Batali in 1999.
Picture: ZUMA Press, Inc / Alamy Inventory Picture
On a cold November morning in 2001, a day without work from work, I walked to Cibao Deli, on the nook of Avenue B and East 4th Road for a self-serve espresso. The person behind the counter had his radio tuned to 1010 WINS, the AM information station.
As I handed my greenback throughout the counter, I heard the radio announcer say that an American Airways aircraft sure for the Dominican Republic had crashed a short while in the past in Queens, minutes after taking off from JFK, and that each one 260 passengers and crew, plus a canine, have been presumed lifeless. The bridges and tunnels have been closed, all of the New York Metropolis airports shut down.
It had been two months since 9/11, and elements of downtown nonetheless smelled like a tire fireplace. You’d sometimes see individuals sporting fuel masks on the road or promoting American-flag-printed T-shirts with horrible slogans like I SURVIVE [sic] THE ATTACK or SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: I CAN’T BELIEVE I GOT OUT. Most days, a wiry white man stood immediately below the arch in Washington Sq. Park, yelling about how the hijacked planes had been chartered by Steven Spielberg, Mariah Carey, and the New York Mets.
We might be taught inside a number of days that the crash had been a tragic accident, not a terror assault. The aircraft had wobbled after takeoff, the inexperienced co-pilot badly overcorrected, the vertical stabilizer got here dislodged, and the aircraft fell out of the sky and into peoples’ yards and homes, immediately exploding in a fireball. Later investigations would present a design flaw within the rudder.
It was the second-deadliest aviation catastrophe in U.S. historical past, and but as a result of it was an accident, there was, within the ambiance, a bizarre collective sense of aid about the entire thing, and a doubling down on the notion that “life is brief” and “something can occur,” which induced individuals to behave in unpredictable methods, operating full-speed towards, or swiftly away from, hazard and uncertainty. Amongst individuals I knew, there have been sudden breakups and ill-advised marriages. If I hadn’t already determined to stop my job as Mario Batali’s assistant, I might have achieved it then.
He’d provided me the job two and a half years earlier, for an annual wage of $26,500, with medical insurance after six months. It by no means occurred to me to barter for even a greenback extra. I used to be so relieved, so thrilled. He would later inform me that I used to be the one one who’d utilized for the job. I had been on the proper place on the proper time; I’d get to work on a cookbook, and get proper up subsequent to the magnetic warmth and pleasure of the restaurant enterprise, whereas avoiding the danger and injury inherent to the endeavor. On my first day, inside half-hour, he’d given me the nickname Woolie.
The day after the aircraft crash, I used to be again at work, modifying recipes at Babbo’s bar. Throughout the room, I might hear Durim, the brand new service supervisor, speaking to a younger telephone lady.
“What did I let you know about blondes sporting pink?” he stated, playacting at scolding her. “I can hardly management myself round you!”
The lady, an NYU freshman, smiled up at Durim from the banquette the place she was seated, taking name after name. Her face was sheepish, her giggle gentle. She was sporting a blush-colored oxford shirt that was buttoned to the highest of her sternum.
Durim had been on the job for about six months. When he first began, I questioned if he was too well mannered and softspoken for the unfastened, enjoyable, dirty-talking tradition of the restaurant workers. The busboys made enjoyable of his Albanian accent, a mix of Italian and Slavic with a little bit of the Bronx, and the waiters pushed again in opposition to his stiff notions of fine-dining service, which he’d honed in varied four-star eating rooms. Durim will need to have spent a while quietly observing the prevailing attractive ethos, as a result of now right here he was, pretending to be upset with a younger worker as a result of he discovered her fuckability a distraction.
It wasn’t simply Durim: Mario’s vocal horniness had set a tone for everybody who labored at Babbo. His grabby arms and fixed soiled jokes and innuendo signified that it was okay, even inspired, to flirt with and grope one another. Nobody known as it harassment, besides maybe when making jokes about it. I had a stack of publicity images of Mario in a two-handed finger gun pose, a slight smile on his face. One morning earlier than he got here in, I took one from the stack and used a Sharpie to put in writing the phrases “Free breast exams!” on it. I confirmed some feminine co-workers, to get amusing. Then I put the photograph in my bag and took it residence, to be secure.
It was an open secret that Mario pawed on the ladies on workers.
One afternoon throughout setup, I’d seen him attain for the cotton drawstring that dangled down the entrance of a pair of lavender sweatpants worn by a cute younger backwaiter named Ariela. His knuckles grazed her crotch for a cut up second earlier than he pulled her towards him, utilizing the string. She jumped again and shrieked, within the showily playful approach of an adolescent lady being teased by an adolescent boy. Was she appearing, to maintain the peace? I had no approach of realizing.
Inside my first few months of working for him, Mario, ostensibly sober, additionally groped me in the course of the workday, whereas I used to be taking a name on the cordless telephone, strolling in a sort of aimless circle across the eating room.
There have been a number of individuals round — a porter hauling laundry luggage down the staircase, a phone lady, one or two waiters beginning to take chairs down from atop tables. Nobody was paying any consideration when Mario beelined towards me, from the entrance door of the restaurant to the center of the eating room. Whereas I had my again to him, he merely grabbed my ass with one hand, squeezed onerous, let go, and moved on into the kitchen.
I used to be rattled and distracted, however ended the decision, and located Mario within the kitchen, leafing by way of invoices on a clipboard. I went and stood at his elbow.
“Hey. Please don’t do this once more,” I stated, quietly. I might see that I had startled him, however he immediately regrouped to furrowed-brow, narrow-eyed, curled-lip contempt.
“What are you, a lesbian?”
I laughed, then left the kitchen and went right down to the basement to cry. It’s probably not a giant deal, I advised myself then, and I believe it now, as I write this. It wasn’t that large a deal. I advised Jessica and my sister that Mario had grabbed my ass however didn’t talk about it with anybody at work. I didn’t need it to get again to him as gossip, and I didn’t wish to burden anybody else with the information.
Everybody had good causes for eager to be and keep at Babbo, which meant excusing the odd grope or bizarre innuendo. The front-of-house workers made nice cash, the cooks acquired the expertise and the glory of working in a red-hot place with a red-hot chef, and even the telephone women and hostesses had entry to the powers of claiming “sure” and “no” to reservation requests.
Mario’s generosity with connections and alternatives was what stored me on the hook. As promised, he’d launched me to meals and journey editors, for whom I used to be now writing my very own freelance tales. Mario had shared bylines with me in Paper and the Los Angeles Instances and Wine Fanatic. He despatched me to continuing-ed courses in recipe writing, Italian, and HTML and trusted me with lots of duty for his books and the recipes and visitor bookings for his TV present.
And he threw me some substantial crumbs from his heaving desk: tickets to a Saturday Night time Dwell broadcast, a Willie Nelson live performance, a Rangers recreation. A 3rd-row seat on the celebrity-packed GQ Males of the 12 months Awards. Three extra boozy, gluttonous working journeys to Atlantic Metropolis, two to Aspen, and one every to Miami, Boston, Philadelphia. Limitless free drinks and meals, and the occasional bottle of valuable aceto balsamico. A Tiffany crystal soccer etched with the NFL emblem. And his previous laptop computer, in lieu of a money Christmas bonus. (That one sort of sucked, really.)
Mario may very well be tyrannical, irrational, and imply. I attempted to maneuver cautiously by way of every day to keep away from triggering a flare-up of rage or the spark of a sudden vendetta. He put a lock on the restaurant’s stereo cupboard, which prevented anybody from interfering along with his fastidiously chosen music picks. When he found that I’d unlocked the cupboard so {that a} supervisor might take away a CD that had been skipping throughout service, he known as me a “pathetic moron,” advised me I ought to recollect whose workforce I used to be on, and hissed, “Have I not made it very clear that nobody touches the music? It’s my restaurant and I management the music.”
Later that day he tossed a bouquet of white roses and lilies onto my desk and stated, “Sorry.”
He was ceaselessly on the defensive, paranoid that anybody else could be getting one thing extra or higher, and apoplectic if it turned out to be true. After one in every of our Atlantic Metropolis on line casino occasions, that includes a number of cooks, he was super-pissed to find that the resort had supplied round-trip helicopter service from New York for Daniel Boulud and his workforce, whereas we’d solely been provided a limousine. “Subsequent time, Woolie, you demand me a fucking chopper.”
Deflecting his intrusions and absorbing his rage was the value of admission to a pool I nonetheless felt very lucky to swim in. I had jumped into the water, and I knew it was moist. If I out of the blue realized that I couldn’t swim, I assumed, it was on me to search out the ladder and climb out. I used to be one in every of dozens of ladies in his orbit who would giggle off his suffocating hugs and suggestive feedback, the occasional tongue within the ear, the lacerating, humiliating verbal kicks within the again. We have been too depending on our jobs, too invested in sustaining a pleasant ambiance, to ever increase an objection, and anyway, wasn’t it simply the character of the rough-and-tumble restaurant enterprise all of us cherished? Would issues actually be any totally different anyplace else?
After I determined to present discover, I didn’t consciously suppose, and by no means stated, that it was due to Mario’s conduct. I believed it was as a result of, as a generalist assistant in a world of particular competencies, I had discovered all I might most likely be taught. I had been treading water, neither entrance of home nor again, and inessential to Mario’s burgeoning TV and writing careers. Six months out from publishing The Babbo Cookbook, he’d determined that my identify wouldn’t go on the duvet in spite of everything. It was near the underside of an extended listing of acknowledgments.
Additionally? I had drunkenly slept with too many co-workers, and now I wished to fulfill somebody good, somebody whose coronary heart hadn’t been corroded by restaurant life. I used to be all the time broke, and I used to be ingesting loads, on a regular basis.
Did I drink a lot as a result of I used to be unfulfilled, or was I unfulfilled as a result of I drank a lot? I had no thought. Everybody I frolicked with, my colleagues and my school pals, drank and drugged; to loosen up, for enjoyable, for the administration of moods. I by no means stated “no” to a bump of coke, and by no means ran out of weed, which I now had delivered to me on the restaurant.
Given the paramountcy of loyalty in Mario’s world, I used to be extraordinarily nervous about leaving. Defectors have been lifeless to him, for the sin of taking what they’d discovered in his make use of and making use of it to another person’s success. It wasn’t simply Mario, after all; nobody is joyful when a valued, well-trained worker leaves, however Mario was able to scorch earth over a hasty exit. I gave him 12 months’ discover, which was absurd, however I hoped it could defend me from being blacklisted if I ended up working for an additional chef or restaurant. It solely occurred to me later that I’d additionally protected myself from a increase or bonus.
Near the tip of my lame-duck yr as Mario’s assistant, we went to Melbourne, Australia, for that metropolis’s Meals & Wine Pageant. Main sponsor Singapore Airways gave us two business-class tickets, however Mario insisted on bringing two assistants, me and chef Mark Ladner, who on the time was operating the Roman trattoria Lupa. I solely managed to squeeze the airline for an additional coach-class ticket, so Mark and I must commerce off sitting in enterprise class with Mario, and alone in coach, over the course of our three flights to Melbourne.
We flew from Newark to Amsterdam on a Monday night. I began in enterprise class. I’d introduced some Vicodin and Percocet that had been gifted to me by one of many telephone women with a aspect gig promoting tablets, and a few Ativan that my primary-care physician, an enormous Mario fan, had prescribed for my (fictional) anxiousness about flying. I took the medication interchangeably, one in every of one thing each few hours, washed down with white wine. Mario drank one beer and fell asleep shortly after takeoff. The tablets made me really feel dumb and dissociated however have been no match for Mario’s loud night breathing. I didn’t sleep.
Regardless of a burgeoning head chilly, I discovered the need to smoke three consecutive cigarettes within the people who smoke’ lounge, which was a number of folding chairs organized inside a grim, glass-walled field. I took an Ativan, then boarded the flight to Singapore, and for the following 12 hours, I had a number of rare and jagged ten-minute increments of sleep, dreaming I’d been left in command of a wolflike canine that I’d uncared for to feed.
We had a five-hour layover in Singapore. Everybody was punchy. I’d misplaced monitor of the time of day, and the day itself. Mark and Mario and I drank large beers and ate bowls of steamy yellow noodles with pork and shrimp. I paid $20 to take a bathe and $10 to sit down in a recliner with a skinny tube strapped to my face, inhaling purified oxygen. I took a Vicodin.
Again with Mario in enterprise class for the ultimate leg, I fell gratefully into my window seat, decided to sleep by way of the loud night breathing this time. When the flight attendant provided him a drink, he stated, “The girl and I’ll every have a Singapore sling.”
The cool crimson cocktail went down like cherry Robitussin on ice after which I needed to pee. Mario set his empty glass down on his tray and depressed the seat-side buttons to raise his legs and decrease his head and shoulders.
“You recognize what, I really have to rise up and use the lav,” I stated, simply as he acquired totally reclined.
“I assume you’re gonna need to straddle me,” he stated. I laughed. He didn’t.
“Woolie, I’ve already made myself comfy,” he stated. His voice had that top, tight tone of harmful annoyance. “I do know you’re not asking me to regulate my seat since you forgot to pee. You wish to rise up? Climb on up and over, child.”
I used to be sporting a denim skirt that hit simply above my knees, and I needed to hike it as much as scramble awkwardly throughout Mario’s lap. I confronted him, in order to not expose him to my precise ass, however I stored my eyes on the carpeted aisle. He reached up and put his arms on my hips as I moved throughout him, and once more once I did the identical crawl again into my seat. I questioned how I might need averted this humiliation. I might have worn an grownup diaper, I assume, or refused to go on the journey. I closed my eyes and didn’t rise up once more.
We landed in Melbourne and it was, extremely, Wednesday night. The competition director, Sandra, met us outdoors the customs corridor with a driver in a slim go well with, who loaded our luggage right into a Mercedes van. Sandra was a good-looking silver-haired lady in a navy shift and pearls, a slash of coral lipstick, and a cheer in her voice that shredded my nerves.
We went straight to dinner at Flower Drum, a flowery Cantonese restaurant, the place we joined an enormous spherical desk of a dozen or so different competition presenters. Sandra directed me to sit down subsequent to an aged American man named Hank. His spouse was a cookbook creator who’d be talking and doing cooking demos.
“Do y’all expertise asparagus pee?” Hank requested the group as I pulled my chair nearer to the desk. He was a retired chemical engineer and had some distinctive insights on the subject.
I used to be wrecked with fatigue, my throat and head pounding, my nasal passages now a fountain of skinny yellow mucous. I chugged two fast glasses of Champagne and took a sip of water earlier than the waiters started delivering the meals: glistening, translucent spring-onion truffles, adopted by scallops with lily buds and an entire roast sucking pig the scale of a well-fed toddler, the meat tender, the pores and skin like crunchy taffy. There was Murray cod fried in a rice-flour batter and garnished with soy sauce, scallions, and cilantro, then skinny slices of abalone that had been cooked for 13 hours at low temperature, served with dainty child bok choy. When the waiters retreated, Sandra advised us that abalone retailed for $450 per kilo. Mario and Mark, seated throughout the desk from me, each appeared one way or the other fully fucking practical, even chipper, whereas I used to be a mute shadow of a ghoul.
A waiter returned to tell us that there would quickly be a duck course and a beef course, and that the chef and his cooks would then come out to introduce themselves earlier than two dessert programs, which might be adopted by espresso and brandy.
I used to be there to be a punching bag, a co-conspirator, a wingman, a straight man, a handy feminine physique …
I did the mathematics on how for much longer we must sit at this desk, then heard the sound of shattering glass from someplace inside my thoughts. I began to cry, silently, feeling not a lot unhappy as held hostage. I closed my eyes, began to nod off, and once I opened them once more, I noticed that Mario was staring throughout the desk at me with narrow-eyed fury. Sandra was up from her seat, coming round towards me.
“Come on pricey, let’s go away the desk,” she stated, greedy my elbow, main me to a bench close to the coat examine. I sat down. Mario had adopted us; he sat subsequent to me. Sandra smiled tightly and retreated.
“Get a grip, Woolie,” he hissed. “It’s gonna be an extended fucking week in case you can’t preserve your shit collectively.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, mashing my fingers throughout the tears on my cheeks. “I’m jet-lagged, I’ve a foul chilly—”
“You’ve been taking some heavy fucking prescribed drugs and ingesting for 2 days,” he interrupted. “You possibly can’t deal with that shit. What did you suppose was gonna occur? Go splash some water in your face and are available again to the desk.” He acquired up and walked away.
I felt ashamed and livid, but weirdly cared for, like Meadow Soprano being dressed down by her father, Tony. That the tablets have been a foul thought had by no means occurred to me. I took a number of deep breaths, dug my nails into my palms, and went again to the desk for the Peking duck, beef filet, milk-and-ginger pudding, and hen nest with almond soup. When the chef got here from the kitchen to greet our desk, he spoke solely with Mario.
The subsequent morning, soaking in a sizzling tub on the Park Hyatt, I coughed up inexperienced phlegm speckled with blood, like some clunky plot gadget foreshadowing my consumptive dying, which I hoped would occur, in order that Mario would really feel suitably dangerous about scolding me.
Later, Sandra took us on a tour of the Queen Victoria Market, the place for the primary time I noticed complete goats and lambs and kangaroos skinned and posed for show at a butcher’s stall. The animals’ intact eyes seemed huge of their bony faces. We ate sausage sandwiches and drank crimson wine for lunch, standing up in a nook, then went again to the resort to prep for the primary of Mario’s three cooking seminars.
He talked to the capability crowd in his normal intense and authoritative cadence concerning the “miraculous and celestial love story between this particular pasta and sauce,” disparaged grocery-store butchers, and hinted that whisking zabaglione was similar to jerking off, whereas Mark and I labored furiously backstage, plating small parts of bucatini all’amatriciana in a resort manufacturing kitchen down an extended corridor from the ballroom.
For the following 4 days, between seminars and panel discussions, we have been obligated to a full schedule of boozy lengthy lunches and dinners with sponsors, the opposite competition presenters, and their spouses. We ate and drank some extraordinary issues: unfamiliar recreation birds and black truffles and big prawns and tiny greens, Persian fairy floss and fair-trade chocolate, Australian Shiraz and classic Champagne and well-aged Sauternes and a few very uncommon and unique sake. I stored a detailed watch on the room, and after every dinner, as soon as I gleaned that it was even barely not impolite to take action, I retreated to the resort, whereas Mario and Mark continued on into the evening, ingesting and smoking and making new pals.
On the morning of our final seminar, Mark stated, “You recognize, the large man is actually pissed at you for not going out ingesting with us. He stated you’re not being a workforce participant, that you just don’t have his again.”
I felt like throwing up. “Yeah, however I believe I’ve, like, a sinus an infection,” I stated.
“I don’t know, possibly take some chilly drugs and exit with us tonight,” Mark stated. “I’m simply the messenger.”
I’d failed to comprehend that being a ingesting buddy wasn’t a enjoyable perk of the job; it was the job. On paper, I used to be there to assist tong pasta onto plates and maintain on to enterprise playing cards, however actually, I used to be there to be a punching bag, a co-conspirator, a wingman, a straight man, a handy feminine physique, whether or not or not I had a chilly or jet lag or simply merely wished a while to myself.
What did I count on? For 3 years, I used to be a good-time assistant, taking the journeys and ingesting the booze and laughing on the terrible jokes and generally making them, too. My mistake had been believing that it was all the time my privilege and my alternative to hang around with Mario and preserve him firm whereas he drank.
I couldn’t wait to be achieved with the job. I let Mark take the business-class seats all the best way again from Melbourne to New York.
Just a few days after we acquired again from Australia, Mario handed me a Babbo enterprise card, on the again of which was written “TONY,” above an Higher West Facet road tackle.
“I met Anthony Bourdain at a dinner final evening,” he stated. “Actually cool man. He’s seeking to rent somebody to assist him write a cookbook and I advised him he ought to rent you. Write him a letter.”
From the e-book Care and Feeding: A Memoir by Laurie Woolever. Copyright © 2025 by Laurie Woolever. Revealed on March 11, 2025, by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
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