Laurie Woolever is a writer, editor, public speaker, and former cook who, for nearly a decade, worked as the lieutenant to the late author, TV host and producer Anthony Bourdain. She has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Saveur and Dissent among other titles. She worked as Mario Batali’s assistant from 1999 to 2002, then spent several years as an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator.
Woolever co-authored two books with Bourdain: Appetites: A Cookbook, and World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, and in the wake of his death, she wrote Bourdain: In Stories. She recently co-authored Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking, co-hosts a food-focused podcast, Carbface for Radio, and is a regular contributor to Flaming Hydra, a creator-owned newsletter collective.
The New York Times describes her new book, a memoir called Care and Feeding, as a “turn-of-the-century, food-and-media-world bildungsroman,” and lauds Woolever’s narrative gifts and generosity. “She is a funny, acerbic and empathetic writer.”
Here’s Woolever herself on the book and some of its key players.
I wrote Care and Feeding to tell my stories of working and living in New York in the early 21st century with and for some of the biggest names in the culinary world, while falling in and out of love, drinking and getting sober, and witnessing a series of spectacular highs and devastating lows.
The main thing I learned writing it was that this is the kind of writing I was born to do, and that the fear involved in telling one’s own stories, warts and all, is absolutely worth it, for the end product.
If I was just starting out right now, I think the big differences in my story would be I would not waste so much time getting drunk and nursing a hangover, and I would have a solid belief in myself and my abilities.
Nowadays when people ask me what Tony Bourdain was like, I usually start by saying that he was a great boss and that I miss him very much. I say that he wasn’t perfect; he was a complicated and flawed person, a hopeless romantic who was trying his best to find peace and happiness.
And when they ask me about Mario Batali I say that he, too, is complicated, a whole human whose worst qualities – his tendency to horribly abuse power and a lack of real accountability for the harm that he caused – precipitated the loss of all the public goodwill that he’d earned over a very successful career.
Richard Hart, meanwhile, is a dynamic, brilliant, hilarious whirlwind. He’s an incredible teacher who took me from sourdough newbie to expert baker over the course of our work together on his book.
I came to the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival while I was working for Mario Batali back in 2002; it was a complicated moment in my life, and you can read about that more in the book, but my chief memories of the festival and of eating and drinking in Melbourne are being wildly impressed by the range of offerings, including all manner of food from all over Asia, and a deep and passionate Italian food scene. I think that New Yorkers can be a bit myopic about our version of Italian food, which until the early 2000s was mostly Italian-American versions of Neapolitan cuisine, because that’s where most of the Italian-Americans in New York had come from. I was blown away by the seriousness with which the festival attendees took the cooking demonstrations. We were accustomed to US audiences who came to be entertained and ogle the celebrity chefs, but folks at the MFWF came armed with a base of knowledge and serious questions.
If you haven’t listened to Carbface for Radio, the podcast I co-host, you should prepare yourself for absurdity, silliness and occasionally some brilliant guests, like Samin Nosrat, Richard Hart, and, in our earliest episodes, Tony Bourdain himself.
I’ve been sober six years now. If you’re thinking about getting sober, I highly recommend it, even if only for a set period of time. There’s no one right way to do it. I have personally found that the 12-step approach is what has worked for me, and has helped me find a level of peace and self-acceptance that kept me from ever wanting to pick up a drink again. It wasn’t easy at first, but the more days I’ve managed to stay sober, the better my life has become.
If you take one thing from this book, it should be that it’s okay to make mistakes and take chances. Not everything will work out the way you want it to, but life is long.
Laurie Woolever’s Care and Feeding ($32.95, Simon & Schuster) is available now, including from such excellent independent local retailers as Hill of Content, Readings, and Books for Cooks.