The woman left standing — and writing — after the fall of two bad boy chefs

On page 167, about halfway through Laurie Woolever’s memoir “Care and Feeding,” she’s describing the hours after her son Eli was born. A nurse helps her attempt breastfeeding, unsuccessfully, and tells her she can try again in a little while.

“While I held him and scrutinized his red face,” Woolever writes, “she topped up my beautiful, perfect drug I.V. and put Eli back in his plastic box on wheels.”

A memoir about untangling a self-knotted life

We know by this point in the book that, duration of her pregnancy aside, Woolever often drinks to the point of blacking out, gets stoned upon wakening many mornings, has dabbled in heavier drugs and made one terrible decision after another in her personal relationships. The reader, then, can easily imagine how she savors the floating drift from the morphine dripping from its suspended bag, and how surreal it is to see this being for whom she is now responsible transported here and there in a sterile hospital vessel.

The humor is dark, and the confessions are unflinching, and Woolever has a gift for turning them into propulsive storytelling.

If you’ve heard about “Care and Feeding,” published by Ecco last month, you know this isn’t only a memoir about addiction and early motherhood. In 1999, Woolever became the first assistant to Mario Batali. It was a year after the opening of Babbo, the New York restaurant that propelled him to fame. In 2009 — after three years working for Batali, followed by stints as a freelance food writer and an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator, and less than a year after her son was born — Anthony Bourdain hired her as his assistant. She worked for him until his death by suicide in 2018.

The book’s triumphant feat is in how Woolever balances recounting her food-world experiences with these globally famous men while centering the professional ambitions and personal failings in her own life.

Generational rites of passage

Woolever and I are close in age, so I’ll admit a Gen-X empathy in the timeline of her becoming. There’s the misery pit of a first New York apartment in the ’90s, when Manhattan felt less shiny and shut off by wealth. And the restaurant-adjacent gigs (catering, cooking for a moneyed couple) in which work meant facilitating someone else’s daily routines or celebrations, leaving little time for either in your own life. And the transitioning age of journalism, when the internet is killing print ads, and thus print, and the opportunities are shrinking and the corporatization feels strangling.

She escapes, and makes things worse, via booze and drugs and sex, all of which were intrinsic to her proximity to restaurant culture at the turn of the millennium.

(Harper Collins)

I particularly admire how she relays her Batali era. He’s messy, and she’s messy in step in her own ways. During an early outing to Atlantic City, he rebuffs her attempt to order only a spinach salad in a restaurant. There will instead be many courses, and equal amounts of expensive wine. “His demand was oppressive,” she writes, “but there was also a glimmer of something appealing about his commanding me to overindulge. It wasn’t my choice to overeat and get —faced; it was my job.”

That might be her 20-something self’s stance on her agency in the moment, but the woman looking back in her late 40s surveys the landscape with clear-eyed ownership. She benefited from the affiliation; part of her work with Batali included collaborating on a book, and he introduced her to Bourdain. She also talked with reporters in 2017 when publications were breaking the story of his sexual misconduct allegations. Her details about Batali tell their own damning story; she wisely forgoes miring the narrative in too much hindsight analysis.

Bourdain in Woolever’s memoir comes across as complicated, real, occasionally infuriating, ultimately heartbreaking. She previously authored “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography” in 2021, so in this book his presence rightly serves her story: his initial skepticism to her quitting drinking as she’s entering sobriety (she sticks with it), her feelings of guilt after his death.

These later events happen while she implodes her marriage through adultery, and grapples with who she is as a writer. The pages fly because Woolever is funny, and blunt, and maybe honest to the point of oversharing as a karmic corrective to the many lies she told her intimates for so long. I finished the book excited for more, for what’s next for her, for the stories that are hers without the proximity to others’ stardom.

Spring cookbooks, all-time favorite cookbooks and the L.A. Times Festival of Books

This week the Food team included “Care and Feeding” in a roundup of the 21 best spring releases that otherwise featured cookbooks. Among these standout titles: Kwéyòl / Creole: Recipes, Stories, and Tings From a St. Lucian Chef’s Journey by Nina Compton and Osayi Endolyn; Mother Sauce: Italian American Recipes and the Story of the Women Who Created Them by Lucinda Scala Quinn; and Margarita Time: 60+ Tequila and Mezcal Cocktails, Served Up, Over and Blended by Caroline Pardilla.

(Penguin Random House )

Thinking about the season’s newly published arrivals also had us considering the larger role of cookbooks in our lives, particularly after the individual and collective losses from the Palisades and Eaton fires.

“[Hearing peoples’ stories] got us thinking about our emotional connection to cookbooks even at a time when just about any recipe we want can be pulled up on our phones in seconds,” Laurie Ochoa wrote on the subject. “What makes an essential cookbook? Is it a collectible with a vintage-cool cover or beautiful photography? Is it a teaching book that led you to find your own cooking style? A book full of go-to recipes that you rely on for entertaining or everyday dinners? Maybe it’s a book with a narrative — a memoir with recipes. Or a book with some other sentimental meaning.”

Her words were part of the introduction to a compilation of 62 personally essential cookbooks — the ones we can’t live without — named by Los Angeles chefs as well as the Food team’s editors and writers. Check it out.

Back to Woolever: She’s appearing next weekend at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. She’ll be part of a panel at noon on April 26 at the Norris Theatre with E.A. Hanks, Elizabeth Crane, Sloane Crosley and Kareem Rosser. Their topic: “Finding the Words: Loss, Grief, and Memoir.”

Here’s a rundown of the festival’s full schedule.

Also ...

• As part of this week’s cookbook coverage, Stephanie Breijo profiles star baker and Fat & Flour owner Nicole Rucker on her new cookbook and her move toward simplicity in the kitchen.
• Betty Hallock profiles Ari Kolender — the chef behind L.A.’s favorite seafood bar, Found Oyster — on his new book, “How to Cook the Finest Things in the Sea.”
• Stephanie also has the first details on the closing of Yangban in the Arts District.
• Ezra Halkett writes about how Silver Lake will change with news of yet another closing: Say Cheese.