Laurie Woolever in conversation with Samin Nosrat • Care and Feeding: A Memoir

NOTE:  We have indoor standing room only tickets for the first 60 people to pre-order the book through this page. The book is your ticket.

No ticket? You are still welcome to attend, but will be standing just outside of the shop in our overflow area. We'll have a speaker set up so that you can hear his talk, and afterwards you'll be able to meet Laurie and have your book personalized. 

Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor. She spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she coauthored the cookbook Appetites and World Travel. She’s written about food and travel for the New York Times, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others, and has worked as an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.

Samin Nosrat is a chef, teacher, and author of the bestselling, James Beard Award–winning Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. She has been called “a go-to resource for matching the correct techniques with the best ingredients” by The New York Times and “the next Julia Child” by NPR’s All Things Considered. Samin is an Eat columnist for The New York Times Magazine and can be found eating, cooking, and laughing in the Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat documentary series on Netflix.

Care and Feeding: A Memoir - In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there’s more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.

Behind the scenes, Laurie’s life is frequently chaotic, an often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating. Laurie seeks to try it all—from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli—while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood.

As the food world careens toward an overdue reckoning and Laurie’s mentors face their own high-profile descents, she is confronted with the questions of where she belongs and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.