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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
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
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.
South China Morning Post
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Meet Laurie Woolever: Anthony Bourdain's ex-assistant – who also worked for Mario Batali – details the days leading up to his death in her new memoir and opens up about her affairs and addictions
Anthony Bourdain's former assistant and co-writer is revealing the last exchange she had with the popular chef, author and TV host hours before his 2018 suicide. The Parts Unknown presenter hanged himself that June in his hotel room in Alsace, France, where he was filming the hit CNN travel series. He was 61. The tragedy occurred on the heels of the National Enquirer's asking Woolever for comment after Bourdain's long-term partner, Asia Argento, was reportedly photographed kissing a French journalist. Laurie Woolever with the late Anthony Bourdain in Vietnam. Photo: @lauriewoolever/Instagram Advertisement In her memoir Care and Feeding, which hits shelves next week, Laurie Woolever writes about the days leading up to Bourdain's suicide, learning about his death and dealing with the public outpouring of emotion that followed. Woolever writes that after Bourdain saw the paparazzi photos of Argento, she received word that things were 'apparently tense' on set in France because 'everyone was walking the tightrope, trying to give him both the emotional support he seemed to need and the space to process his pain with a measure of private dignity. 'The next day,' she continues, 'Tony asked me to schedule a number of things for him – a lunch, a haircut, a doctor's appointment, a private session with his jiu-jitsu trainer – for the week after his return to New York. 'I hope you're doing OK,' I texted to him.' Woolever writes that Bourdain responded: 'I'll live, and we'll survive.' The message proved to be his last to Woolever, who assumed that 'we' referred to Bourdain and Argento. 'At 4:25 the next morning, my phone vibrated … It was Kim, Tony's agent. When I answered the call, she said, 'Tony has taken his life,'' Woolever recalls. Here's everything to know about Anthony Bourdain's former assistant, Laurie Woolever. She once worked for Mario Batali
