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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.
Los Angeles Times
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Top Chef' begets Martha Stewart and José Andrés' new ‘Yes, Chef!' Will their kitchen therapy work?
Chefs who behave badly get their own show. Also, pink Champagne cake at Madonna Inn plus more road food favorites. And can fish be too fresh? I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. 'For far too long,' Martha Stewart says into the camera during the opening moments of NBC's new 'Yes, Chef!' cooking competition show, 'the pressure of the kitchen has been an excuse for out-of-control behavior.' 'That kind of behavior doesn't make a great chef,' adds her co-host, chef José Andrés. 'It holds them back.' Stewart and Andrés are correct. And yet, that kind of behavior — yelling at fellow chefs, throwing pans in frustration, undermining colleagues and sometimes inflicting more harmful abuse — has been the roiling soup that has fed reality TV cooking competitions for more than 25 years. It's also been the kind of behavior that restaurant workers have tried, with varying degrees of success, to root out as cheffing became an aspirational profession instead of disrespected grunt work. You can read about the pain as well as the allure of working in and around restaurant kitchens in several recent memoirs, including Laurie Woolever's 'Care and Feeding,' which restaurant critic Bill Addison praised in this newsletter last month, Hannah Selinger's 'Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly' and books by two chefs and reality TV cooking show insiders, Tom Colicchio's 'Why I Cook' and Kristen Kish's 'Accidentally on Purpose,' which I wrote about last week. If you've watched even a few minutes of a reality TV cooking competition — from 'Hell's Kitchen's' Gordon Ramsay angrily dumping out a contestant's overcooked steak to even the sweet contestants on 'The Great British Baking Show' expressing frustration — chances are good that you've seen how the kitchen pressure Stewart talks about often does lead to bad behavior. So can a reality TV cooking competition really help chefs become better people — and better bosses? Possibly. But three episodes into the inaugural season of 'Yes, Chef!' — a show cast with '12 professional chefs, each with one thing standing in their way: themselves,' Stewart says — it looks as though the cards are stacked against redemption. 'In our kitchen,' Stewart tells viewers about the chefs, 'it takes a lot more than good food to win. They'll need to figure out how to work together.' Andrés and Stewart have a lot of life experience and advice to offer, with Stewart admitting, 'I have been known to be a perfectionist. And that kind of holds you back sometimes.' But when it comes down to which team wins and which team loses, it turns out that good food does matter more than bad behavior. (Note that there are spoilers ahead if you haven't watched the show yet.) After TV competition show veteran and designated villain Katsuji Tanabe ('Top Chef,' 'Chopped') takes all the eggs in the kitchen so that the opposing team has none to work with, he and his teammates are rewarded with a win. The reasoning: The losing chefs struggled to, in the language of the show, 'pivot.' Even worse for the development of the chefs, the decision of who stays and who goes at the end of each episode is not made by Andrés or Stewart. Instead, a one-on-one cook-off is set up between the contestant deemed to be the Most Valuable Chef (MVC) and another contestant that the MVC strategically chooses to go up against. If the MVC wins, the challenger chef goes home. But if the challenger chef beats the MVC, the challenger becomes the decider. So far, this has led to one of the better chefs, Torrece 'Chef T' Gregoire, being booted largely to reduce the competition, followed by the executioner of that decision, Michelle Francis, getting axed in the next episode, possibly comeuppance for sending home a popular player the week before and partly because of her dish — even though she was handicapped by the egg theft. The sharp edges and head games almost feel retro, closer to the template set 25 years ago this month when 'Survivor' first aired and popularized the whole 'I'm not here to make friends' trope that was common in sports and then became emblematic of reality TV posturing. We'll see as the season progresses whether the chefs can turn around the bad attitudes and insecurities that led to them being cast on the show. I certainly hope Andrés and Stewart are given more time to guide the chefs toward their better selves in future episodes. But if you want to watch a show where the chefs are modeling kitchen behavior we'd like to see more of in our star chefs, may I suggest the current season of Bravo's 'Top Chef.' Both 'Yes, Chef!' and 'Top Chef' are made by the production company Magical Elves, but 'Top Chef,' now in its 22nd season, is showcasing a group of chefs who actually seem to care about each other. Yes, there are big personalities on the show, notably Massimo Piedimonte, who often generates eye rolls by the other chefs when his bravado goes overboard. But he is seen in quieter moments trying to tame his impulses and become a better person. And there is genuine emotion displayed when chef Tristen Epps gets word right before a big challenge that his father-in-law has died and his mother encourages him to continue competing. The entire show, from the production staffer who takes him off the set to his fellow competitors seem to support him. There is even camaraderie among the losing contestants who try to work their way back into the competition through the spin-off 'Last Chance Kitchen,' judged solo by Colicchio showing his mentoring skills. When Chicago's North Pond chef César Murillo is pitted against three-time 'Last Chance' winner Katianna Hong, co-owner of the recently closed Arts District restaurant Yangban, there is support and respect shown for both talented competitors by the eliminated chefs watching the proceedings, including chef Kat Turner of L.A.'s Highly Likely. 'Top Chef' used to have a lot more hotheads. 'I'm not your bitch, bitch,' was a catchphrase in the show's early years when one chef pushed another too far. But the new season, which has just a few more episodes to go, is proving that you can cool down the temperature in the kitchen and still entertain. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the motel — the first use of the word is credited to the 1925 opening of the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo — Food's writers and editors joined our colleagues in Features to put together Motel California, a story series that includes a guide to the state's '34 coolest, kitschiest, most fascinating motels' and our team's picks for the best roadside diners and restaurants. Also in the package: Christopher Reynolds' account of his 2,500-mile search for California's greatest motels, a roadside attractions guide and Marah Eakin's profile of Barkev Msrlyan, creator of the Merch Motel brand of retro souvenirs. Food's Stephanie Breijo spent time at the very pink San Luis Obispo landmark, the Madonna Inn, and says that the 'maze-like, kaleidoscopic lair of chroma and whimsy is home to some of the most iconic food on the Central Coast.' She came away with insider knowledge of the red oak grills at Alex Madonna's Gold Rush Steak House and of the Inn's famed pink Champagne cakes — made in the hundreds each week. But the pink cake recipe remains a secret. Breijo did, however, get the recipe for the Inn's Pink Cloud cocktail — topped with whipped cream and a cherry. Plus: Julie Wolfson guides us to some great coffee shops along the Santa Barbara coast. This week, the paper introduced a new feature, L.A. Timeless, which highlights stories from our archives. The first two stories this week come from former L.A. Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, who wrote about learning to shop for fish at L.A. supermarkets with Jon Rowley, the man Julia Child once called 'the fish missionary.' I got to go along on that reporting trip all those years ago and I'll never forget the lessons Rowley taught us. Her companion story on Rowley went into one of his obsessions: '[T]hat fish can be too fresh ... a fish coming out of rigor mortis five or six days after harvest (in ice, of course) can be far better eating than a fish less than one day out of the water.' Tickets are on sale for our second-annual Great Australian Bite. Last year, we were on the Malibu Pier. This year, chef Curtis Stone is hosting the event with Tourism Australia on his Four Stones Farm. He's partnering with chef Clare Falzon of the restaurant Staġuni in South Australia's Barossa. Read more about the event and how to get tickets here.
Los Angeles Times
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The woman left standing — and writing — after the fall of two bad boy chefs
On page 167, about halfway through Laurie Woolever's memoir 'Care and Feeding,' she's describing the hours after her son Eli was born. A nurse helps her attempt breastfeeding, unsuccessfully, and tells her she can try again in a little while. 'While I held him and scrutinized his red face,' Woolever writes, 'she topped up my beautiful, perfect drug I.V. and put Eli back in his plastic box on wheels.' We know by this point in the book that, duration of her pregnancy aside, Woolever often drinks to the point of blacking out, gets stoned upon wakening many mornings, has dabbled in heavier drugs and made one terrible decision after another in her personal relationships. The reader, then, can easily imagine how she savors the floating drift from the morphine dripping from its suspended bag, and how surreal it is to see this being for whom she is now responsible transported here and there in a sterile hospital vessel. The humor is dark, and the confessions are unflinching, and Woolever has a gift for turning them into propulsive storytelling. If you've heard about 'Care and Feeding,' published by Ecco last month, you know this isn't only a memoir about addiction and early motherhood. In 1999, Woolever became the first assistant to Mario Batali. It was a year after the opening of Babbo, the New York restaurant that propelled him to fame. In 2009 — after three years working for Batali, followed by stints as a freelance food writer and an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator, and less than a year after her son was born — Anthony Bourdain hired her as his assistant. She worked for him until his death by suicide in 2018. The book's triumphant feat is in how Woolever balances recounting her food-world experiences with these globally famous men while centering the professional ambitions and personal failings in her own life. Woolever and I are close in age, so I'll admit a Gen-X empathy in the timeline of her becoming. There's the misery pit of a first New York apartment in the '90s, when Manhattan felt less shiny and shut off by wealth. And the restaurant-adjacent gigs (catering, cooking for a moneyed couple) in which work meant facilitating someone else's daily routines or celebrations, leaving little time for either in your own life. And the transitioning age of journalism, when the internet is killing print ads, and thus print, and the opportunities are shrinking and the corporatization feels strangling. She escapes, and makes things worse, via booze and drugs and sex, all of which were intrinsic to her proximity to restaurant culture at the turn of the millennium. I particularly admire how she relays her Batali era. He's messy, and she's messy in step in her own ways. During an early outing to Atlantic City, he rebuffs her attempt to order only a spinach salad in a restaurant. There will instead be many courses, and equal amounts of expensive wine. 'His demand was oppressive,' she writes, 'but there was also a glimmer of something appealing about his commanding me to overindulge. It wasn't my choice to overeat and get —faced; it was my job.' That might be her 20-something self's stance on her agency in the moment, but the woman looking back in her late 40s surveys the landscape with clear-eyed ownership. She benefited from the affiliation; part of her work with Batali included collaborating on a book, and he introduced her to Bourdain. She also talked with reporters in 2017 when publications were breaking the story of his sexual misconduct allegations. Her details about Batali tell their own damning story; she wisely forgoes miring the narrative in too much hindsight analysis. Bourdain in Woolever's memoir comes across as complicated, real, occasionally infuriating, ultimately heartbreaking. She previously authored 'Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography' in 2021, so in this book his presence rightly serves her story: his initial skepticism to her quitting drinking as she's entering sobriety (she sticks with it), her feelings of guilt after his death. These later events happen while she implodes her marriage through adultery, and grapples with who she is as a writer. The pages fly because Woolever is funny, and blunt, and maybe honest to the point of oversharing as a karmic corrective to the many lies she told her intimates for so long. I finished the book excited for more, for what's next for her, for the stories that are hers without the proximity to others' stardom. This week the Food team included 'Care and Feeding' in a roundup of the 21 best spring releases that otherwise featured cookbooks. Among these standout titles: Kwéyòl / Creole: Recipes, Stories, and Tings From a St. Lucian Chef's Journey by Nina Compton and Osayi Endolyn; Mother Sauce: Italian American Recipes and the Story of the Women Who Created Them by Lucinda Scala Quinn; and Margarita Time: 60+ Tequila and Mezcal Cocktails, Served Up, Over and Blended by Caroline Pardilla. Thinking about the season's newly published arrivals also had us considering the larger role of cookbooks in our lives, particularly after the individual and collective losses from the Palisades and Eaton fires. '[Hearing peoples' stories] got us thinking about our emotional connection to cookbooks even at a time when just about any recipe we want can be pulled up on our phones in seconds,' Laurie Ochoa wrote on the subject. 'What makes an essential cookbook? Is it a collectible with a vintage-cool cover or beautiful photography? Is it a teaching book that led you to find your own cooking style? A book full of go-to recipes that you rely on for entertaining or everyday dinners? Maybe it's a book with a narrative — a memoir with recipes. Or a book with some other sentimental meaning.' Her words were part of the introduction to a compilation of 62 personally essential cookbooks — the ones we can't live without — named by Los Angeles chefs as well as the Food team's editors and writers. Check it out. Back to Woolever: She's appearing next weekend at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. She'll be part of a panel at noon on April 26 at the Norris Theatre with E.A. Hanks, Elizabeth Crane, Sloane Crosley and Kareem Rosser. Their topic: 'Finding the Words: Loss, Grief, and Memoir.' Here's a rundown of the festival's full schedule.
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Feeding the soul: Laurie Woolever on food, addiction – and working with Anthony Bourdain
Laurie Woolever is an expert on indulgence. The first time we met was in a dimly lit omakase restaurant in downtown Tokyo, in the summer of 2017. We were both in Japan on respective work trips. Woolever was researching a travel book she was writing with her boss, the chef Anthony Bourdain, and I was filming a CNN digital spin-off series from his Parts Unknown show. We were introduced through mutual friends in New York, where I had been living that year, and where her reputation preceded her. She was known to be private, tough, with a wickedly dry sense of humour. I was a little intimidated. As she expertly navigated a seven-course tasting menu of wagyu beef with her chopsticks, she casually mentioned that she'd recently stopped drinking, alluding to the fact it had become out of control. I self-consciously sipped my own cold beer, picked up sweet strips of marbled meat and couldn't help thinking how tricky giving up drinking must have been, both because of her job as the then long-term assistant to Bourdain – one of the most rock'n'roll food personalities of our time – but also being immersed in a fast-paced New York food scene where drinking to excess was the norm. What I didn't realise until reading her new memoir, Care and Feeding, was that while Woolever wasn't drinking, she was still seeking hits of illicit pleasure. A few days after our dinner, she hired a Japanese male sex worker to join her for an 'erotic massage' at her hotel. A clinical act to numb the discomfort she felt, trapped in an unhappy marriage without alcohol to smooth over the cracks. 'I was having a hard time on that trip because I didn't understand the point of Tokyo without drinking,' she tells me over a video call from her home in Queens, New York, in February of this year, ahead of the release of her new book. 'Acting out sexually was a way to escape that.' She takes a reflective pause. 'I'm a different person now, you know, just trying to decentre myself. As much as I thought I was a worthless piece of shit, I also thought I was the centre of the universe. I think that's a common thing in addiction.' Care and Feeding is a blisteringly candid and laugh-out-loud account of hedonism and heartbreak. It chronicles Woolever's two decades as a food writer, editor, chef and assistant to two of the USA's most notorious chefs – Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain – men whose own challenges with addictive behaviour at times seemed to mirror her own. 'Very few people are curious about the unknown women who prop up the work of important men,' Woolever writes, as she sets out her own chaotic journey of misadventures while working in their shadows. It's common practice for prominent celebrity chefs on both sides of the Atlantic to heavily lean on the work of others when releasing books under their names. 'Without the Tonys or Marios of the world, there would have been no book, or TV show or magazine work for me,' she writes. 'The flip side of this, that the end products, credited solely to the marquee men, wouldn't exist without the work of women like me.' Woolever grew up in the small village of Chittenango in upstate New York. She describes having 'classmates who got up at 4am to milk cows and others who skipped school on the opening days of deer and trout seasons'. After finishing her degree in Natural Resources Management at Cornell University, she moved to New York City in 1996 in search of a good time. Outwardly presenting as reserved and shy, she had a secret wild streak that saw her spend her days quietly mowing and weeding at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and her nights partying in East Village clubs where she would creep home in the early hours 'after discovering just how much vodka I could drink while on cocaine… clutching a handbag into which I'd quietly vomited bile and Snapple'. Following a stint catering for a wealthy Upper East Side family, Woolever decided to attend culinary school, drawn to the heat and excitement of the kitchen. Shortly after graduating in 1999 she landed a job as assistant to Mario Batali, a rising star in the food world and proprietor of Babbo, a high-end Italian restaurant that was one of the hottest tables in New York. 'It was an incredible education,' she tells me. 'Managing the constant attention from press and surrounded by people who were proud of being at this hot genre of a restaurant. Mario was pioneering a new way of doing things, the food was elegant, but he had stripped away some of the pretence of fine dining. It was wild and uninhibited.' Woolever's time with Batali was most notable for its excesses. On a trip to Atlantic City early in her role, she was chided for ordering a salad. 'No fucking way are you getting just a spinach salad,' Batali told her. 'When you are out with me, you will order a cocktail, an appetiser, a mid-course pasta, an entrée, a dessert, a cheese course and an amaro or a grappa, and we will drink a shit-ton of expensive wine.' Woolever understood the assignment. 'I couldn't not drink and do my job,' she tells me wryly. 'That was a lie I told myself for a long time.' Having already developed a penchant for day drinking, accepting a bump of cocaine whenever it was offered and relishing the first bong of the day (preferably taken in the morning), Woolever embraced a work-life balance that often involved drinking until she passed out and navigating her days at the restaurant with painful hangovers mixed with a hefty dose of self-loathing. She also embarked on a series of messy sexual encounters, including 'hate fucks' with co-workers who 'smelt like an old spicy sausage left in a hot car,' hook-ups with strangers at bars and, on occasion, going home with men who picked her up on the street when she was almost blackout drunk. Back in Babbo, sexualised behaviour dominated the workplace, too. Batali is alleged to have created an atmosphere where female employees were regularly harassed (a claim he denies) and Woolever shares stories of her own harassment at his hands – from having her ass grabbed by him on the restaurant floor or being forced to straddle him across a plane seat when he refused to move when she wanted to use the bathroom. When Batali was brought down in the #MeToo movement and settled lawsuits amounting to $600,000 (£462,000) in compensation to former employees, Woolever was not surprised. 'It felt good that justice, in some small way, has been served for people who were very hurt by him, but it was upsetting to be faced with all the evidence.' Did she feel complicit in enabling him, having worked so closely with him? She frowns, looking slightly pained. 'That's a complicated question. I did speak up on my own behalf when he groped me, but I think it's important to note there was a massive power imbalance at play. Powerful men in an industry that's very desirable get to use their power to get away with whatever they want. If I had spoken up in a public way, I don't believe it would have changed anything, except I probably would have lost my job.' Eventually, Woolever decided it was time to move on from Babbo, driven by a desire to pursue a career as a food writer. Not wanting to incur Batali's infamous vengeance, she gave him a year-long notice period, after which, in 2002, she worked as a recipe tester on a cookbook for another up-and-coming chef who Batali had introduced her to, Anthony Bourdain. Her first impression of Bourdain was a surprise. 'I was expecting the guy on the pages of Kitchen Confidential and assumed if you speak that way on the page, and you've got this level of notoriety, then you must be brash and loud, sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But that was not the case at all. He was very polite, a little awkward and very kind. Immediately I felt I was met with respect and treated as an equal.' Having established herself as a writer, Woolever went on to become an editor for the culinary magazines Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator, got married and had a baby – on the surface presenting as someone who had settled down, but all the while continuing to fall deeper into her addictions. She was drawn back to assistant work when Bourdain reached out to her and relished taking on the role of supporting the superstar chef. The flexibility of the job (remote, primarily via email) was well suited for a new mother, but also perfect if you regularly woke up hungover and liked to smoke weed. Over the course of the next few years, while her career remained stable, Woolever found her personal life unravelling as she reached for the bottle more intensely. Finally, in 2017, off the back of a weekend of hard boozing and a fallout with her extramarital fling, she dragged herself to an AA meeting. 'I listened hard, cried about my own feelings and did not raise my hand or say anything,' she writes. But she went back the next day. And the next. Until, at last, she stopped drinking. Throughout her book, Woolever's admiration for Bourdain is evident, describing him as a supportive boss as well as a caring figure in her personal life. During their tenure together, her role grew from assistant to the occasional editor of his work and eventually co-author of Appetites, a cookbook they wrote together. When Woolever's marriage imploded due to her affairs, Bourdain offered his bank account as an asset in her application for a rental agreement to ensure she was able to get a decent place to live, as well as counselling her about his own experience of divorce. 'There were none of the assistant horror stories you hear about famous people,' she tells me. 'But I still wanted to deliver for him above and beyond.' Her role involved scheduling flights, doctors' appointments and liaising with the press, but also more unusual activities, such as organising helicopters for quick transportation, finding jiu-jitsu classes he could attend all over the world, or preparing feasts of crab and caviar for trips on a private jet. Today, her fondest memories of him relate to food and travel, whether it was 'shooting the shit and eating ice-cream' together on a beach in Sri Lanka, or learning from him how to cook organ meat – 'straight from the fridge, never brought to room temperature, that's a recipe for disaster'. At the height of his success, Bourdain achieved an almost statesman-like reputation for his artful blending of food, travel and politics. His Emmy award-winning documentary series Parts Unknown took him to places such as Iran, Cuba and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, opening up windows into these hidden worlds for American audiences for the first time. He even recorded an episode with the then US president Barack Obama, eating bowls of bún cha at a noodle joint in Vietnam. What was it like working behind the scenes of such an influential man? 'I think it took me a while to recognise that behind all the invitations, overtures and gifts I would be sent, there was a desire to get close to Tony or get a favour from Tony…' She pauses, searching for the right words. 'Certainly after Tony died, it was really eye-opening to see who stuck around and who suddenly didn't have a lot of time for me.' In June 2018, just weeks after Woolever had moved out of her marital home and was in the process of negotiating custody of her son, she was woken at 4.25am by a call from Bourdain's agent who told her he had taken his own life in his hotel room in France. 'I felt a kind of shock that I don't know I'd ever experienced before,' Woolever tells me, her voice growing quieter. 'There were probably three hours where a handful of us knew what had happened before anybody else did. And it was just surreal to think that everyone thinks Tony is still alive, but I know the truth. I kept thinking, how do we fix this? We've got him out of difficult situations before, those of us that worked closely with him, we'd fixed things… Which is just nonsense, right? But it's where your brain goes.' In the book, Woolever describes Bourdain's increasingly erratic behaviour in his last few months of life, due in part to the challenging entanglement he had with his girlfriend at the time, Asia Argento. The day before he killed himself, photos of Argento looking close with another man had appeared in the Italian press. 'I've had my heart broken,' Woolever says. 'So I understand the extreme pain you can feel. I don't think that ending one's life is the right answer, but that was the choice he made. It was a spasm of pain and grief and humiliation and rage. At the time I felt irrationally angry that he couldn't have found another way to deal with the enormity of the feelings that he was having, but they were just too big.' After Bourdain died, Woolever's life became a lot smaller. 'I went from being very busy and connected to being kind of on my own. It was lonely, strange and unclear what the next steps would be for me in terms of work and in terms of my life.' In previous years, Woolever's first response to uncomfortable feelings would have been to get drunk. With her marriage over and her boss dead, was she tempted? She shakes her head, 'I was not. I was deep enough into not drinking at that point that I knew, if things are bad, you're not going to make it better by having a drink. You're actually going to make it worse. But I was still smoking pot like it was my job. When I would have to go into Manhattan to pick up Tony's mail after he died I would get really stoned, and then get on the subway and cry.' Today, Woolever is six years and four months sober – no alcohol and no weed – a statistic she confirms by pulling out her phone to check her daily sobriety app. You still count your days? She nods. 'Yes, and it feels good. If you'd told me I would have this amount of time sober, I'm not sure I would have believed it.' I tell her one of the most moving parts of the book was when she describes her good fortune at being pulled out of the nosedive of drinking before she hit the ground, which doesn't tend to be the general trajectory of addiction memoirs. Why was it important to make that point? 'I think with addiction there is a sense that you have to completely blow something up in order for it to be valid. I had impostor syndrome when I first went into the rooms of the 12-step programmes as I had this idea that you've got to almost die, or go to rehab, or be in a drunken accident in order to justify your presence. But it's just not true. If you're able to stop drinking before any of that stuff happens then you should consider yourself lucky'. Today, Woolever continues to care for the important men in her life, though these days it's less about A-listers and more about feeding her 16-year-old son – a source of great pleasure for her. 'Cooking is a non-negotiable for me. Sometimes I feel tired and overwhelmed, like all parents, but then I remember that this kid is growing up, he's going to go to college soon and it's a real privilege to cook for him and for myself.' As we wrap up the conversation so that Woolever can get to her weekly AA meeting, I'm struck by how she has emerged, at 50, with a new lease on life. Does it feel that way? 'Yes,' she says, 'And it feels like closing a chapter… the book chronicles the years it took for me to finally grow up.' She laughs and rolls her eyes, 'I guess it took me 25 years to become an adult.' Care and Feeding: A Memoir by Laurie Woolever is published by HarperCollins at £22. Order it from for £19.80
Wall Street Journal
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Care and Feeding' and ‘Cellar Rat': The Main Course Was Chaos
Twenty-five years ago, Anthony Bourdain's 'Kitchen Confidential' shined a light on the squalid side of restaurants—bullying, hard drugs, rampant sexism. In 2017, Mario Batali was brought down by the #MeToo movement amid revelations of abusive behavior. In two new memoirs, women reveal what the restaurant business was like for them. Laurie Woolever's 'Care and Feeding' is an account of a turbulent life in Manhattan's food world, where she worked as Mr. Batali's assistant at Babbo for four years and for Bourdain from 2009 until his death in 2018.
