Laurie Woolever's Care and Feeding Exposes the Hidden Struggles of the Restaurant World
- Mar 18
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 26
Laurie Woolever’s Care and Feeding is a candid examination of the restaurant industry, blending memoir with cultural critique. Drawing on her years of experience as a food writer and editor, Woolever exposes the hidden realities of restaurant life, from burnout and exploitation to the gender and power dynamics that shape professional kitchens. She interweaves personal reflections with stories of workers across the industry, capturing both the creativity that fuels restaurants and the systemic challenges that threaten them.
Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever
Laurie Woolever has worn many hats in the food world—assistant, writer, insider, witness. She worked for Mario Batali from 1999 to 2002, then spent nearly a decade as Anthony Bourdain’s right hand, collaborating on his books and television projects until his death in 2018. Her new memoir, Care and Feeding, released one week ago today from Ecco, is a raw, unfiltered account of what it meant to operate in the orbit of high-profile, high-voltage men in an industry that has long thrived on excess and ego.
A decade after allegations against Batali helped ignite the #MeToo reckoning in fine dining, exposing decades of unchecked abuse, Woolever pulls back the curtain on the wreckage left behind by the Bad Boy Chef Era. But Care and Feeding isn’t about the men who shaped her career, but rather, navigating ambition, complicity, and survival in a male-dominated world and reckoning with the high-risk behaviors that bound them all together.
Laurie Woolever’s Care and Feeding offers a raw, unfiltered look at the power dynamics, toxicity, and unspoken truths that have shaped the modern restaurant industry. As an insider who worked as Batali’s assistant and later became Anthony Bourdain’s trusted collaborator until his death in 2018, Woolever delivers an intimate, firsthand account of what it meant to operate within these circles. Having co-authored books with both men, she brings a unique perspective that’s neither blind to their talent nor dismissive of their failings.
Rather than a takedown or sensationalized exposé, Care and Feeding is a thoughtful examination of power, complicity, and the blurred lines between genius and destruction. Woolever’s writing offers a deeply personal reflection on loyalty, ambition, and what it means to reckon with a culture that once celebrated excess and ego. By lifting up the kitchen mats, she forces us to confront the uncomfortable truths that many would rather leave hidden.
Laurie Woolever’s Care and Feeding wasn't written to provide a behind-the-scenes account of working alongside two of the most notorious figures in the culinary world, but rather to offer an introspective assessment of power, self-destruction, and the complex dynamics of loyalty and complicity within the restaurant industry.
And yet, despite working with two of the industry’s most well-known, larger-than-life personalities, her voice never fades into the background of their towering reputations. She resists reducing them to caricatures: Batali appears as both a generous mentor and a charismatic bully, a man whose boorishness and brilliance were equally outsized. Bourdain, by contrast, is portrayed with a mix of tenderness and brutal honesty—a kind, neurotic, deeply troubled man whose final years were marked by obsession and restlessness.
Having written Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, Woolever knows how to walk the fine line between insight and hagiography. She offers glimpses of Bourdain that feel intimate rather than reverent, such as details like his answering machine message, an Elvis Costello song, that remind us of the man beneath the myth.
But Care and Feeding isn’t limited to an account of the men who shaped Woolever’s career, but a stark, unfiltered portrait of her own unraveling. She writes with sharp wit, dark humor, and a brutal self-awareness, neither excusing nor justifying her choices. There’s no performative self-pity, just a steady, matter-of-fact inventory of excess ranging from whiskey bottles, endless rounds of gin and tonics, wine, and beer, all tracked with the precision of a bartender restocking after a long night.
She never calls herself a pothead, yet she wakes up high, "blazing" before workouts with her trainer as if it’s part of the routine. She never claims to be addicted to sex, but she’s always having it—drunkenly, carelessly, with strangers, with colleagues, in public, in shadows. It’s not framed as reckless abandon or a desperate attempt at escape—it simply is.
The consequences surface as a slow, inevitable pileup—less a sudden explosion, and more a car crash in excruciating slow motion.
Set against the backdrop of the early 2000s food media boom, Woolever’s journey is one of trial, error, and sheer persistence. She arrives in New York and pieces together a career, working as a gardener, a private chef, a food writer, and, eventually, Batali’s assistant. She lands the job by default, as no one else applies.
"You want to be a food writer?" Batali asks in their first meeting. "I’ll introduce you to every editor in town. They’re all on my dick, trying to get a reservation."
It’s a vulgar, ego-driven boast, but also an open door in its own twisted way.
Batali, in her telling, is both mentor and sadistic industry ringleader, a man whose grotesque appetites were indulged and celebrated for years. Woolever, for her part, plays the game, matching him drink for drink, bite for bite—always watching and aware of his tendency to humiliate those around him.
By the time Woolever steps into Bourdain’s world, she’s already unraveling. She disappears into bars, downing vodka tonics in quick succession, detached and trying to vanish for a few hours at a time. Her marriage, eroded by infidelity and dulled by alcohol, is fraying, though she still clings to the illusion of giving it a real chance.
There’s a reckless momentum to it all, a kind of oblivious madness that reminds her of Mad Men's Don Draper. She describes herself as "the woman the men their mothers divorced," bound to a community of wives who make her feel both seen and, at the same time, even more lost.
At one point, she stabs her husband in the leg with an earring. In Tokyo, she hires a gigolo. When she becomes pregnant by someone who isn’t her husband, she scours the internet for an herbal abortion, grasping for control over a life that keeps slipping further from her grip. But even after making that choice, something in her fractures. She finds herself alienated from her own body, suddenly repelled by the very thing that once fueled her impulses.
As Batali’s empire implodes under the weight of his own predation, allegations of sexual misconduct from his employees, and a class-action lawsuit over misappropriated tips, Woolever’s world quietly collapses in tandem. Her husband discovers a letter detailing her affairs and leaves. And then, standing in the wreckage of everything she’s destroyed and everything that’s crumbled around her, she makes a choice: she puts the bottle down.
If Care and Feeding is about anything, it’s about survival in a less-than-heroic, yet redemptive way, in the messy, unsparing manner in which life actually unfolds for many individuals within the industry as a whole. Woolever neither wallows nor apologizes. She tells her story, just as she tells Batali’s and Bourdain’s, with candor, wit, and unflinching truth.
But sobriety doesn’t mark the end of Woolever’s reckoning. Instead, it arrives just in time for her to confront one of the greatest losses of her life. Bourdain’s death is handled with a starkness that refuses sentimentality or sugarcoating.
“He had made the colossally stupid but somehow wholly plausible decision to die of a broken heart,” Laurie writes.
It’s a devastating, unsentimental assessment that encapsulates both the weight of his absence and the inevitability of his unraveling.
Towards the end, Care and Feeding leans into Quit Lit territory as Laurie leans deeper into motherhood and into sobriety. Woolever embodies gratitude, prayer, and a slower, more intentional approach to navigating the world. This shift retroactively reframes what was once a detached, brutally honest account of her excesses into something resembling a redemption narrative. But what keeps it from feeling forced or preachy is its refusal to rewrite the past with judgment or regret. There are no grand apologies or overt atonements; just a woman taking stock of what remains of her life after everything else has burned away.