’t make you less authentic.”
Since Bourdain’s death, Woolever dreams of her best-ever boss regularly. “There’s always a consistent theme that it was a big mistake, a big misunderstanding,” she says, smiling. “He didn’t die, he came back and now I’m in some sort of position to help him transition back into normal life.”
Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever (HarperCollins) is out now.
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London
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