Care and Feeding: A Memoir

by Laurie Woolever

Overview

An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

A candid, funny, and occasionally devastating memoir of a woman making her way through the food world, navigating addiction, a cultural reckoning, and an unexpected tragedy

In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there’s more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.

Behind the scenes, Laurie’s life is frequently chaotic, an often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating. Laurie seeks to try it all—from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli—while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood.

As the food world careens toward an overdue reckoning and Laurie’s mentors face their own high-profile descents, she is confronted with the questions of where she belongs and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063327603
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor. She spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she coauthored the cookbook Appetites and World Travel. She’s written about food and travel for the New York Times, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others, and has worked as an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Care and Feeding and Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/27/2025

In this profane, exhilarating autobiography, Woolever (World Travel)—a former cook and assistant to Anthony Bourdain—takes readers on a ride-along through her turbulent decades in the food industry. After falling in love with cooking during college, Woolever moved to New York City in 1996, stumbling “into the food world at a time when cooking and eating became an increasingly respectable and well-documented form of mass entertainment.” She worked odd jobs while taking classes at the French Culinary Institute, and eventually became an assistant to chef Mario Batali, a sometimes “tyrannical, irrational, and mean” boss who Woolever claims sexually harassed her during her first day on the job—though he also helped her sell her first pieces of freelance food writing. Through Battali, Woolever met Bourdain, who eventually hired her to help write a cookbook and serve as an all-purpose assistant. Throughout, Woolever paints a raw portrait of the culinary world’s hypermasculine work culture, but she steers clear of playing the victim, frankly acknowledging her own addictions, affairs, and mental health struggles, which nearly derailed her career before 12-step meetings helped her get sober. These rowdy reflections enlighten and entertain. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Gritty, unflinching, powerful.” — Nigella Lawson

“Care and Feeding is literary proof that the lives and stories of women so often pushed behind the scenes are always so much more interesting, dynamic, and delicious than the stories we’ve been sold. Woolever's voice, representing women born into a particular kind of world that required shapeshifting and quiet transgressions, is now loud and clear and heroic.” — Lisa Donovan, author of Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger

“You ever clam up around a person because you think they’re so cool and smart that whatever you say will land like an insect on their intellectual windshield? That’s how I feel about Laurie. The only difference is that she’ll slow the car down to not let you splatter, no matter how wittily her mind is racing. Something rare happens when deadpan humor meets sincerity. It’s like when acid hits an oil. Emulsion. Care and Feeding feels so cinematic, almost fictional, yet incredibly real. This is a wonderfully written memoir that reads like a novel, with the most stupendous characters to boot. I know this book is largely about overcoming addiction and being able to write about it on the other side, but call me addicted, because I cannot put this book down!” — Roy Choi, chef

“I was riveted by this fast-paced, scrupulously honest, and searching memoir that leaves no stone unturned, from the restaurant-world insider adventures of Laurie Woolever’s early career and the outsized personalities she encountered along the way to her heroic and unvarnished struggles with marriage, motherhood, and work. Fans of Woolever’s writing about Anthony Bourdain will not be disappointed by this deeply personal and elegantly wrought story of sacrifice, love, and everything Woolever ate and drank along the way to her current hard-won happiness and sobriety.” — Emily Gould, author of Perfect Tunes

"A deliciously juicy, profoundly-relatable, and thought-provoking ride, an exploration of how we survive male-dominated worlds when the deck is so often stacked against us."  — Jennifer Romolini, author of Ambition Monster

"Profane, exhilirating...These rowdy reflections enlighten and entertain." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An intimate dispatch from an inside player...[A] fundamentally kind and generous book. [Woolever] 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 feeds. She cares. And we read and care too.” — New York Times

"The success of Care and Feeding is in Woolever’s keen storytelling. She knows how to craft a story, and guide us along multiple paths simultaneously...She allows us in, and we can see ourselves reflected in her success and failures...while Woolever may have found identity in her proximity to powerful men, in telling her story, she reclaims her own narrative, and is well on her way to becoming a celebrity in her own right.” — Chicago Review of Books

From the Publisher

2024-12-28
A tale of celebrity kitchen mayhem.

Woolever came onto the high-end New York restaurant scene at 22, “the correct age to eat shit at a poverty-­wage job that I hated, while living in a wet hole in the ground.” The first wet hole belonged to Mario Batali, the once-eminent empire-building chef who fell afoul of the dawning #MeToo culture with behavior that would make even the most unapologetic horndog blush: “His handsiness and constant dirty jokes and innuendo signified that it was OK, even encouraged, to squeeze and flirt with and grope each other,” Woolever recounts, and in the end, it brought him down. To her good fortune, Woolever wasn’t there for that end, having since—at Batali’s engineering—gone to work for Anthony Bourdain, the angel on Woolever’s shoulder to Batali’s devil. Much of what Woolever has to say about Bourdain is available, in one voice or another, in the oral biographyBourdain that she assembled after his death, just as much of what she has to say about restaurant work is told, and far better, in Bourdain’s own breakthrough book,Kitchen Confidential. What is not available elsewhere is an enumeration—that eventually becomes tedious and then numbing—of Woolever’s own bad behavior: pickup sex and numerous affairs while married and raising a child, abundant drugs and an endless flow of alcohol, lies and evasions and missed days of work, and all the rest. It’s noteworthy, and a detriment, that Woolever is harshly judgmental of just about everyone but herself (and, for the most part, Bourdain), cutting herself innumerable breaks for decades of infidelities and addictions until finally allowing that sobriety works better. “If Tony were still alive,” she writes, “I’d almost certainly still be working for him, maybe collaborating on a new book, instead of having written this one.” Yes, and more’s the pity.

This is one meal you can skip.

Kirkus Reviews