Laurie Woolever Serves Up Raw Truth About Sobriety and Celebrity Bosses

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

On this episode

Laurie Woolever has worked for chefs you’ve definitely heard of, most notably Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali. Those two men are notorious for their outsized appetites, but in her new memoir, Care and Feeding, Woolever gets raw and real about her own insatiable need for drugs, alcohol, and extramarital affairs while navigating the grossness and glamour of the food world in their orbits. She joined the Tinfoil Swans podcast to talk about getting sober, managing complicated men, and the shock of needing spirituality.

Meet our guest

Laurie Woolever is a writer, editor, public speaker, and former cook. Her memoir, Care and Feeding, was an instant New York Times bestseller. Woolever co-authored Appetites: A Cookbook, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, with her longtime boss, Anthony Bourdain, and wrote Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography. She recently co-authored Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking, and co-hosts the Carbface podcast. Woolever’s work has been published in the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Bloomberg, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine’s Gold Signal Award-winning podcast Tinfoil Swans, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing With Recipes and a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On making herself invisible

“Something happened between the ages of 10 and, I don’t know, 25 — puberty, high school, college. At 10, I was still naive about thinking the world is always going to love everything I do, because here’s my mother and my grandmother and my teachers and my friends who think I’m great. It hadn’t really occurred to me yet that you’re not ever going to be everyone’s cup of tea. You’re going to get some harsh feedback. 

At some point I was like, you know what? It feels a little bit safer to fade into the background. I am still going to say s***, write s*** down, be who I am — but maybe I’m going to shuffle ball change off the stage and not try to get attention for my corpus and my face and my voice anymore. Just kind of be a little quieter.”

On setting a tone

“At the end of cooking school I had made it very clear to the career counselor and some of the other instructors that I didn’t think I was cut out to cook in a restaurant, and I was really hoping to find a job that was adjacent. I didn’t want to have to earn my stripes in a restaurant kitchen. Everyone encouraged me, ‘Just do it for six months. Do it for a year. You’ve got to get this under your belt.’ 

Then the career counselor said, ‘There’s this chef, he has a television show. He has a restaurant in the West Village. His name is Mario Batali, and he’s looking for an assistant. So even though I think you should go and cook for six months or a year, I’m going to send you on this interview.’ 

I showed up on a Thursday to his restaurant Babbo, which at that time was only open for maybe six months. I waited and he didn’t show up for the interview. At some point somebody came out of the kitchen and said, ‘Sorry, he went home to see his kids.’ He called the next day and said, ‘Come in on Saturday.’ I went back and it turned out I was the only person who was interested in the job, and I was hired.

[My first day of work] he got into a cab to go to a TV shoot, and said, ‘Slide those thighs on over.’ And I went, ‘Oh, I’m not sure I want to do that.’ And I didn’t. I made it a point to sit on the other side. That definitely set a tone for who he was and what the work environment was like.

On the slippery slope of substances

“I didn’t really drink that much in college, only because I got very into smoking pot. Once I got to New York, it was like, ‘Why don’t we put these two things together? They’re really fun.’ There was no thought in my mind that a person should drink moderately or only smoke a little pot. You definitely could not have told me that I had a problem back then. I think this is a very common thing with people who have been substance abusers, that you don’t see it in yourself until you do. The more somebody tries to point it out to you, the more it’s like, ‘Well, you’re just jealous cause I’m having a good time.’ There’s a million mechanisms that people have to not see what is plainly obvious to the people around them.”

On finding an off-ramp

“I started to get really tired, and I thought, ‘If I stay here, or if I just simply move on to another restaurant, another job like this, nothing’s going to change for me. And I’m tired, and I know what this is now, and I think I’m done here.’ I saw that the easy availability of all those different types of temptation, I couldn’t handle it — as much as I still needed a couple of decades to truly figure myself out. I knew myself enough in that time to know that I needed to step back from this environment cause it’s really aging me very rapidly.”

On the reality of working for Anthony Bourdain

“He had this very specific way of letting you know that you were valued and that you were important to him, but he just wasn’t a guy who would say that directly. He would tell other people and they would tell you. This actually felt very familiar to me in my own family. Our ways of communication are all backchannel, good or bad. My sister would tell my mom something and my mom would tell me, or vice versa. So it was like, ‘OK, I can hang with this.’

But I had such respect for him and recognized that so many people wanted a piece of him or wanted a little bit of his time or attention. The last thing I wanted to do was be another one of those people or in any way put an additional burden on him because he was so in demand. I would never want to ask for anything or show any need.

What was it like to work for him? He was great. He was exactly the guy that you see on TV and in other ways there were also all the parts that get cut from the show. There was also a human being.

I think of him as up there with David Bowie and Philip Seymour Hoffman and other people that have gone too soon. We can recognize that they were humans and they had their flaws, but they were so beloved. They made such an impact on the culture that we want to put them on T-shirts, candles, sides of buildings, tattoos, and everything else.”

On spirituality and recovery

“It’s this bottomless need that you hear a lot of people in recovery talk about. You can get very hokey with all of the recovery talk, but there’s this idea of the God-shaped hole. You’re trying to fill in your life with sex, drugs, money, food, attention, and all of the things. But you can find some way to a spiritual life — and that kind of talk made me climb the walls when I first started going to 12 step meetings. I was just like, ‘This is not for me, I just want to stop drinking.’ 

Against all odds, I somehow have come around to it. I’m not saying I’m a big believer in God or any kind of traditionally religious person at this point — not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not for me. But there are so many ways to actually have a spiritual life. It’s to be a good, honest person and to think about other people. To see yourself not as the center of everything but just as a worker among workers. It’s realizing that the hole that you were filling with all these other things — you needed to fill it with spiritual growth.”

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry and beyond, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like Roy Choi, Byron Gomez, Vikas Khanna, Romy Gill, Matthew Lillard, Ana and Lydia Castro, Laurie Woolever, Karen Akunowitz, Hawa Hassan, Dr. Arielle Johnson, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Samin Nosrat, Curtis Stone, Kristen Kish, Padma Lakshmi, Ayesha Curry, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that’ll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.