Laurie Woolever is a writer, editor, public speaker, and former cook. For nearly a decade, she worked as the lieutenant to the late author, TV host and producer Anthony Bourdain.
Laurie has written for the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Bloomberg, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others.
In this episode of The Leader Assistant Podcast, Laurie talks about her time working as an assistant to Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain – prominent figures in the culinary world.
LEADERSHIP QUOTE
People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.
― Dorothy Day
CONNECT WITH LAURIE
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- Laurie on LinkedIn
- lauriewoolever.com
- Laurie’s book -> Care and Feeding: A Memoir
Image Credit – David Scott Holloway
ABOUT LAURIE
Laurie Woolever is a writer, editor, public speaker, and former cook. For nearly a decade, she worked as the lieutenant to the late author, TV host and producer Anthony Bourdain.
Laurie has written for the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Bloomberg, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others. In 1996, Laurie earned a bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, after which she completed the professional training program at the French Culinary Institute.
She worked as Mario Batali’s assistant from 1999 to 2002, during which time she contributed to the writing of his books Holiday Food (2000) and The Babbo Cookbook (2002). Laurie edited and recipe-tested Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook (2004), and then spent several years as an editor, at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator, before becoming Bourdain’s assistant.
In 2016, Ecco (an imprint of HarperCollins) published Appetites: A Cookbook, which Laurie co-authored with Anthony Bourdain. Their second collaboration, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, was published by Ecco in April 2021, and hit the New York Times bestseller list at #1. In September 2021, Ecco published Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at #7. Appetites, World Travel and Bourdain have each been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Laurie recently co-authored Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking, published by Clarkson Potter in November 2024. Her memoir, Care and Feeding, was published by Ecco on March 11, 2025, and hit the NYT Best-seller list in its first week. Laurie co-hosts a food-focused podcast, Carbface for Radio, and is a writer for Flaming Hydra, a creator-owned newsletter collective.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Laurie Woolever 0:00
Hi, I’m Laurie Woolever And today’s leadership quote comes from Dorothy Day. People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds, is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.
Podcast Intro 0:37
The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident, Game Changing leader assistants.
Jeremy Burrows 0:49
Hey friends, welcome to The Leader Assistant Podcast. It’s your host, Jeremy Burrows, and this is episode 342 you can check out the show notes at leader assistant com slash 342, leader assistant.com/three, four, to find all the links and bio information and all the things for this conversation, which I’m excited to be speaking with. Laurie Woolever. Laurie is a writer, editor, public speaker and former Cook, and for nearly a decade, she worked as the lieutenant to the late author, TV host and producer Anthony Bourdain. She has experience as an assistant to Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali, and so for those of you who don’t know, they’re prominent figures in the culinary world, so yeah, I’m really excited to have you on the show. Laurie, first of all, tell us what city you’re in and what you like to do when you’re not working.
Laurie Woolever 1:46
I am in New York City, and when I am not working, I like to, I’ll just be very honest, I like to sit on the couch with my cat and watch trash television.
Jeremy Burrows 2:01
Hey. Fair enough. Fair enough, awesome. Well, let’s, let’s just dive in. Tell us a little bit about your you kind of early in your career, and how you ended up as an assistant period, you know, like, what was it about being an assistant that drew you to the role, or was it just kind of something that happened? And you know, we’d love to hear as the assistants listening have various reasons or happenstance reasons that they became an assistant. What was your intro into the world of assisting?
Laurie Woolever 2:39
So when I graduated college, which was 1996 I had a job, but it was really kind of a placeholder job, and I knew that I wanted to get a better, more permanent job. The job I started with was as an intern at Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York, and so the pay was quite low, and I knew that it was it would be over after six months, and once I actually started the job, I was pretty unhappy. It was basically lawn mowing, weeding, pitching straw, picking up garbage, and those are all great, worthwhile activities, but I felt a little bit that I was having just graduated from college, not really being a person that loved to be outdoors in the summer heat and physical activity, I felt maybe this wasn’t the right job for me, so I started right away looking for new jobs. And of course, as a new college graduate, without a lot of real skills, kind of anything you do, any job you’re applying for, or at least that was the case back then. Was some form of assistant, whether it was publishing assistant, or legal or financial, administrative. Everything was, you know, just get your foot in the door and help other people do their jobs. So the job that I ended up with was sort of a household assistant. I was working as a cook for a family that had very simple healthy food requirements, and so being their cook wasn’t really a full time position. So what I ended up doing, in order to sort of justify the full time nature of the job was I was a household assistant. I was I would help with the laundry, and I would do the grocery shopping, and I would get the mail and organize the periodicals, and they had an extensive manual of things in the household that they wanted to always have stocked in a certain way. So I and I was sort of a liaison between other members of the household staff. So I really was doing it for, really, since the beginning of my career, and then eventually I went to culinary school, and again, thought, well, this isn’t exactly what I want. I don’t really want to be a restaurant cook. It’s a little stressful. It’s hot. Know, again, I’m kind of lazy, and how can I take this, these skills that I’m just, you know, I’ve just taken out a big loan to pay for and use them, but in a different way. And just by stroke of good luck, a job came up to be the assistant to Mario Batali, who, at the time, had two restaurants in New York. He had just published a cookbook. He had a show on the on the earliest iteration of the Food Network, and he was looking for his first ever assistant to help keep everything organized. And I knew I was qualified, and I knew that this would be a great way for me to avoid having to work in a restaurant kitchen, and I applied for the job. So that was, that was the first time that I really worked, you know, that was officially an assistant. But I had, I had actually been doing that, that work for a while.
Jeremy Burrows 5:49
Nice, nice. So was it business and personal assistant work at first, or it’s,
Laurie Woolever 5:59
you know, that’s a great question. I think it was, I think it was a combination of the two. It was, I was working out of his one of his restaurants, and was definitely cognizant of the day to day workings of the restaurant, and would pitch in sometimes my salary was paid by the restaurant, so I was technically a restaurant employee, a business employee, but there were parts of my job that that tipped over into the more personal things, like going he had his he had children who were quite young at the time that I started working for him, and I would sometimes go over and make them lunch, or make a big batch of chicken cutlets to put in the fridge that The Nanny could give the kids throughout the week, or, you know, just other things, assisting out with his household needs, with his family needs. But I would say for the most part, it was, it was more business. It just, I think it’s often true in the restaurant business that there is, there’s very little separation between your personal life and your your work life, because you spend so much time at work and with the people that you work for, work with. So it’s it all. It’s really just a person’s life, you know, that is largely consumed by business, but sometimes there are, there are personal needs for for family things.
Jeremy Burrows 7:18
Yeah, nice. So how, how did that role evolve? How long you know, were you there? And then tell us a little bit about the I know there was a lot. I’m not super familiar, but I know I have a friend who’s a chef, and he’s very familiar with with both Mario and Annie. But tell us a little bit about just where your career went from there. And I know there was some some headlines, unfortunately, and for both of those, those people, but yeah, give us a little bit of the rest of your story there.
Laurie Woolever 7:56
Yeah. So I was, I worked for Mario for three and a half years, and I’d say the role evolved so that I was starting to do more writing and editorial support. I helped him write two cookbooks while I was there, I did a lot of behind the scenes support for the recipes for his television show. You know, we did some some co writing together on articles, and I did some ghost writing for him. I also did, at some point get back into the kitchen, because somebody left unexpectedly, and they needed just, they needed somebody to cook that was an hour before the service, and they realized they were missing a cook. So I did do some cooking. I did some traveling. You know, it was, in a lot of ways, a great experience, really, a huge education in restaurants, travel, business, media, food, wine, cooking, you name it. It was really kind of just an up close look at that lots of different parts of lots of different businesses. Yeah, you mentioned headlines. Mario was held accountable for some of his behavior in 2017 at the height of the ME TOO movement, and I saw some of that behavior when I when I worked for him, he was not always appropriate in the workplace, not great boundaries, some, I would say, some pretty egregious abuse of power. So it was complicated. I had a lot of fun. I learned a lot of things. I also, you know, I absorbed some some things that I wish that I hadn’t, and I saw some things that I wished I hadn’t. You know, it’s just kind of goes with the territory, or went with the territory in the and this time period of the late 90s and early 2000s it was very normal in the restaurant business for people to have pretty porous boundaries around in their personal behavior and the things they would say to each other, etc, etc. So I did that for three and a half years, and then I worked as a sort of a hybrid catering Cook, private cook and freelance writer. Because writing was always really what I wanted to do. From there, I parlayed that into two different jobs with magazines to do with food and beverage art Culinaire and Wine Spectator magazine, where I was an editor, both of those places, and then I had a baby, and I got married, and I was looking for some a different kind of position, where I could have a little more flexibility, where I didn’t have to be in an office every day. And I reached out to Tony Bourdain, who Mario had introduced me to several years before. And I reached out to a lot of people, including Tony, just to say, I’m looking for something part time and flexible. If you hear of anything, please keep me in mind. And he happened to be looking for a new assistant. His his longtime assistant was on her way out, and he offered me that job, and I wasn’t sure. I thought it was sort of a backward move to go from being a magazine editor to being an assistant, but I knew Tony, and I thought this seems like a really great, interesting opportunity. I know he’s a good guy, so let me try it out. And so I did that for close to a decade, 2009 until Tony’s death in 2018
Jeremy Burrows 11:09
Wow. Yeah. So what was maybe two, two sides. So tell us about the best time and the best part of that role, that decade and and maybe the the the not so good time, or the like, most difficult part of that job.
Laurie Woolever 11:35
There were so many great aspects of it. It was really a dream job in a lot of ways. I mean, he was just a fantastic boss. And I think because he was someone who had worked so hard as a cook and chef for 28 years himself, and I think he really understood the value of being a good boss and the and the and the value of having a competent and loyal and dependable employee. So he treated me very well, I will say, one of the real top perks of the job, and there were sort of a series of five great moments. A few years in, he offered me the chance to travel with him and his television crew while they were shooting his show, Parts Unknown. And he paid for my business class flights, and you know, I stayed in the nice hotel, and I was just, I didn’t really have a responsibility there. It was just come, come along with us, eat the food, see what we’re seeing. If you want to work on your own projects while you’re there, you can do that. And so, along with Tony and the crew, I got to go to Vietnam. I went to Japan twice. I went to Hong Kong, I went to Sri Lanka, and so those kinds of experiences, you know, seeing behind the scenes of this really beloved television show and and just seeing these parts of the world and eating well. And it was, it was really extraordinary. So that that was one of, I’d say, many highlights. We also co authored a cookbook in 26 2016 called appetites. And that was, you know, what a what an extraordinary opportunity to co author a book with, with such a, you know, high profile, interesting, beloved author. And then I think, you know, the obvious low light, or the the hardest part was, was his death, which just was completely unexpected and very destabilizing. You know, I really, I really liked and admired him as a person, as a boss, as a creative producer. You know, he was, he had, he treated people like family and and he had a family, and so that was just, you know, it’s, it’s hard to overestimate the the level of loss that I felt and that lots and lots of people felt when he died. Yeah,
Jeremy Burrows 13:57
yeah. I so I worked for an executive. My prior executive for Well, I worked at the organization for 12 years, but I supported him. He was a founder of a nonprofit. I supported him for six years, and, long story short, in 2016 he burned out, made some mistakes and got himself fired, and in 2020, I was about two months away from publishing my book, and I was still kept in touch with him. I was working for a different executive. Had moved on, but I still was friends and kept in touch with him, and I remember he helped me with my book and super we kind of talked through all the all the mess of like, what we would have done if we could go back and you know, how we would have set better boundaries and maybe avoided some of these, this burnout, and maybe could have the. Things could have been different. So we had a good, good time there. And it was, I was grateful for that opportunity. But unfortunately, like, a month and a half before my book came out, he took his own life, and it was just one of those things where you’re just like, the it you just, there’s just no words, right? There’s just no words. And so when you support someone and in an assistant role, it’s like there’s oftentimes other than, well, sometimes even more so, but that’s another story. But oftentimes other than their their spouse or their kids, the assistant is, like, the closest person to them, right? And so, how? Yeah, so I don’t know, you know, share as much as you want to share, as little as you want to share, but I haven’t been through that experience and losing not only a friend and a boss, you know, colleague, all the different titles, what? How did you process that, you know, because I obviously had to figure that out as well. And there’s different, you know, ups and downs and during that processing. But yeah, anything you’d be open and open to sharing.
Laurie Woolever 16:25
Yeah, it was, was really difficult. I felt lucky that I had good relationships with other people that were very close with Tony, that had very close professional associations, and he because he worked so much, first as a cook and a chef, and then in television and writing, friends and colleagues were kind of one in the same. He did have some friends who were not involved with his work, but it was the people that he spent a lot of time with and got very close with, happened to be people that he worked with. So I had eight and a half, nine years of experience getting to know those people and we all that was really important for us to lean on each other, spend time together, just get together, talk, you know, just sort of puzzle it out and support each other. I was, I was very lucky to have quit drinking before this happened. I think that, you know, one of the coping mechanisms that a lot of people turn to are drugs and alcohol in a time of extreme shock and grief. And I that’s totally understandable. I know for me, it would have just made things more difficult. And so I was, you know, I was able to maintain my sobriety. And I think my, you know, my involvement with 12 step programs was also a really big part of my ability to kind of keep it together and process the grief I was in therapy. I had been in therapy for a long time, and I continued to see my therapist through this process, and I spent a lot of time alone. And I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but I also, I mean, it probably wasn’t, but that was what I wanted. You know, I was lucky to have friends outside of, you know, people who worked for Tony. I had friends who were good at checking in on me, coming to see me, making sure I had when I needed, but I also just, I just felt so, just so drawn to isolate, you know. And again, I don’t recommend it, but that’s what I did. I also have a son. You know, my son was nine years old at the time, and there’s nothing like the needs of a child to keep you, you know, putting one foot in front of the other, and getting up and just trying to figure it out. And I’m really, I’m glad that I had someone depending on me to to keep me from kind of going off the rails. So it was, you know, those were my specific circumstances, but it takes a long time, you know? What I realized is that it’s not, you know, grief is not linear, and it kind of comes in waves. And you maybe don’t feel much at all for a little while, and then suddenly you’re just hit by brand new waves of grief and different feelings. I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of dreams about Tony, and I continue to, you know, really, since right after he died. I mean, I just, I feel like he’s there all the time, and they tend to follow sort of the same storyline where he has re emerged, he has come back. It was just a big mistake, or he, you know, took off and faked his own death, but now he’s back. And I think it’s just a way of the brain sort of trying to make sense of this loss. And for me, it’s the great sort of fringe benefit, is that I get to see him and talk to him. Yeah,
Jeremy Burrows 19:50
thanks for sharing. Sure. Let’s talk a little bit about, if you don’t mind, burnout. So you know, I mentioned a little bit of my story, but. So what you mentioned your sobriety was there, was there burnout in the both of your roles, or was it kind of, I know you talk about this a little bit in your book, but tell us a little bit about your experience with burnout and what maybe caused you to realize that, okay, or helped you, help pull
Laurie Woolever 20:26
you out of that, right? Yeah, yeah, I would say there was, that’s a
Jeremy Burrows 20:29
crazy industry. That’s a crazy industry. Yes, everyone knows that. You know, they watch the show, the bear, the cooking show, they see all these things, you know that, or they work in the restaurant industry, and they just know it’s like, it’s like, non stop,
Laurie Woolever 20:42
yeah, and then, and then, add to that the intensity of being someone’s assistant, you know, which has its own Yeah, pitfalls. So I would say there was, for sure, burnout when I worked for Mario, and a lot of it was sort of self inflicted. You know, it was in my 20s. I was partying a lot. I didn’t have a good sense of proportion when it came to drinking and using drugs, and so I was pushing myself as hard as I could in that realm. And Mario was getting more and more busy, starting to open restaurants all over New York, and then eventually outside of New York, and I could just see the job getting bigger and bigger. And whereas I was getting kind of disillusioned by the industry, by him, I was, you know, not enjoying the social aspects as much anymore, and I knew that I needed to make a change, that this wasn’t a track that I could stay on indefinitely without really causing a lot of harm to my my mental health. So I, I gave my notice. Actually gave him a year’s notice, because he was so, he was so, you know, loyalty was so crucial to him, and the idea that somebody would leave and take what they’d learned from him and apply it someplace else, which, of course, is just what people do. You know, in the in the world of work, you you learn and you grow and you move on. But he had such a problem with people, you know, taking from him and and helping somebody else succeed. And I thought the only way that I can get out of here, you know, unscathed, is just just let him know my intentions way ahead of time, and also not to take another job, you know, as an assistant, which I didn’t really want anyway. So there was definitely some burnout there with Tony. It was less so, but I was starting to before he died, I was starting to get to a place of Gosh, I don’t know how much longer I can do the just the routine admin stuff. And I think again, it was, it was, it was as much of a me problem as it was, or even more so than a him problem. I really felt that I had to be on constant alert and that i If he asked me for something, I wanted to be able to deliver it in, you know, instantly. And working for someone who traveled as much as he did and all over the world in different time zones, that meant, you know, being on alert at all times of day or night, and never putting my phone down, and just being constantly ready to react, you know, and I, and I was married at the time, and I had a child, and I I had really allowed this job to become the the most important thing to me in the center of my universe. And I want to be clear that Tony was Tony never said to me, I need it immediately. When I’d say, jump, you say how high that was pressure I was putting on myself, because I I wanted things to be as easy as possible for him. I was, I just, I never wanted to disappoint him, and so I, I put these unrealistic expectations on myself. And there were times where, you know, he would ask me to do things that I thought were kind of silly, like he would be in Rome, in Italy, and I would be back home in New York, and he would text me and say, Can you get me a taxi or get me a car to take me to dinner. You know, whereas he’s staying in a five star hotel with a 24 hour concierge, she speaks 10 languages, right? Someone who is certainly better positioned than I am to get him a car immediately. But for whatever reason, he asked me to do it, and that was the kind of thing where I felt like I don’t, I don’t want to be doing this for the rest of my life. This is really, this is really nuts. But I had no idea how to go about changing that, you know, I thought maybe I could find someone to take over the admin stuff. But then what would that leave for me? How can I ever train someone to do what I’ve done, you know, to understand the nuances. You know, it felt like an unsolvable problem, and I’m sure it wasn’t. But then, unfortunately, the problem resolved itself by way of Tony no longer being alive. So I wish that I could have figured out some way to stay working for him, but to maybe i. Lessen the burden of the the constant vigilance. Yeah,
Jeremy Burrows 25:04
yeah. I remember, a few months before my executive got fired, I was riding with him to pick up his son at school. I did some personal assistant stuff, and we kind of worked out of his home office. It’s kind of everything was all ingrained, but I’m riding with him, and I’m like, you know, I don’t think we can run at this pace much longer, you know? I was like, I don’t think this is sustainable. I’m kind of, I’m kind of done with this pace, and I’m burning out. And he’s like, yeah, he’s like, I’ve kind of been wondering why you’ve been such an asshole lately. And I was like, well, you made me one. You You are. You’re the one that’s that’s driving us at this pace. And I was like, it’s your fault. So anyway, so thankfully, he was like, hey, you know, just let’s, let’s downshift. And for the, you know, for the next month, just do the bare minimum. Go Go home to your your family, and just like, let’s, let’s hit reset. But then by the time we came back, it was the holidays, and then the next holidays, and then he gets fired. So it’s like, kind of like, resolved itself as well. But yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s such an interesting and you mentioned you’re so concerned about, you know, you know, you didn’t want to disappoint Tony, right? And that’s, that’s such a hard thing. That’s what that I’ve had to deal with and try to move forward this idea of like, I’ve got to, I’ve got to prove my worth to this, this person, or I’ve got to get their approval. If I don’t have their approval, then I’m going to have a bad day or a bad week, or I’m going to let it affect me,
Laurie Woolever 26:46
right? Yeah, yeah. Totally. Such a
Jeremy Burrows 26:50
such a hard shift, especially in an assistant role where we, like you, mentioned specifically you said you just wanted to do whatever you could to make things easy for him. We want to help we care so much. We care too much. We want to help other people. So it’s hard to help ourselves when we’re helping other people so much.
Laurie Woolever 27:14
Yeah, yeah.
Jeremy Burrows 27:16
Well, Laurie, let’s shift gears a little bit. Just tell us a little bit about your memoir, care and feeding. Super interesting to share this with my listeners, and obviously I’ll put the link to the book in the show notes, but tell us a little bit about why you wrote the book, and maybe just give us a quick summary of what it covers.
Laurie Woolever 27:39
Yeah, so this is a memoir that’s basically covers 25 years of my life, from right after college up until 2021 and I’ve always wanted to write. I’ve always, I’ve always been telling stories, you know, creating stories, and sort of hiding them away, thinking, at some point I’ll put something like this together. And it was the right time when I started writing it. I had just finished writing a book called World Travel and a reverent guide that was co authored with Tony, that we started before he died, and I finished it after he died. And then I also did a oral biography called Bourdain, the definitive oral biography. So once those two were off the table, and just to flash back a bit to the grief question, I mean, writing these two books was also a really important part of processing the loss of Tony, because I was suddenly immersed in his work and talking to people that knew him, and going back and re watching all the shows and reading everything that he had written. And so that was a really nice way to to spend time with him and remember him, yeah. But So once those books were out, I thought, well, this is this is my this is my time now to tell my story and to tell the story of everything that goes on, not everything, but some things that go on behind the scenes, behind the superstar marquee names of Mario Batali and Tony Bourdain. But the book is not about them. It’s really about me. And I just I felt that I had experiences that were interesting enough to keep people reading, but also relatable enough and common enough that people would see might see some parts of their own experience reflected there, and maybe not feel alone, or maybe have some ideas of how to proceed through difficult things like the loss of a friend and colleague. You know, marriage troubles, addiction, difficulty at work. You know, all these things that I think just are really part of the human experience. So, and I had a good relationship with the publisher, and I had a, you know, literary I still have a relationship with them, and I have a great literary agent, and so everything was kind of teed up. And I thought, if I don’t do this, if I don’t try this now, I’m really going to regret it. Mm. Yeah, and it really worked out. So the book has been very well received. It hit the New York Times bestseller list its first week out. You know, it’s gotten some really nice reviews. So I’m very, very pleased with with the way it’s
Laurie Woolever 30:11
all gone.
Jeremy Burrows 30:13
Awesome is there, you know, enough assistant stories and assistant stuff in there, to to not, not to say it wouldn’t be interesting if it wasn’t. But you know what I mean, like, is there a lot of assistant?
Laurie Woolever 30:27
Oh, for sure, yeah. I mean, the the structure, the the framework of the book, really is, is the work, the jobs that I’ve done? So I, you know, start with the working for the family as the private cook and assistant. There’s a lot about my time working for Mario, and there, there are moments of working for Tony, and also a lot of moments of insight and reflection. And, you know, what am I doing? Why am I here? You know, how do I maintain my sense of self while devoting everything to to you know, someone who was has cast an enormous shadow over me, and the the understanding that, you know, there’s no job without this person, but this person’s success doesn’t happen without the support of people like me and and just sort of wrestling with that and trying to figure out how I feel and felt about all of it. So, yeah, I think, I think assistance of all different in all different industries will really find something to grab onto.
Jeremy Burrows 31:33
Awesome. Well, I will link to the book care and feeding in the show notes, leaderassistant.com/342, all also link to your website. lauriewoolever.com and your LinkedIn. Yeah, people can reach out, say hi, connect with you. Absolutely. Really appreciate you being on the show. The last thing I want to ask though, is all this experience with all these amazing culinary, you know, taste tests and restaurant experience, what’s your What was your favorite thing that you that you ate, or your favorite meal, or your favorite type of of entree, or, you know, appetizer,
Laurie Woolever 32:18
wow, so much. The thing that comes to mind right away is a bowl of soup in Vietnam with Tony, we went in 2014 to the city of way, which is sort of right in the center part of the country. And they have a signature soup called bumbo way. And it sort of resembles pho, which I think a lot of people are familiar with. It is a noodle soup, but there’s a it’s a much more complicated. It has beef or pork Shanks, and it has, sometimes crab dumplings, and it’s got a very rich red broth and noodles. Sometimes there’s crunchy banana blossoms in there, lots of herbs, lots of citrus. Really, just an extraordinary soup. I mean, it’s really, it’s sometimes there’s even cubes of gelatinized pig blood, which sounds, you know, challenging, but it’s actually really delicious. And I went with Tony. He shot a scene at the Central Market in Hui, which is called Dongba market. And after he shot the scene, he said, Come, you know, sit with me now that the cameras are down and you got to have a bowl of this soup. It’s so good. And so just to sit in this steamy, hot environment in this market in the morning and have this delicious soup that Tony was encouraging me to try, was that this really doesn’t get a lot better than that. Wow,
Jeremy Burrows 33:38
that’s amazing. Well, thanks again, Laurie, for sharing some of your story and being on the show, and I’m excited to share with the world. And Yeah, appreciate your time
Laurie Woolever 33:48
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
