Care And Feeding

How do you build a life in an industry that feeds on performance, pressure, and proximity to fame—without losing yourself? In this candid memoir, Laurie Woolever shows you the intertwined economies of kitchens and media: craft and hierarchy, mentors and gatekeepers, class and aspiration, sex and secrecy, addiction and recovery, motherhood and money, reckoning and grief. Across restaurants like Babbo and Les Halles, magazines and PR gigs, and years assisting Anthony Bourdain, she maps the costs of access and the work of rebuilding. You don’t just learn how a creative career grows; you see how it survives.

The world you enter: kitchens, media, and status

From the French Culinary Institute’s knife drills to Babbo’s garde-manger, Woolever demystifies the craft behind the glamour. Kitchens function like militaries: you master tourné potatoes, hold emulsions under heat, and accept that burns and embarrassment are part of learning. Meanwhile, the media and hospitality circuit operate on subtle class codes and conspicuous authenticity—how you dress, speak, and consume all signal belonging. A “hayseed” insult in an early interview and the Smiths’ penthouse of fat-free tomato sauce (labels perfectly faced) teach her that taste and status often masquerade as virtue.

Power, mentorship, and their double bind

Proximity to stars—Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain—grants Woolever trips, cookbooks, and bylines. With Mario, access comes with strings: loyalty, eroded boundaries, and dependence; with Tony, the stewardship is healthier and better paid, but still embeds her in a system where fame shapes credit. She’s asked to manage calendars, write copy, test recipes, and filter a blizzard of requests (from tattooed superfans to charity asks). The lesson is blunt: access is leverage only if you convert it into independent capital you control—credits, contracts, and relationships beyond any one mentor. (Compare to other creative industries where assistants ghost a brand but rarely appear on the masthead.)

Addiction’s emotional economy

Substances serve as tools and traps. Daily vodkas with Alejandro soften humiliation; joints steady late-night recipe testing; Ativan and Percocet tame flights and postpartum pain. The fixes are temporary but seductive. Use escalates from social lubricant to maintenance dose, and the same culture that rewards alcohol-fueled charm normalizes risky coping. You watch the slide: near-blackouts, humiliations (vomiting during an Atlantic City trip), and danger (driving sick on the highway). The narrative insists that awareness alone won’t save you; change demands structure—meetings, sponsors, and new routines that replace secrecy with support.

Sex, secrecy, and fallout

In restaurants and media, sexualized banter and boundary-blurring coexist with professional life. A workplace ass grab by Mario gets minimized to keep the peace; strip-club detours, affairs with colleagues (Noah, Roger, Bob), and later entanglements with Greg and Jack grow from the same stew of adrenaline, status, and escape. Secrecy corrodes marriage and self-respect, culminating in a devastating confrontation when Alex discovers a misfiled essay about her affairs. That collapse forces legal, financial, and parenting decisions—proof that transgression has administrative aftershocks you cannot outrun.

Motherhood, money, and the practical grind

Postpartum life flattens any fantasy of seamless work-life flow. A C-section, a morphine haze, a ranula under baby Eli’s tongue that requires six-week surgery—plus the economic gut-punch of daycare consuming most of a salary—push Woolever to move to Jackson Heights and renegotiate work. She toggles between part-time magazine roles, private cheffing, and freelance writing, discovering that exposure rarely pays the rent. The portfolio approach—multiple revenue streams, meticulous negotiation, and written agreements—becomes a survival skill.

Core tension

The same networks that lift you up can keep you quiet; the same rituals that make you belong can make you sick; the same love that stabilizes you can destabilize when you hide.

Reckoning and grief

As #MeToo reshapes the industry, Woolever weighs loyalty against truth and ultimately speaks to reporters about Mario’s behavior. She navigates threats and surveillance whispers, learning how accountability happens in increments—phone calls, corroboration, encrypted texts. Then Bourdain’s suicide rips a hole in her life, blending private grief with public myth-making. She handles logistics, replays final texts, and resists canonization that erases complexity. Work—finishing books like World Travel and stewarding an oral biography—becomes both income and memorial.

What this book gives you

You walk away with practical models for boundaries and credit; a granular view of how kitchens shape competence; a frank map of addiction and recovery; and a humane account of parenting, partnership, and grief under pressure. It’s a cautionary tale and a toolkit: document agreements, diversify income, seek sober community, and speak even when the culture rewards silence. (Note: if Kitchen Confidential glamorized the chaos, this memoir inventories its costs and shows the patient work of repair.)

You enter the kitchen as an aspirant and leave, if you last, as a reliable instrument. At the French Culinary Institute, Chef Pascal’s mantra—“Don’t freak out”—prepares you to take correction without flinching. You drill knife cuts (brunoise, julienne, tourné), clarify consommés, butcher lobsters, and learn mise en place as time management. None of it is cinematic heroism; it’s repetition that toughens your hands and steadies your head under heat. (Note: this echoes classic craft memoirs where mastery is muscle memory, not inspiration.)

Service as a pressure lab

On Babbo’s garde-manger, Woolever learns that small errors have big consequences. A soft-cooked egg ruptured at the pass wastes minutes and money; a lamb’s tongue plate assembled a beat too slow backs up a station. A chef de cuisine like Roger moves as expeditor and metronome; you sync to his timing or drown. The brigade structure—line cook, sous, chef—polices quality and speed, but it also enforces a culture where ridicule is an accelerant and humility is armor.

The hidden curriculum

Beyond technique, you absorb social rules: listen more than you speak, accept discomfort, show up early, don’t take corrections personally, and cultivate calm even when you’re bleeding through tape. You also learn to separate palette building from ego performance; the kitchen rewards reliability, not grandstanding. Later, celebrity chef culture flips those incentives, but your credibility comes from the years you spent plating consistently under fire.

Class codes in hospitality

Woolever’s trajectory crosses class fault lines. A job interview where she’s dismissed as a “hayseed,” the Smiths’ penthouse stocked with eight bottles of labeled, fat-free tomato sauce, and Babbo’s Ivy-sprinkled staff show you how taste doubles as social capital. The French cook without a degree is an outlier fired for using real fat—proof that pedigree often trumps craft in certain rooms. The performance of authenticity—knowing how to order, how to dress, how to “care” about health—becomes a currency as real as money.

Authenticity as performance

Food culture sells “realness,” but the people who can afford to perform it often define it. A suit for the PR office, then a chef coat at the pass; refined copy for editors, then “rustic” dishes plated just so—this toggling is a survival skill. It buys entry into rooms where you turn craft into career. The danger is believing the performance is the person; the freedom comes when you treat codes as tools rather than identity.

Practical moves

Practice knife skills daily, build plating speed under simulated pressure, and audit your social signals—how you communicate with guests, managers, and peers—because in hospitality, fluency in class codes shapes opportunity.

What you carry forward

A stint on the line gives you credibility across food media. It also inoculates you against the industry’s romance: you know great dishes are built from burns, blisters, and boring repetitions. For Woolever, those habits—mise-en-place thinking, humility under fire—later stabilize freelance chaos and high-stakes assistant work. They are portable skills: you can bring them to a magazine, a book deadline, or a night feeding a newborn.

Mentorship in creative fields is a conveyor belt: it moves you faster, but you must stay balanced. Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain each fast-track Woolever in different ways. With Mario at Babbo, she earns dinners, cookbook work, and editorial introductions; she also absorbs loyalty expectations, unpaid overage, and sexualized behavior. His “You belong to me” captures the asymmetry: access can feel like ownership. Credit gets fuzzy, as with the Babbo book, where her labor is essential but not foregrounded.

The assistant’s invisible power

Working for Bourdain clarifies the impact of behind-the-scenes labor. Woolever triages calendars titled “Bourdain: The Gathering Storm,” manages travel, vets endorsements, and steers a tidal wave of asks—from smoked fish gifts to charity intros to a fan’s marriage proposal with a cubic zirconia ring. She becomes both gatekeeper and emissary, tasked with preserving Tony’s bandwidth and brand coherence. He pays well and treats her with respect, modeling a mentorship that’s demanding without predation.

Leverage in the age of platforms

Proximity yields leverage if you convert it. A tweet about Gray’s Papaya leads New Yorker editor John Bennet to solicit a pitch; Lucky Peach assignments emerge from Tony’s nudges. Coauthoring Appetites should have been a crowning credit, but a big-box retailer’s aversion to the Ralph Steadman cover triggers a neutral jacket that leaves her name off the mass-market edition. Without an agent, she lacks a forceful advocate for cover treatment, rights, and credit. The industry’s reflex to center the famous man and blur women’s labor reappears (a pattern you see across celebrity publishing).

Trade-offs and safeguards

Mentors open doors, but they also produce dependencies. You’re tempted to pay in soft currencies—loyalty, silence, emotional availability—because the benefits feel irreplaceable. The move is to take what you need then formalize your independence: get agreements in writing, secure representation before a deal, and keep parallel relationships that aren’t routed through a single gatekeeper.

• Document scope and credit on creative projects; insist on jacket and metadata commitments upfront.
• Translate access into bylines and relationships you own (editors, producers, freelancers), not favors you owe.
• Watch for coercive cues—“You belong to me”—and counter with boundaries backed by paper.

Key distinction

Supportive mentorship (Bourdain) provides opportunity and fair pay while respecting autonomy; exploitative mentorship (Batali) bundles opportunity with blurred consent and eroded credit.

What you can do now

If you’re close to power, treat visibility like venture capital. Invest it in durable assets: skills that outlast trends, signed credits that survive reprints, and relationships you don’t have to borrow. Gratitude is good; governance—agents, contracts, boundaries—is better.

In Woolever’s world, substances do jobs: a vodka to mute humiliation after a PR office slight with Alejandro, a joint to smooth late-night recipe testing, pills to survive a transoceanic flight to Melbourne, a morning shot of brown liquor to unknot postpartum nerves. The function is always immediate relief. The problem is that each fix blunts growth and pushes the next dose closer. You see the inexorable logic of maintenance use replacing celebratory use, until risk and shame do their own maintenance.

The increments of escalation

Her pattern maps how rationalizations stack: “It’s for my mental health, and therefore good for the baby,” she tells herself when smoking weed during pregnancy. Post-C-section, Percocet morphs from relief to torment—she hallucinates Paul McCartney—and insomnia compounds. Later, she sneaks weed breaks on the street between work obligations. The humiliations mount: vomiting during an Atlantic City junket, driving while sick, paying a locksmith $200 because she’s too fogged to turn the keys correctly, and a Kentucky night that ends in a missed flight and a spiritual hangover.

Sex, substances, and secrecy

Addiction rarely travels alone. Substance use lubricates secrecy and infidelity—sexts with Greg, a tangled affair with Jack, and Ativan-assisted abortion logistics that become another compartment to hide. These aren’t moralistic plot points; they’re engineering facts. The more you split your life into private and public modules, the more you need chemical gaskets to hold the pressure.

Recovery as scaffold, not epiphany

Her way back is incremental. She texts Rob, a friend in long-term recovery, and gets AA meeting times. Early shares are small and practical: “I have ten days,” then “nineteen.” The $2 basket goes around. A sponsor is suggested; she resists, then leans in. “God” is reframed as “a higher power of my understanding” so the spiritual piece is non-coercive. She gives away her stash before a life-insurance physical to lock in lower premiums—an actuarial nudge that doubles as a sobriety milestone. Nicotine goes next. These are unglamorous moves that stick because they’re repeatable.

• Micro-rituals: gratitude lists, day counts, and meetings that anchor a schedule.
• Harm-reduction pragmatism: align financial and health incentives with abstinence.
• Secrecy detox: fewer compartments in your life means fewer triggers for use.

Key observation

Addiction here is an emotional economy—substances extend the credit line of avoidance; recovery is paying cash for ordinary life, one day at a time. (Compare to Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, which names the chaos; Woolever tallies its recurring charges.)

What you can use

If you recognize this pattern, start with structure, not self-loathing. Meetings, sponsors, and tiny honest acts (telling the truth about your day count, putting cash in the basket) beat dramatic vows. Rewire the system that rewarded shortcuts, and the cravings fade into the background hum of a life you can maintain.

Woolever writes from inside a culture that treats sexualized talk and contact as occupational scenery. It’s the jokes on the line, the strip-club detours in Atlantic City, and the moment in Babbo’s dining room when Mario squeezes her ass. The calculation is constant: push back and risk your prospects, or absorb it to keep the door open. Many women in hospitality and media know this ledger—because it’s socialized as banter, complaints mutate into disloyalty.

Consent on a sliding scale

Her sexual life is restlessly mixed with work: flings with Noah, Roger, Bob; later entanglements with Greg and Jack. Some are thrilling and chosen; others are manipulative in context. When career pressure and substances are in the air, “choice” gets sticky. The book refuses a clean line between victimhood and agency; it asks you to see how structures shape what seems like desire.

Secrecy’s compound interest

It isn’t only the acts; it’s the encryption. A misfiled essay about her affairs detonates the marriage when Alex finds it and confronts her at 1 a.m., calling her “a monster.” The aftermath is logistical: mediation, custody schedules for Eli, and Woolever moving out with boxes hauled in a granny cart. The moral math is brutal: a temporary high buys years of rebuilding trust—often with yourself.

Culture versus policy

Colleagues laugh off gropes; managers prize loyalty; HR, where it exists, is often ornamental. You need counterweights outside the org chart. Documentation, external mentors, and an exit option create leverage. The signal to heed is the shrug—“boys will be boys”—because it forecasts how the place will respond when a line is crossed.

• Boundary kit: say no early, document incidents, and build a network that isn’t beholden to one boss.
• Personal hygiene: minimize secrets; they breed both addiction and blackmail risk.
• Exit literacy: practice leaving before you must—update clips, line up references, and rehearse the conversation.

Hard truth

A culture that bonds through transgression also shields transgressors; changing it requires both private boundaries and public accountability.

How it links to recovery

Addiction and boundary collapse co-evolve: secrecy makes using easier and truth-telling scarier. Sobriety—meetings, sponsors, daily honesty—shrinks the space for double lives. That’s less moral purity than operational clarity: one life is cheaper to maintain than two.

You can prepare a birth plan; you cannot script postpartum reality. After a C-section, Woolever has one morphine-blissed hour before months of anxiety, sleeplessness, and pain. Breastfeeding dribbles in late, then arrives like weather. Eli’s ranula—an infant cyst—turns into specialist visits and surgery at six weeks. She watches the clock to give him cool water at 4:30 a.m., listens to the breast pump’s “black death” drone, and fights the dread every parent recognizes: the anesthesia odds you can’t stop calculating. None of this fits Instagram’s idea of arrival.

The economics of care

Daycare eats 60% of a salary; part-time work at Wine Spectator means a 20% pay cut and lost health insurance; the company later refuses to extend the arrangement. They move to Jackson Heights to make the math work. A home caregiver (Jennifer) charges $700 a month—a bargain that still requires gig-juggling. These are not personal failures; they are structural conditions that force career pivots.

Portfolio survival

Woolever patches income across a mosaic: private cheffing for the Smiths or Rebecca, editing and testing recipes for Les Halles with Bourdain, writing for Time Out New York and the New York Times, and later staff roles at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. Exposure helps, but cash flow is king. A $300 dinner party, $25,000 contract work that collapses, and unpaid blurbs that get replaced teach her to value agreements in writing. Eventually, steadier institutional roles trade some freedom for salary and benefits—a pragmatic evolution many creatives recognize.

Micro-supports, macro-impact

Anya’s casserole, a neighbor’s coffee cake, and a Jackson Heights baby group make the difference between isolation and survivable exhaustion. Practical support has outsize mental-health effects in early parenthood. That solidarity—someone to text at 3 a.m., a freezer meal—beats advice columns. (Note: parenting research consistently shows social support moderates postpartum anxiety and depression.)

• Budget for care before birth; the sticker shock is real and career-altering.
• Diversify income streams and secure written scopes; exposure is not a payroll.
• Treat neighborly help as infrastructure, not charity.

Working rule

When life adds a dependent, add redundancy—savings, backup childcare, and a mix of gigs—so one failure doesn’t cascade.

Pivoting with purpose

Her return to work with Bourdain isn’t just aspiration; it’s arithmetic. You follow the money to a role that fits the new constraints, and you convert that access into longer-term assets—credits, skills, and relationships. Reinvention here is less about reinvention theater than about learning to survive on purpose.

Accountability and loss arrive together in Woolever’s later chapters. As #MeToo exposes restaurant abuses, she faces what she saw under Mario Batali—gropes, lewd comments—and what she minimized to keep working. Tony urges her to call Times reporter Jason Horowitz; Maura Judkis at the Washington Post and an Eater reporter follow. She moves from background to on-the-record, navigating the slow mechanics of reporting: dates, corroboration, “who else was there?” The pushback is real—an email from Mario labeled “Threat,” rumors of surveillance, and the paranoia that followed the Weinstein playbook. She and Tony switch to encrypted messaging and a VPN—a contemporary survival kit for speaking up.

Fallout and ambivalence

Public consequence lands messily: a flippant quasi-apology from Mario that includes a cinnamon roll recipe, a scuttled Babbo cookbook contribution, and a new, uneasy quiet with old colleagues. She feels relief, grief, and guilt in the same breath—classic for people who both benefited from and were harmed by a powerful figure. Accountability, the book shows, isn’t a single headline but the accumulation of testimonies sustained by institutional reporting.

Bourdain’s death and the practical work of grief

Then Anthony Bourdain dies by suicide, and Woolever’s world heaves. Agent Kim calls; Laurie’s first thought is magical: “We can fix this.” She helps manage announcements, calls family, and handles surreal chores: canceling a yacht charter, sorting Tony’s mail, fielding a grotesque PR mailer involving a rotting potato. She replays a final text—“I’ll live”—and collides with public canonization that turns a complicated man into a saint. She honors him without polishing the edges: addiction histories, obsessions, loneliness. (In grief literature terms, she refuses disenfranchised grief by claiming both proximity and critique.)

Rebuilding through work and sobriety

Sobriety holds. She funnels pain into projects that are simultaneously income and ritual: promoting Appetites, co-creating World Travel, and assembling Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography. Advances and contracts become what she calls a diamond in the pocket—unromantic but lifesaving. Stabilized finances give her time to mourn and write instead of panic. The lesson is not that work cures grief, but that work can contain it long enough for life to reassemble.

• If you speak up: document, find trusted reporters, expect retaliation theater, and harden your comms.
• If you grieve publicly: protect private meaning-making; the internet will simplify what you know is complicated.
• If you rebuild: pair sobriety structure with financial scaffolding so emotion doesn’t bankrupt you.

Enduring message

Tell the truth, do the paperwork, and keep showing up; culture shifts and personal healing both run on cumulative acts, not grand gestures.