Bourdain and Batali’s Assistant Spills Some Secrets

In her new memoir, “Care and Feeding,” Laurie Woolever looks back on 20 tumultuous, exhilarating years with two of America’s biggest celebrity chefs.

Laurie Woolever has played many roles in the food world. She was Mario Batali’s assistant from 1999 to 2002, and Anthony Bourdain’s assistant, working closely on his books and television shows, from 2009 until his death in 2018. Her new memoir, “Care and Feeding,” which Ecco will publish on Tuesday, is a candid account of tending to high-wattage celebrities, and of working as a woman, wife and mother in a wildly male-dominated industry. It’s also a reckoning with the high-risk behaviors that tied the three together. Below is a condensed and edited version of our phone interview.

You grew up in upstate New York and moved to the city after college with hopes of becoming a writer. How did you end up in culinary school?

I was drawn to the industry because I had this very wrong idea that it would be fun. The sort of fuzzy notion that I had of everyone hanging out in the kitchen, cooking, listening to music — that was very wrong. I’m glad that I had that, because I think if I had really understood what professional cooking was, I would have been too scared. I would have probably changed my mind about even going to cooking school.

What was it like to work at Babbo, the restaurant that was the white-hot center of the culinary world?

When the restaurant was brand new, everyone there knew that we were someplace special. It was getting a lot of press, everybody wanted to get in, celebrities were there every night. Mario’s star was on the rise, and I think there was a real collective sense of pride, and we really cared about what we were doing.