Care and Feeding
ByPublisher Description
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities2 Reviews
heatherlilia
Created 1 day agoRevRacoon
Created 10 days ago
“(This is my longest review ever so thank you if you stick around til the end)
I honestly don't know what I was expecting going into this book. I was lucky enough to receive an ALC of the audiobook, narrated by the author herself, thanks to Netgalley and the publishers at HarperAudio. All opinions are my own.
If you thought watching "The Bear" was traumatic or too intense then you better buckle up for Care and Feeding: A memoir, By Laurie Woolever.
I never quite know what to expect going into a book written by, or about someone in the restaurant world. Will I be getting some romanticized, over-hyped lens of the reality of restaurants? Will I be getting advice on how to be a better worker? Will it be funny, using humor to deflect from the trauma endured? Will it effect some change to the industry?
What I was met with was Woolver's expertly written, raw, almost journal like retelling of her life and her experience working in restaurants. The bullshit she had to put up with working as Mario Batali's assistant when she was fresh out of culinary school. The memories she had working for the beloved Anthony Bourdain as his assistant right up until his death. Then everything in between that happens outside of work. Raising a child, marriage, friendship, addiction, mental health, the list goes on.
It's refreshing to read something that feels so true to how a lot of us have experienced restaurant work life, without it being some romantic idealization of addiction, abuse, long hours and garbage pay.
This story is so much more than just who Woolever worked for though. It's honest, devastating, gut-wrenching, and humbling. It's inspiring in a sort of way. The way that Woolever writes, it's almost as if she is giving everyone else permission to be real with themselves too. To own up to whatever awful shit they may have done.
I found myself cringing through many of the parts of the book where I felt like I had second hand embarrassment for her. But also I had such a degree of understanding and sympathy for a lot of it. The admittance of fucking up. Of not making the right decisions. Of not being perfect. That's such an essential part of learning how to live a healthier life.
Then there were the parts where I unfortunately could empathize with some of the situations. Finding myself reliving past traumas right alongside Woolever as she recounts some pretty hideous truths about being a young woman working in kitchens, feeling like you have no direction in life.
With the epilogue, it feels *to me* as though Woolever hopes for a better future for restaurants, as far as a healthy workplace is concerned. If you work in the industry, truly you should put this on your "must reads" of 2025. If you don't work in the industry, it's still such incredible insight into a life that is often glamorized, for better or worse.”About Laurie Woolever
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 Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.
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