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.
You occasionally worked in the kitchen at Babbo. What was it like to move between the front and back of the house?
The dining room seemed like a really luxurious, wonderful place to be from the perspective of the kitchen. When you’re in the kitchen and you’re on your feet and it’s relentless and you’re making a fixed weekly salary, you’re not going to benefit from the generous whims of a customer that might leave a huge tip, or get the chance to sell a great big bottle of wine. I think it’s fair to say that led to some resentment. It’s always a competition between front and back of the house for who works the hardest, who is the most hard-core, who is doing the most for the restaurant.
At the time, how did you reconcile the two Marios: the one who was a “brainy evangelist” for real Italian food, and the one who talked constantly about women’s bodies and bragged about his penis size?
I would push back on the concept of “two Marios” because I didn’t see two distinct personas at work. There’s no reason why a brainy evangelist can’t also be a funny, charismatic, fun person who makes dirty jokes and is a little too handsy at times and says really outrageous things. It’s not that he was presenting as a choirboy to the world and was a monster in private. It’s that he was a full, complicated person, with vices and blind spots and also some generous impulses and a lot to offer the world. He was able to present the best parts of himself in public and save the more risqué parts of himself for an audience that wasn’t in a position to push back on him or judge.
In 2017, you went back to your journal from your time at Babbo, and read your own accounts of how Mario behaved toward you and other women, you asked yourself: Could I have done anything to stop it?
When Mario grabbed me and I didn’t like it, I did privately, quietly go right to him and say, hey, please don’t do that again. And that was that was as much as I felt I could do. I was scared and he kind of made fun of me for it, but then it didn’t happen again for a long time. I wouldn’t fault anyone for not doing what I did because everyone has to make their own risk assessment in that situation.
I stand by the idea that there was an enormous power differential between me and Mario and between most, if not all, of my colleagues and Mario. It was very clear that he was in charge, and it was very clear that loyalty was extremely important. And in the dominant culture of the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was no way to think: Let’s organize and push back. Let’s confront our boss en masse about behavior that makes us uncomfortable. There was no example to look to, and there was no sense that your job would be safe or that you would be OK.
You were shocked by how casually you had written about his behavior, telling yourself, “You knew what you were getting into.”
I knew from Day 1 working for Mario that he was going to be very flirtatious, that he was going to push boundaries and say outrageous things. That was the atmosphere. It wasn’t part of my job description. But I stayed because it was really hugely beneficial to be aligned with someone who had the power and the influence that he did. I knew what I was getting into and I was an at-will employee and I didn’t leave — until I did.
When you started working with Tony in 2009 he was just starting to become a celebrity outside the food world. Were you surprised that he got as famous as he did?
I already thought his writing was amazing, so it was not a surprise that it struck a nerve with so many people. But then the TV work made him popular and interesting and so valuable in the public sphere. The day that he died, to see both the sitting president and the former president both tweeting about him within hours of the announcement of his death, that took me by surprise, for sure. It was very comforting to see the whole world reacting to his death, to know that a lot of other people cared about him, too.
You write very frankly about your own addictions and risky decisions. When did you realize that you were more similar to Mario and Tony than you may have thought?
I think that is the through line. I don’t want to diagnose anyone else or talk about anyone else’s states of addiction. But it is a very common thing across the world of food and cooking, because there is a lot of adrenaline and a lot of excitement, a lot of status in pulling off a great service or getting through a rush or getting all your prep done before 4 o’clock. That’s a common thread, and that’s one of the really appealing, intoxicating things about working in kitchens.
Batali got #MeToo’d in December 2017. Soon after that, your marriage ended, Tony became involved with the Italian actress Asia Argento and, very soon after that, ended his life in June 2018. How did you feel at that time, how did you get through it?
It was an absolute turning point in my life in a lot of different ways. I felt overwhelmed in those weeks and months after my marriage ended, and I had moved out of the family home and then Tony wasn’t around anymore. And I didn’t have the job, which was very stabilizing and really gave me a center of gravity. I felt like I wasn’t sure who I was or what I was supposed to do. I remember saying to a friend, “I feel like I’m not even sure I exist anymore.”
Did you feel any regret about having become so embedded in the restaurant business?
I think I got really lucky ending up in these really interesting, dynamic, chaotic worlds. My bosses just happened to be these two guys who had extraordinary careers and extraordinary flameouts close to the same time. But you know, what an education. I can’t say that I regret any of it.
