Publishers Weekly
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In this profane, exhilarating autobiography, Woolever (World Travel)—a former cook and assistant to Anthony Bourdain—takes readers on a ride-along through her turbulent decades in the food industry. After falling in love with cooking during college, Woolever moved to New York City in 1996, stumbling “into the food world at a time when cooking and eating became an increasingly respectable and well-documented form of mass entertainment.” She worked odd jobs while taking classes at the French Culinary Institute, and eventually became an assistant to chef Mario Batali, a sometimes “tyrannical, irrational, and mean” boss who Woolever claims sexually harassed her during her first day on the job—though he also helped her sell her first pieces of freelance food writing. Through Battali, Woolever met Bourdain, who eventually hired her to help write a cookbook and serve as an all-purpose assistant. Throughout, Woolever paints a raw portrait of the culinary world’s hypermasculine work culture, but she steers clear of playing the victim, frankly acknowledging her own addictions, affairs, and mental health struggles, which nearly derailed her career before 12-step meetings helped her get sober. These rowdy reflections enlighten and entertain. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (Mar.)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Woolever spent years working as an assistant for Mario Batali and then nearly a decade working for Anthony Bourdain, traveling and writing books with him (Appetites, 2016; World Travel, 2021). After Bourdain's death, she compiled his impressive oral biography in Bourdain (2021). This beyond-absorbing memoir details Woolever's own story: her professional life and her dovetailing transformation from a "shy, soft-bodied twenty-two-year-old with a limited skillset" to a bona fide writer who, at midlife, committed to sobriety, knows exactly where she is and how she got here. A note on the title verso page credits the author's "unusually sharp" memory, and, boy, are there some sharp memories here. Standing in Martha Stewart's driveway before a shoot with Batali, Woolever flicks a bedbug off her jacket. An unnamed "big-time novelist" pulls a photo off his wall before offering Woolever a line of coke on it. Repeatedly, Bourdain comes across as "one of one," a kind, generous mentor and an enormous loss. Woolever may have been born to write, and lovers of memoirs, especially those by women based in the food world and other male-dominated zones, will be riveted by her candor, crisp reflections, and forcefully propulsive storytelling.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A tale of celebrity kitchen mayhem. Woolever came onto the high-end New York restaurant scene at 22, “the correct age to eat shit at a poverty--wage job that I hated, while living in a wet hole in the ground.” The first wet hole belonged to Mario Batali, the once-eminent empire-building chef who fell afoul of the dawning #MeToo culture with behavior that would make even the most unapologetic horndog blush: “His handsiness and constant dirty jokes and innuendo signified that it was OK, even encouraged, to squeeze and flirt with and grope each other,” Woolever recounts, and in the end, it brought him down. To her good fortune, Woolever wasn’t there for that end, having since—at Batali’s engineering—gone to work for Anthony Bourdain, the angel on Woolever’s shoulder to Batali’s devil. Much of what Woolever has to say about Bourdain is available, in one voice or another, in the oral biographyBourdain that she assembled after his death, just as much of what she has to say about restaurant work is told, and far better, in Bourdain’s own breakthrough book,Kitchen Confidential. What is not available elsewhere is an enumeration—that eventually becomes tedious and then numbing—of Woolever’s own bad behavior: pickup sex and numerous affairs while married and raising a child, abundant drugs and an endless flow of alcohol, lies and evasions and missed days of work, and all the rest. It’s noteworthy, and a detriment, that Woolever is harshly judgmental of just about everyone but herself (and, for the most part, Bourdain), cutting herself innumerable breaks for decades of infidelities and addictions until finally allowing that sobriety works better. “If Tony were still alive,” she writes, “I’d almost certainly still be working for him, maybe collaborating on a new book, instead of having written this one.” Yes, and more’s the pity. This is one meal you can skip. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.