Laurie Woolever, longtime assistant and co-author to Anthony Bourdain (Bourdain’s Appetites and World Travel) tells her own story in Care and Feeding. This memoir of her decades hustling for a place in New York City’s food world focuses in part on her experiences with the two men who defined that place for her: the compelling and troubled Bourdain and the disgraced celebrity chef Mario Batali.
Woolever begins her story in the mid-’90s, when she was a recent college grad renting a damp basement apartment in Brooklyn. Working as a cook for an idiosyncratic billionaire family, she realized that to move on, she needed to go to culinary school. These entertaining early chapters offer memorable descriptions, like this one about a culinary school teacher: “He looked like Barry Manilow’s sinewy and extremely disappointed-by-life younger brother, down to the curly mullet.”
Read our Q&A with Laurie Woolever, author of ‘Care and Feeding.’
Soon, Woolever landed a dream job, assisting Mario Batali at his acclaimed restaurant Babbo. Even as the memoir describes Batali’s charisma, it notes his boundary-crossing—grabbing body parts, giving unwanted hugs, verbally abusing employees—and his outsize appetites for food and alcohol, the last of which he shared with Woolever and other industry workers. Swept up in restaurant culture, Woolever embarked on her own self-destructive path of excessive drinking, chronic weed smoking and ill-advised relationships and hookups. Years later, she began working for Anthony Bourdain as assistant and cookbook writer, and the narrative gives a look at Bourdain’s frenetic career, with its incessant traveling and the lure and burdens of fame. Woolever was working for him when she learned of his suicide.
Throughout, Woolever continued blackout binge drinking, daytime drinking and weed smoking, along with affairs and anonymous sex, even after marriage and parenthood, only occasionally seeming to worry about her husband’s and son’s feelings. Though this self-sabotage is undoubtedly part of her story, some readers may find the details of these accounts tedious.
Early 21st-century dining is defined by male celebrity chefs. Care and Feeding offers a worthy opposing viewpoint: that the stories of women like Woolever behind those outsized personalities are just as worthy of telling.
