She is not the protagonist one would root for—adulterer, opportunist, sexual masochist, foulmouth, backslider, self-loather, abuser of mind-numbing substances. Yet by the last line of her memoir, journalist Laurie Woolever commands respect thanks to her profundity and sheer, clear-eyed self-awareness.
Fans of the late Anthony Bourdain know her as his coauthor (Appetites: A Cookbook and World Travel: An Irreverent Guide) and assistant before his suicide in 2018. Followers of certain #MeToo offenses remember her previous employ with chef-restaurateur Mario Batali, whose two sexual misconduct lawsuits would eventually be settled out of court. To appreciate how Woolever landed positions with both megawatt personalities, she begins her story as a 22-year-old college grad ISO who’s come to NYC.
The journey is relatable, with poverty wages, bed bugs, and morning bong hits. She cooks for the very rich until the lure of a professional chef’s life draws her to culinary school. There, she soon “took correction as a personal referendum on what a complete idiot I was, how unsuited for this hard, hot kitchen life.”
This was in the 1990s brand of celebrity chefdom; Food Network was new and instructional. Woolever is fired from her first official culinary gig the day before she receives her diploma. By the time Batali hires her at Babbo, his hotspot in the West Village, she favors a career writing about food rather than cooking it.
Woolever had been journaling along the way, in effect honing her literary skills. That is surely one reason this account of Batali’s behavior is specific: He pats the seat of their shared cab and says, “Slide those thighs on over.” She plops her bag between them and thinks: “Had he really expected me to fucking cuddle with him in the first five minutes of my first day on the job? He was testing my boundaries.”
Nonetheless, she admits at age 25 being “excited by the proximity to power, money, charismatic and attractive new friends, endless booze, and rich food.” Batali promises her access to food editors, leering: “They’re all on my dick, trying to get a reservation. Access is power, baby.”
When he squeezes Woolever’s backside later on, she calls him on it but then laughs it off. Why? The fact that the chef harassed his female employees was being tolerated, and Batali had opened those editorial doors for her. Woolever’s writing chops soon earn bylines in Wine Enthusiast and the Los Angeles Times.
He does toss her back into the kitchen for a time, and she enjoys the rush. “Work fast, work clean, make it flawless,” she writes. “Cooking this way was a form of controlled danger, risk … and also, very much about sex.” After work, she drinks to stupor levels with cooks and waiters, gets hung over regularly, and sleeps around. Care and Feeding’s prose does not flinch from noting how many times the author vomits or what she upchucks into.
Batali also recommends her to Bourdain, a chef in search of a recipe maven for his brasserie cookbook. She describes him at their first meeting as self-effacing and warm. At this point, Woolever had been cycling through jobs, including as online editor for Wine Spectator.
She meets her future husband online. Their relationship turns out to be complicated and unsatisfactory for her libido. She scratches that itch elsewhere, which will lead to their divorce. Still an addict, Woolever fondly remembers the morphine drip she receives after the Caesarean birth of their son and painfully revisits the new motherhood terrors that follow.
So she is grateful when Bourdain offers her his assistant post. “Tony treated me like a person with inherent value and paid me on time,” she says. “I felt lucky and glad.”
He gets her to join Twitter—reposting her first tweet and earning her an immediate throng of followers. He connects her with his pals at Lucky Peach. He invites her to join his television crew on a shoot in Vietnam, where she slurps a bowl of Bun Bo Hue, the spicy beef and pork noodle soup Bourdain calls “the greatest in the world.” They collaborate on a second cookbook, this time as coauthors.
Woolever admits that she admires, and is envious of, Bourdain’s “public-facing” life. Privately, she watches as he frees himself from his first marriage, achieves crazy fame, falls in love hard, and suffers for it. Knowing his fate, reading the final 60 or so pages of Care and Feeding is akin to witnessing Bourdain lumber toward the edge of a cliff.
It is here that Woolever is especially masterful at delaying the denouement by juxtaposing it with what happens in her life. Her son playing Little League and the #MeToo reportage that involves Bourdain’s girlfriend forces Woolever to reexamine the Batali era (and go on the record, albeit anonymously). Her own marriage ends ugly.
She grieves for Bourdain yet feels undeserving of those who express their sympathy for her, because she also says that she should have recognized his pain. Ongoing therapy, a measure of sobriety, and clarity of purpose put the author on the road to redemption.
Care and Feeding: A Memoir
by Laurie Woolever
Ecco, 352 pp., $29
Bonnie S. Benwick, formerly of the Washington Post Food section, is a freelance editor and recipe tester. You can find her on Instagram and Threads: @bbenwick.
