Celebrity chefs have grown into brands far beyond the confines of their restaurants. They’re sales platforms selling television shows and cookbooks and merchandise. That’s all possible because of the cultlike following in their fan base. It’s the public’s intrigue in their personal lives that likely will entice readers to pick up Laurie Woolever’s memoir, Care And Feeding. And they will likely be delighted to find the book a deeper exploration of restaurants, marriage, parenthood, substance abuse, work, hopes, and dreams than simply the exposition of the secret lives of master chefs.
Laurie Woolever is herself a trained chef and professional recipe writer who happened to work with both Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain during her career. She’s a co-author of their cookbooks, though her name only appears on the latest from Bourdain. Her first solo project, Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography also dove deep into the personal and professional side of Bourdain’s life. In Care And Feeding, Woolever takes us on her journey from her wayward youth up until the present—seemingly up until the moment she submitted the final manuscript.
In a sense, there are two stories here. The first is the link Woolever has with the celebrity chefs, and the second is the one following her own broken personal life. There is strangeness too in the fact that Mario Batali is, in a post-#MeToo world, a well-known sexual harasser, and the beloved Anthony Bourdain committed suicide during a period of deep depression. Both facts are widely known. However, despite foreknowledge of these points, or perhaps because of it, Woolever is able to build suspense into the narrative around these inevitable turning points.
Woolever is delicate in her approach to discussing Batali’s behavior. We can see a young Woolever facing some problems through comments he makes to her or moments she shares. There is an early trip she makes with Batali to Atlantic City where he instructs her to bring a friend along—there’s a sense he’s inviting Woolever to bring him a date. Throughout the book, she also discusses the repercussions faced by other “disloyal” chefs and acquaintances when Batali felt he had been crossed, and she’s able to create a genuine sense of fear, even now, well-removed from his employment.
When it comes to her time working for Bourdain, the opposite is true. She reinforces the narrative of “Tony’s” kindness, his earnest demeanor. He comes off as kind in her portrayal—a consensus among people who knew him. But as a reader, there of course is the macabre fixation on understanding why he chose to end things. If Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography pointed the finger at Asia Argento, Bourdain’s girlfriend, Woolever in Care and Feeding all but accuses her of killing him.
Part of what drives this book is inevitably our ability to gaze into the closed world of not one, but two celebrity chefs. Woolever understands the sentiment. After a night out with Batali, she explains that she “was excited by the proximity to power, money, charismatic and attractive new friends, endless booze, and rich food.” It’s these reasons that draw us to this book, but the skill in the narrative is their stories do take a backseat to Woolever’s own life.
Throughout the book, Woolever is either dating or married to Alex, the father of her child. Their relationship does not stop her from finding trysts with strange men or simply strangers. Much of the tension of the memoir is whether she will get away with her affairs, and how or when Alex will find out. As the memoir proceeds, her continued infidelity grows into this monstrous freight train barreling through the storyline.
There’s more to Woolever than her romantic entanglements. Much of the intrigue here is in her work tangential to restaurants–creating recipes, writing cookbooks, cooking for clients. Woolever’s career has never been a straight trajectory, and it ebbs and flows through the narrative, creating fascinating intermezzos between Batali and Bourdain. There’s the wealthy family she served as a private chef who became addicted to sugar-free Reddi-wip, or the client who wanted a carrot cake only to find Woolever underbaked it, leaving the center raw. She’s a flawed chef, a flawed wife, and flawed person, but it’s these flaws that are interesting to read. Woolever is great at making bad decisions, often, although not exclusively, because she’s stoned.
Alcohol abuse is another underlying theme throughout Woolever’s life. It’s a major problem among restaurant workers too. The alcohol consumption does eventually begin to boil over into her, but unlike a recovery memoir, there’s not much to her sobriety story. If anything, there’s a sense that great wine is part of great food, and reluctance to abstain.
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. Sure, the celebrity tie-ins don’t hurt, but her adroit storytelling doesn’t rely on the famous men. She’s successfully made herself the focus, and creates more than enough narrative tension with her own dramas to sideline Batali and Bourdain. Woolever’s story has power too because she creates a relatable connection. She finds motherhood isolating, she struggles for approval from the men she works for, she’s betrayed by the people who are supposed to be on her side. She allows us in, and we can see ourselves reflected in her success and failures.
Care and Feeding manages to surpass the celebrity-driven platform memoirs that so often litter airport bookstores. Without Batali and Bourdain’s name attached to this book, few people would have recognized Woolever’s name. But 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.
NONFICTION
Care and Feeding
By Laurie Woolever
Ecco
Published March 11, 2025
