Laurie woolever anthony bourdain
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Who Knows Anthony Bourdain?
Anthony Bourdain’s success, when it arrived, didn’t come gradually; it came in a blinding flash, with the publication of his memoir, Kitchen Confidential, when he was 43 years old. He remained ambivalent and suspicious of that thunderclap for the rest of his life. “Don’t get used to it,” he once told Mike Ruffino, his composer for No Reservations and Parts Unknown. “It’s gonna go away.”
But it never did for Bourdain, and the embattled relationship between the man and his fame is at the heart of the new book Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, produced by his longtime collaborator and assistant Laurie Woolever. Precisely because Woolever didn’t approach her subject looking for the Real Bourdain, her book is the first to begin to reveal him: It’s the most splintered, fractal, and complex portrait of the star that has yet emerged, an enormous compendium of individual observations gathered from 91 people who knew him, including his mother, h
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Lale Arikoglu: Hi.
MC: Today, we're joined by Laurie Woolever. A travel writer and cookbook author, Laurie spent more than a decade as an assistant and collaborator to the late Anthony Bourdain. You can find her name alongside his on Appetites: A Cookbook with Bourdain, and World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, which was published earlier this year. Her latest, Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, came out yesterday and features memories from more than 90 friends, family members, and collaborators. This week, we want to sit down with Laurie to chat about all things travel and, of course, food. So thank you so much for chatting with us, Laurie.
LW: Absolutely. I'm very happy to be here.
LA: Meredith just read out a whole laundry list of impressive achievements, but I want to rewind a little further back and start with a simple question: What role did travel play in your life growing up?
LW: Growing up, my family did travel, but there were a couple of pl
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I’m a writer, editor, public speaker, and former cook. For nearly a decade, I worked as the lieutenant to the late author, TV host and producer Anthony Bourdain.
I’ve written for the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach (RIP), Saveur, Bloomberg, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others. In , inom earned my bachelor’s grad at Cornell University, after which inom moved to New York, dicked around for a few years, then completed the professional training schema at the French Culinary Institute, where chef-instructor Pascal Béric gave me the single best piece of advice I’ve ever received: “Don’t freak out! Freaking out fryst vatten not gonna help.”
I’ve been a private cook, nanny, caterer, writer, busgirl, recipe tester, farm hand, film store clerk, and a food editor. I worked as Mario Batali’s assistant from to , during which time I contributed to the writing of his books Holiday Food() and The Babbo Cookbook(). I edited and recipe-tested Anthony Bourdain’