Women in the culinary world have long fought to be heard, respected and given full credit for their contributions. With a career spent both cooking and writing about food alongside well-known chefs and television personalities Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever has a unique perspective on navigating the complex world of food culture. She is the best-selling author of “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography,” a collection of interviews with those who knew him personally and professionally, and co-author of “World Travel: An Irreverent Guide,” with Anthony Bourdain. She joins us on The Excerpt to discuss her new memoir “Care and Feeding,” which is on bookshelves now.Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to [email protected] Transcript available hereAlso available at art19.com/shows/5-ThingsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of women's voices in the culinary world?
Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, April 2, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. Women in the culinary world have long fought to be heard, respected and given full credit for their contributions, you know, for their rightful place at the table.
With a career spent both cooking and writing about food alongside well-known chefs and television personalities like Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Willever has a unique perspective on navigating the complex world of food culture.
She's the bestselling author of Bourdain, The Definitive Oral Biography, a collection of interviews with those who knew him personally and professionally, and co-author of World Travel and Irreverent Guide with Anthony Bourdain. Her new memoir, Care and Feeding, is on bookshelves now. Thanks for joining me, Laurie.
Chapter 2: How did Laurie Woolever's career begin in the culinary industry?
Thank you for having me. Very happy to be here.
Can you describe the professional world you entered following culinary school? Was it and does it remain a culture of food, alcohol, and drugs? In care and feeding, you were pretty wide open regarding your road to addiction and recognizing when you needed help.
Yeah, I will say that the world of restaurants and professional cooking that I entered into was very high pressure and very high stakes, but also a lot of fun. There was pretty easy access to alcohol. But I do want to say that my perspective comes from one specific restaurant. So I think that there is a range, certain fine dining restaurants, there's a very low tolerance for alcohol.
Chapter 3: What challenges did Laurie face in high-pressure culinary environments?
drinking on the job, joking around, there's silence in the kitchen. That was not my experience. Things were a little looser, a little bit more fun. And this was the late 90s and early 2000s. So that was a specific point in time. I do think that kitchens remain a high pressure, high stakes environment. There is a lot of goofing around and a lot of camaraderie, a lot of ways to blow off steam.
But I do think that things have changed for the better. That's my anecdotal understanding from speaking to friends who are still in the business.
I was going to ask you about working in high pressure environments. You write about the challenges of finding your path while working in various high pressure environments within the culinary world. In broad terms, what did survival mean to you then and what does it mean to you now?
I think at the time, survival meant getting along with people, going along. If there was someone that was in power that was doing something untoward or uncomfortable, it was about—and this was my experience, and I wrote about it in the book— I tried to diffuse it quietly and privately and not to make a scene about it because I knew that would lead to blowback.
Chapter 4: How did Laurie’s perspective on survival in the culinary world evolve?
I think survival was just making and saving enough money to be able to live in New York City. And in some ways, that is still the case. It's working as a writer, living in New York, raising a child. It is continuing to hustle every day to try and make money. But I think that I am a much more confident person now and a much more calm person now.
I did give up drinking and doing drugs several years ago, and that has made a big difference in my life. So in a lot of ways, it's easier to survive and to get by when your life is quieter and calmer and not so chaotic.
You spent a good deal of your career working with two larger-than-life personalities. It's clear from your book that both Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain helped propel your writing career. Let's start with the good stuff. Batali's restaurant, Babo, was at one time the most sought-after restaurant in New York City. For you, what was the upside of being there?
It was really exciting to be headquartered at Babo, to be at this place that had just opened to huge critical acclaim. There were a certain number of seats and probably 10 times as many people looking to get a seat in the restaurant every single night as there was availability. So that really just led to an electric sense of I'm in the center of something really great.
Chapter 5: What were the benefits of working with Mario Batali?
And my colleagues were all at the top of their game, young and youngish and very excited about being somewhere that was really one of the best restaurants in New York. And all of that came with access to opportunity for me. Mario had a lot of power in the marketplace and media, real estate, business. And so he was able to connect me with a lot of people who were helpful to my career.
He helped me to get bylines as a fledgling food writer and really just kind of established me in a scene in New York that was very appealing to me.
You also spent years working with Anthony Bourdain. I know you call him Tony, including during his pivot from the show No Reservations to Parts Unknown. His star ascended at that time. Did you feel that yours did as well? How did he help you?
Over the course of being Tony's assistant, which was just under a decade, I definitely found that I was getting more and more opportunities. As Tony's star rose, he got busier and busier, and I was very valuable to him as an assistant, as an administrator. But he also knew that I wanted to be a writer.
And so he started to give me opportunities to get involved with things that were more gratifying to me intellectually. I did some line editing on some of the books that he published on his imprint. And then we ended up writing a cookbook together called Appetites that came out in 2016.
So as time went on, I continued to get more and more responsibility to collaborate and to work with him on exciting creative projects.
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Chapter 6: How did Anthony Bourdain influence Laurie's writing career?
Many of the types of experiences you shared regarding working with Mario Batali in the early 2000s seemed destined for a collision with the Me Too movement that took off in 2017. There was a moment when Anthony Bourdain thought you might need to do some personal damage control when Mario Batali was accused of sexual assault. Was there a personal reckoning there or did that feel unfair to you?
I had mixed feelings about it. It felt a little jarring and slightly unfair to have to take any responsibility for... harassment and alleged abuse and things that I didn't really feel that I had any part in. Where I landed on it ultimately was that I was part of a culture in which this was very, very normalized.
And as much as it's not okay to be touched inappropriately at work or to be ever to be abused or assaulted in any way, It was the lower end of things. This was kind of normalized in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was working around him. And so I had to look at my part in it, look at the part that I played in not more vocally pushing back, but also...
just recognize that none of these things happen in a vacuum and it's not really black and white. And as much as I benefited from being around Mario and having access to some of those channels of power, that it was also ultimately kind of a toxic environment that I spent many years in. So it was a complicated kind of personal reckoning.
You've worked in publishing and professional kitchens, places that historically haven't been welcoming to women. Over the past 20 years or so, have you seen or experienced any meaningful changes?
I can only speak to my own experience in terms of kitchens where I haven't really been in kitchens in a long time. Women made up probably half the kitchen staff or a little less than half the kitchen staff when I worked at Babo. So it wasn't that we weren't necessarily invited or included, but that you had to work a little bit harder or maybe a lot harder to prove that you deserve to be there.
My understanding now from speaking to chefs who are still active in kitchens and speaking to cooks and people in the industry is that there have been some changes. It's not completely linear. And I think there probably will be ebbs and flows of progress and regression. But I think that.
Many restaurateurs got scared in 2017 and thought about how do we put some structures in place in the workplace to prevent things like this from happening and or to have a way to react in a cohesive way if someone does have a complaint. So I think you see more HR structure, just more supports, more communication between management and employees. But it is what it is.
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Chapter 7: What was the impact of the Me Too movement on the culinary industry?
As they say, people are people. Stress is stress. Relations between men and women are what they are. And I think there always will be sort of a looser environment than maybe in an office or another type of workplace. But I do believe that there have been some changes.
As I mentioned, you've written extensively about Anthony Bourdain. In your new book, you discuss the impact of his life on both your career and personal life, as well as the impact of his death on both of those. What was the biggest lesson you took away from his life? And what was the biggest lesson you took away from losing him?
I think one thing that really was so powerful that I learned from Tony, and I saw it, he talked about it, I think other people experienced this too, was this openness to the idea that I don't know everything. And I probably can't ever know everything about a subject, about a person.
And he had this really incredible way of staying open-minded, of asking questions, of being willing to be proved wrong and even sort of enjoying being proved wrong if it meant that it would deepen his understanding of a subject or a person or a situation. So I try and remember that.
I try and move that way to not stay completely fixed in my judgment of a situation or a person, but to try and keep... Turning something over to understand all the angles of it. And then as far as his death and what I learned, you know, I got practice in managing grief in a way that I hoped I never would have to, but that is part of life is death.
And also recognizing that much like he knew there was always more to learn, there's always more to learn about a person. And so when I spoke with people that knew him for the biography, I must have spoken to between 90 and 100 people. And I learned something new about him from every single one of those people.
And I was quite sure when I started that I knew everything there was to know about this guy. And it was really... in some ways, a pleasure to be proven wrong, to know that whatever someone shows you or tells you, there's always more to a person going on under the surface.
Your book is called Care and Feeding, which sounds nurturing, Lori. Now that I've read it, I'd like to have a deeper understanding of why you chose that title. How did you land on that?
I had a good friend I was talking with about my career a few years ago and just sort of describing the different high and low points. And she said, gosh, you know, you really have made a career out of the care and feeding of difficult men.
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