LAURIE WOOLEVER Care and Feeding: A memoir. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

Laurie Woolever – cook, writer, and fixer for chef Anthony Bourdain – enjoyed the glamour of a celebrity lifestyle. But it came with a price.

Laurie Woolever’s memoir opens with an introduction noting that none of us has very much control over anything in life, despite our delusions and hubris. Her peace with this is hard-earned. ‘This is my story of being a (relatively) high-functioning addict in a world of irresistible temptations …’ For many years, Woolever’s career was in and around restaurant kitchens where she supported two famous men known for their energy, creativity, passions and, ultimately, their transgressions and private sorrows.

Graduating Cornell with the fuzzy ambition of wanting to write, possibly about food, and a yearning to take care of people, she landed work with dazzlingly rich families on the Upper East Side. She had cooked at a co-operative house for forty students and, in cooking ‘criminally simple food for rich neurotics’, she reasoned she could get her writing career started. A few years passed before she was advised that she would never be taken seriously unless she cooked in a restaurant. Culinary school followed.

Scoring the gig of personal assistant to a famous New York restaurateur, Mario Batali at Babbo (the only applicant, which seems extraordinary), Woolever exchanged rich neurotics for a rich narcissist who abused, harassed and threatened his staff while showering them with introductions, experience and opportunities they could not pass up. Her job was to manoeuvre him into his TV gigs, his cooking demos, his interviews, and to co-write a book with him.

For a short stint, she worked in the kitchen, too, when a garde manger quit.

There was something almost spiritual about the whole enterprise. When I was in it, and everyone else was in it, too, and I took a few seconds to look up and observe the functioning of the improbably human machine of a restaurant, pushing back against entropy, something larger than any of us could execute alone, I felt I was seeing perfection …

The life of a restaurateur and the lives of their kitchen staff, from chef to dish pig to front of house to maitre d’, is a high-wire act every single night: working till midnight, working at speed, applying chemistry, heat, sculpture to raw ingredients to create something ephemeral that, for this moment in time, will look, feel, and taste a certain way, that will satisfy, will exceed expectations. To do this over and over again, night after night, requires a kind of wizardry, though there is no magic and the toll is exacted, eventually. It should be no surprise that so many people in the industry have struggled with addiction of different kinds.

I power drank my way through a bourbon-tasting seminar, a boozy book party, a cocktail party, dinner in a restaurant. I drank a glass of prosecco the next morning, before my panel. I slept all afternoon then drank wine and cocktails at the awards ceremony … At the after-after party, hosted by a local chef’s restaurant, I drank bourbon and engaged in a silly flirtatious conversation with an important editor, whom I merrily and for what reason I cannot recall, told to go fuck himself. Back at the hotel bar, I got mouthy to some strangers about Trump, and the bartender politely asked me to go to my room.

Woolever acknowledges she has a problem and makes a tentative entry to AA but pulls the plug quickly. That’s not for her.

Through these years, Woolever charts her development as a writer. Working with Mario Batali opened doors but she lived precariously, freelancing for long stretches, cooking for private functions, and submitting constantly. When she gained full-time work on food and wine magazines, she had a front row seat to the molecular gastronomy movement of the era, the 2010s, and Care and Feeding serves us these dishes in all their beauty and weirdness. Interviewing a famous chef whose preferred term was ‘deconstructivist’ or ‘techno-emotional’ she suppressed an urge to make ‘the international gesture for jerking off a dick’.

The descriptions of her own cooking read like a love-letter to food:

I crushed three dozen garlic cloves with the broad side of my chef’s knife, then covered the shreddy surfaces with kosher salt and anchovy fillets and capers and a bunch of parsley, all of which I chopped and crushed together into a messy paste. I freed the two boneless lamb shoulders from their feathery red netting, rubbed them all over with the paste, then rolled them back up and secured them with twine.

When a work day blends into evenings and into weekends, crossing timezones, into new cities and one hotel room after another, the carousel is impossible to get off. Woolever drank, smoked pot, and took whatever pharmaceuticals she could find, prescribed or not, to sleep, to stay awake, to party, to come down. Vomit and anonymous sex are here in equal measure keeping up with the hard living of her bosses and, like all good servants, she did her job well. When she went to work for Anthony Bourdain, by now a full-time TV personality and author, the flamboyance, the midnight hours, the travel, the mania, became all-consuming and lasted nine years, right up to his death by suicide in 2018.

Reconciling this world with her life with her husband, a man outside the industry, a smart and kind man, gets harder and harder. Her unhappiness, guilt and obsession with her weight is a familiar domestic arc: sex has dried up and so has any desire, but Woolever’s writing moves quickly with constant new scenes, and an array of perspectives from people in her life: her friends, colleagues, mother and therapist. She uses dialogue to perfection. Her portrayal of her husband and his pain is gut-wrenching. Conversely, and happily, her parenting of Eli, their son, was easier – one simple joy in her life.

It is only in the last fifth of the book that Woolever understands that she needs to live soberly and openly. Her acknowledgement of her cowardice, her denial, her betrayal of her husband, is the only judgement Care and Feeding offers. Her honesty here is brutal.

For the rest, Woolever is without censure, letting the stories speak for themselves – and they are all good stories.

Laurie Woolever Care and Feeding, a memoir Affirm Press 2025 PB 352pp $32.99

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

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Tags: addiction and recovery, Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chefs, food writing, Laruie | Woolever, Mario Batali, memoir