'Bourdain' author shares her story in new memoir

USA Today

02-04-2025

'Bourdain' author shares her story in new memoir | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on April 2, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: Women in the culinary world have long fought to be heard, respected and given full credit for their contributions. With a career spent both cooking and writing about food alongside well-known chefs and television personalities Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever has a unique perspective on navigating the complex world of food culture. She is the best-selling author of 'Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography,' a collection of interviews with those who knew him personally and professionally, and co-author of 'World Travel: An Irreverent Guide,' with Anthony Bourdain. She joins us on The Excerpt to discuss her new memoir 'Care and Feeding,' which is on bookshelves now.
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Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt, I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.
Women in the culinary world have long fought to be heard, respected, and given full credit for their contributions, their rightful place at the table. With a career spent both cooking and writing about food alongside well-known chefs and television personalities, Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever has a unique perspective on navigating the complex world of food culture. She's the bestselling author of Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography, a collection of interviews with those who knew him personally and professionally, and co-author of World Travel: An Irreverent Guide with Anthony Bourdain. Her new memoir, Care and Feeding is on bookshelves now. Thanks for joining me, Laurie.
Laurie Woolever:
Thank you for having me, very happy to be here.
Dana Taylor:
Can you describe the professional world you entered following culinary school? Was it, and does it remain a culture of food, alcohol, and drugs? In Care and Feeding you were pretty wide open regarding your road to addiction and recognizing when you needed help.
Laurie Woolever:
Yeah, I will say that the world of restaurants and professional cooking that I entered into was very high pressure and very high stakes, but also a lot of fun. There was pretty easy access to alcohol, but I do want to say that my perspective comes from one specific restaurant. So, I think that there is a range, certain fine dining restaurants, there's a very low tolerance for drinking on the job, joking around, there's silence in the kitchen. That was not my experience, things were a little looser, a little bit more fun. And this was the late 90s and early 2000s, so that was a specific point in time. I do think that kitchens remain a high pressure, high stakes environment, there is a lot of goofing around, and a lot of camaraderie, a lot of ways to blow off steam, but I do think that things have changed for the better, that's my anecdotal understanding from speaking to friends who are still in the business.
Dana Taylor:
I was going to ask you about working in high pressure environments, you write about the challenges of finding your path while working in various high pressure environments within the culinary world, in broad terms, what did survival mean to you then, and what does it mean to you now?
Laurie Woolever:
I think at the time, survival meant getting along with people, going along, if there was someone that was in power that was doing something untoward or uncomfortable, it was about... And this was my experience, and I wrote about it in the book. I tried to diffuse it quietly and privately, and not to make a scene about it because I knew that would lead to blowback. I think survival was just making and saving enough money to be able to live in New York City. And in some ways that is still the case. Working as a writer, living in New York, raising a child, it is continuing to hustle every day to try and make money. But I think that I am a much more confident person now, and a much more calm person now, I did give up drinking and doing drugs several years ago, and that has made a big difference in my life. So, in a lot of ways, it's easier to survive and to get by when your life is quieter and calmer and not so chaotic.
Dana Taylor:
You spent a good deal of your career working with two larger-than-life personalities, it's clear from your book that both Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain helped propel your writing career. Let's start with the good stuff. Batali's Restaurant Babbo was at one time the most sought-after restaurant in New York City, for you, what was the upside of being there?
Laurie Woolever:
It was really exciting to be headquartered at Babbo, to be at this place that had just opened to huge critical acclaim, there were a certain number of seats and probably 10 times as many people looking to get a seat in the restaurant every single night, as there was availability. So, that really just led to an electric sense of I'm in the center of something really great. And my colleagues were all at the top of their game, young, and youngish, and very excited about being somewhere that was really one of the best restaurants in New York. And all of that came with access to opportunity for me. Mario had a lot of power in the marketplace and media, real estate, business, and so he was able to connect me with a lot of people who were helpful to my career, he helped me to get bylines as a fledgling food writer, and really just established me in a scene in New York that was very appealing to me.
Dana Taylor:
You also spent years working with Anthony Bourdain, I know you call him Tony, including during his pivot from the show, No Reservations to Parts Unknown. His star ascended at that time, did you feel that yours did as well? How did he help you?
Laurie Woolever:
Over the course of being Tony's assistant, which was just under a decade, I definitely found that I was getting more and more opportunities, as Tony's star rose he got busier and busier, and I was very valuable to him as an assistant, as an administrator. But he also knew that I wanted to be a writer, and so he started to give me opportunities to get involved with things that were more gratifying to me intellectually. I did some line editing on some of the books that he published on his imprint, and then we ended up writing a cookbook together, called Appetites, that came out in 2016. So, as time went on, I continued to get more and more responsibility to collaborate and to work with him on exciting creative projects.
Dana Taylor:
Many of the types of experiences you shared regarding working with Mario Batali in the early 2000s seemed destined for a collision with the Me Too movement that took off in 2017. There was a moment when Anthony Bourdain thought you might need to do some personal damage control when Mario Batali was accused of sexual assault. Was there a personal reckoning there, or did that feel unfair to you?
Laurie Woolever:
I had mixed feelings about it. It felt a little jarring and slightly unfair to have to take any responsibility for harassment and alleged abuse and things that I didn't really feel that I had any part in. Where I landed on it ultimately was that I was part of a culture that in which this was very, very normalized, and as much as it's not okay to be touched inappropriately at work, or to be ever to be abused or assaulted in any way, it was the lower end of things, this was kind of normalized in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was working around him. And so, I had to look at my part in it, look at the part that I played in not more vocally pushing back, but also just recognize that none of these things happen in a vacuum, and it's not really black and white, and as much as I benefited from being around Mario and having access to some of those channels of power, that it was also ultimately a toxic environment that I spent many years in. So, it was a complicated personal reckoning.
Dana Taylor:
You've worked in publishing and professional kitchens, places that have historically haven't been welcoming to women. Over the past 20 years or so have you seen or experienced any meaningful changes there?
Laurie Woolever:
I can only speak to my own experience in terms of kitchens, where I haven't really been in kitchens in a long time. Women made up probably half the kitchen staff, or a little less than half the kitchen staff when I worked at Babbo. So, it wasn't that we weren't necessarily invited or included, but that there was, you had to work a little bit harder, or maybe a lot harder to prove that you deserve to be there. My understanding now from speaking to chefs who are still active in kitchens, and speaking to cooks and people in the industry, is that there have been some changes. It's not completely linear, and I think there probably will be ebbs and flows of progress and regression, but I think that many restaurateurs got scared in 2017, and thought about how do we put some structures in place in the workplace to prevent things like this from happening and/or to have a way to react in a cohesive way if someone does have a complaint?
So, I think you see more HR structure, just more supports, more communication between management and employees. But it is what it is, as they say. People are people, stress is stress, relations between men and women are what they are, and I think there always will be sort of a looser environment than maybe in an office or another type of workplace, but I do believe that there have been some changes.
Dana Taylor:
As I mentioned, you've written extensively about Anthony Bourdain, in your new book, you discuss the impact of his life on both your career and personal life, as well as the impact of his death on both of those. What was the biggest lesson you took away from his life, and what was the biggest lesson you took away from losing him?
Laurie Woolever:
I think one thing that really was so powerful that I learned from Tony, and I saw it, he talked about it, I think other people experienced this too, was this openness to the idea that I don't know everything, and I probably can't ever know everything about a subject, about a person. And he had this really incredible way of staying open-minded, of asking questions, of being willing to be proved wrong, and even sort of enjoying being proved wrong, if it meant that it would deepen his understanding of a subject or a person or a situation. So, I try and remember that, I try and move that way, to not stay completely fixed in my judgment of a situation or a person, but to try and keep turning something over to understand all the angles of it.
And then, as far as his death and what I learned, I got practice in managing grief in a way that I hoped I never would have to, but that is part of life is death, and also recognizing that much like he knew there was always more to learn, there's always more to learn about a person. And so, when I spoke with people that knew him for the biography, I must've spoken to between 90 and 100 people, and I learned something new about him from every single one of those people. And I was quite sure when I started that I knew everything there was to know about this guy, and it was really, in some ways, a pleasure to be proven wrong, to know that whatever someone shows you or tells you, there's always more to a person going on under the surface.
Dana Taylor:
Your book is called Care and Feeding, which sounds nurturing, Laurie, now that I've read it, I'd like to have a deeper understanding of why you chose that title. How did you land on that?
Laurie Woolever:
I had a good friend I was talking with about my career a few years ago, and just sort of describing the different high and low points, and she said, "Gosh, you know, you really have made a career out of the care and feeding of difficult men." And I had never framed it in that way, but it made so much sense to me that even, whether it was with Mario, or Tony, or working in various publications that were helmed by men, or working as a private cook, there were challenging aspects of everyone's personalities or everyone's lives that I had to manage, and I think I've developed some skill in that area. So, that's one explanation for the title. And then, also there's a lot of cooking, and feeding, and self nourishing, or self neglect, and all of that, that goes on throughout the book. At some point I get engaged, I get married, I have a baby, my marriage falls apart, and each step along the way, there's some aspect of trying to keep things together, in part by keeping people well-fed.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, it would be impossible to tell the story of your professional life without discussing your work with Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Does this book close the chapter on that era of your life? What's next for you?
Laurie Woolever:
Yeah, I think this has got to be the final word from me on those jobs. I would not be where I am without either of those two huge presences, but I don't want the rest of my life to be just relitigating and retelling these stories. So, moving forward, I really love collaborating with people and helping them tell their stories, I would love to find someone that has an amazing story to tell and needs a writer to help them get it on the page. I am working on a cookbook collaboration with Chef Ryan Bartlow, who has a restaurant in New York, called Ernesto's, and I do love that kind of work too. So, it's just I'd like to keep writing books and figure out a way to keep the rent paid.
Dana Taylor:
Laurie Woolever's new book, Care and Feeding is available now. Thank you so much for being on The Excerpt, Laurie.
Laurie Woolever:
Absolutely. Thank you.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance, our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [e-mail]. Thanks for listening, I'm Dana Taylor, Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.