Latest news with #Bourdain:TheDefinitiveOralBiography
Winnipeg Free Press
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
A life well fed
As is the case in hospitality, Laurie Woolever has spent her career in service to others — feeding the needs of catering clients, the food media machine and a pair of superstar chefs. For herself, she collects only crumbs of shame-filled happiness. Woolever's memoir, Care and Feeding, plumbs the depths of her dysfunctional personal life while offering an intimate view of the equally dysfunctional fine dining establishment. David Scott Holloway photo Laurie Woolever was a longtime assistant to Anthony Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018. She penned the 2021 book Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography. Born in upstate New York, Woolever charts her path, in searing detail, from small-town obscurity to culinary school to the employ of famous restaurateurs Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Cooking for hire and assisting for the diametrically opposed chefs are a means to an end. At least initially. Woolever's aspiration is to become a gainfully employed food writer. Spoiler alert (not really): She's more than attained that goal over the last three decades as a food magazine editor, cookbook co-author and frequent contributor to major publications such as the New York Times and GQ. She's also author of Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, an illuminating bestseller that aims to capture the complex humanity of her former boss, who died by suicide in 2018. While Care and Feeding exists in the same universe as Woolever's previous work, with Batali and Bourdain providing gravitational pull, the memoir gives voice to the unsung masses keeping the whole celebrity food system in orbit. 'Very few people are curious about the unknown women who prop up the work of important men,' Woolever writes following a publishing slight in which her name was left off a printing of Appetites: A Cookbook, co-written by Bourdain and herself. Fresh out of cooking school, Woolever lands a job as Batali's personal assistant. Dubbed 'Woolie' by the red-haired Italian chef, she becomes privy to the disturbing chasm between his public and real-life personas. There's a lot of nuance in the celebrity profiles thanks to Woolever's close proximity and self-awareness. She grapples with her reverence and revulsion for Batali, who introduced her to Bourdain and who was later accused of sexual assault. And her reflections about 'Tony' (a good and flawed human) in the aftermath of his sudden death are particularly insightful. Every Second Friday The latest on food and drink in Winnipeg and beyond from arts writers Ben Sigurdson and Eva Wasney. This coming-of-age autobiography also gives voice to the author's various addictions — alcohol, exercise, love, attention — which she references casually and constantly. Care and Feeding Instead of dragons to be slain, Woolever's habits are depicted as toxic friends tagging along for every personal milestone and professional impasse. It's an effective framing that captures the comfort and insidious nature of a functioning addiction. Despite the dark subject matter, the tone isn't sombre. Woolever is self-deprecating and has a knack for quippy, evocative descriptors — in turn describing herself as 'all turtle, no shell' during a moment of emotional vulnerability or suffering through a hangover with eyes that 'felt like burnt holes in a blanket.' While some sections are overburdened with minutiae about the publishing or restaurant industries, Care and Feeding is a juicy page-turner and a feat of sharp personal storytelling. Eva Wasney is an arts and life reporter for the Free Press. Eva WasneyReporter Eva Wasney has been a reporter with the Free Press Arts & Life department since 2019. Read more about Eva. Every piece of reporting Eva produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
USA Today
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
'Bourdain' author shares her story in new memoir
'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. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to podcasts@ 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. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here 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 podcast@ Thanks for listening, I'm Dana Taylor, Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
2 Memoirs by Women of the Bad Boy Chef Era Leave a Bittersweet Taste
Our enjoyment of restaurants is matched only by our outrage at what occurs in them. A decade after accusations against the chef Mario Batali ushered in the #MeToo era in the fine dining world, blowing the lid off years of ubiquitous industrywide abusive behavior, two memoirs lift up the kitchen mats and examine the scuzz the Bad Boy Chef Era left underneath. The first, 'Care and Feeding' by Laurie Woolever, is an intimate dispatch from an inside player. Woolever was both Batali's assistant and, from 2009, Anthony Bourdain's, until the latter's death by suicide in 2018. She also worked on books with both men. The other, 'Cellar Rat,' by Hannah Selinger, is a howling account from the periphery. Selinger worked as a server and sommelier at a few marquee restaurants, then, briefly, as a beverage director for another bad boy chef, at David Chang's Momofuku. One is a fundamentally kind and generous book; the other, a petty and mean one. Which is which is easily surmised by the titles alone. 'Very few people are curious about the unknown women who prop up the work of important men,' Woolever writes. Since she worked with two of them, it would have been easy for their shadows to stretch over Woolever's own. But they don't. Nor are they depicted as caricatures. Batali, for his part, appears as a generous bully and charismatic tormentor. Bourdain is extremely kind, a little neurotic, somewhat tortured and, toward the end of his life, seemingly bewitched. Woolever, who wrote 'Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography,' manages to divulge nuggets of his life that don't seem like weird post-mortem veneration. (His outgoing message on his answering machine, for instance, was Elvis Costello's 'Alison.') She is a funny, acerbic and empathetic writer. One of the most refreshing aspects of 'Care and Feeding' is that she doesn't belabor the point that she was a hot mess. She simply inventories the handles of whiskey, rafts of gin and tonics, bottles of wine and cases of beer. She doesn't say she's a pothead; she's just high from the moment she wakes up. And she doesn't say she's addicted to sex but is always having it, often sordidly, generally drunkenly, frequently with strangers, sometimes with colleagues. There's little judgment, just consequences, which pile up like a car crash as the pages turn. In this turn-of-the-century, food-and-media-world bildungsroman, we see Woolever move to New York, work as a gardener and as a private chef before attending culinary school. She becomes Batali's assistant (the only one to apply for the job). 'You want to be a food writer?' he asks her upon their first meeting. 'I'll introduce you to every editor in town. They're all on my dick, trying to get a reservation.' Batali emerges as a munificent, peevish, boorish, sadistic rizzmaster whose ever more outrageous antics are rapturously greeted by the public. Woolever, for her part, is mostly ride or die. She matches Batali bite for bite and drink for drink even while cannily noting his proclivity to humiliate and harass those around her. But by the time she becomes Bourdain's assistant, after stints writing and editing, Woolever is in a marriage doomed by her frequent infidelities and constant boozing. At some point, she stabs her husband in the leg with an earring and has sex with a gigolo in Tokyo. Not good. Eventually, the dominoes begin to fall. First, Batali goes down publicly in a barrage of exposés. Then Woolever is exposed, privately. After finding a letter detailing her cheating, her husband ends the marriage. Somewhere along the way, almost miraculously, Woolever puts down the bottle(s). But that's just in time to deal with the death of Bourdain, here handled with little sentimentality and no sugarcoating: 'He had made the colossally stupid but somehow wholly plausible decision to die of a broken heart.' After sobriety, the book tilts toward Quit Lit. Woolever practices gratitude and prayer. While this arc retroactively casts the hitherto delightfully neutral account of her behavior into a redemption narrative, nothing can rob the book of its deep sense of empathy. She feeds. She cares. And we read and care too. One problem with outrage, an extremely salient problem as it turns out, is exhaustion from it. Selinger opens her book pre-aggrieved. In fact, the book seems to have sprung like Zeus from the loins of titanic anger, or at least an Eater article. She sees slights like Kendrick sees dead people. She is 'assaulted' by the smell of petits fours. Her lovers are manipulative 'men who wanted to suck from me the things that were useful to them, leaving behind only my shell, my carapace.' Everyone catches it in 'Cellar Rat.' Gwyneth Paltrow is an 'icy little troll.' Jimmy Fallon 'claimed to be allergic to mushrooms, and possibly that was true or possibly he was just one of those people who lied to save face so that he could avoid copping to the fact that he was one of those people who didn't like a food that most people did like.' The chief executive of the BLT restaurant group is 'Jewish and kept kosher and he loved to show up at the restaurant with a wad of bills so thick it actually hurt to watch him.' The food guide pioneer Tim Zagat is, without explanation, 'rotund, grotesque.' It's the early aughts and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is repulsive, the farm-to-table movement a sham, and Colleen, a manager at Bar Americain with 'straight and oily' hair who fires Selinger for texting during work, 'the kind of restaurant lifer who hated people like me — newbies, people who fit in seamlessly for no good reason.' 'Cellar Rat' feels at times like a charmless mix of Joris-Karl Huysmans, M.F.K. Fisher and Regina George. A blurb describes the book as 'brutally honest,' but there's a thin line between brutal honesty and glib brutality. These are lessons I wish Selinger could have had a chance to pick up from Tony Bourdain, and ones Woolever certainly did. Selinger's foundational trauma is a problematic sexual encounter with the pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini. She renders the episode in explicit, outraged detail but also with a frustrating veil of vagueness. The difficulty for the reader, however sympathetic, is that the incident doesn't occur until halfway through the book, by which point our outrage meter has been somewhat decalibrated by so much relentless flippancy — and if this is what cemented or changed her attitudes, that's not clear, either. To make matters more confusing, each chapter ends on a recipe. For instance, 'Chapter 5: Fourplay,' which contains the Iuzzini episode, finishes with a recipe for Bittersweet Chocolate Cream Pie. It's not quite as bad as Batali's mea culpa with accompanying recipe for pizza dough cinnamon rolls, but it's equally baffling. Unbelievably, Selinger ends her book by dedicating it to the people of Gaza. 'This book is yours too,' she writes. But, quite frankly, I doubt they would want it.
