How Laurie Woolever created Anthony Bourdain’s newest travel book without him

How can you go on to complete a book when your co-author, whose opinions are the subject of the book, has passed away? That was the task that Laurie Woolever faced after Anthony Bourdain died in June of 2018.

The book, World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, was published on April 20, 2020. Woolever was his assistant from 2009 until his death, and he referred to her as “the lieutenant.” She discussed the book’s blueprint only once with Bourdain, but she filled in the gaps with her own years of experience working with him, along with research and conversations with those who knew the globe-trotting chef.

There are travel recollections from Bourdain’s brother, Christopher; a story from his producer and director Nari Kye; a reflection of his time at Black Hoof in Toronto by owner and restaurateur Jen Agg; and a contribution by producer and musician Steve Albini, who dined with Bourdain on camera in Chicago.

“I tried to make a good balance of those two — people who were along for much of the journey with him and people who he met along the way,” Woolever says.

The book covers 40-plus countries, from Argentina to Vietnam, with Tony’s related observations sprinkled in. Each chapter includes tips on travel and recommendations for dining, accommodations, and attractions. Some places didn’t make the cut if a lot had changed since Bourdain’s time there, or if his experiences aren’t possible for the everyday traveler. Iran and Indonesia fall into this list, as does Thailand.

Woolever, a writer and editor with a culinary background, met Bourdain in 2002 while she was working as an assistant for the chef Mario Batali. Bourdain hired her to help him develop his Les Halles Cookbook. Woolever and Bourdain later reconnected when she was seeking a flexible, part-time job and he, an assistant. They worked closely over the years on editorial projects published through Anthony Bourdain Books, an imprint founded in 2011, including 2016’s Appetites. Woolever would also go on to travel with Bourdain and his production crew once a year to filming locations. The pair first discussed writing a guide book, which would become World Travel, at a meeting at Bourdain’s New York City apartment in the spring of 2018.

Photo: Steve Legato

Currently, Woolever is working on an oral history of Bourdain’s life set to be published in October 2021.

“I think we both were very lucky to know each other,” Woolever says. “He certainly gave me the most incredible opportunities to develop as a writer and an editor and to really live a great life.”

Over a Zoom interview, I spoke with Woolever about what it was like to work with Bourdain, and how he helped change travel media forever.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tony was so known for his directness and being a little bit acerbic. What was it like working on editing and writing projects with him?

In terms of the writing projects, Tony started a book imprint in 2011 called Anthony Bourdain Books, and it was an imprint of ECCO, which is itself an imprint of HarperCollins. And he published about six titles a year.

One of the first ones was called Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews. It was a collection of restaurant reviews by Marilyn Hagerty, who was the longtime restaurant critic and restaurant reviewer for the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota. She went viral because she reviewed an Olive Garden back in 2012, and sort of became this sensation. He really championed her and thought there was something there to this very straightforward assessment of places to eat in North Dakota. So he wanted to publish sort of a best of, of her work.

I was hired to go through the entirety of her output from about 30 years of restaurant reviewing and pull the most representative and interesting reviews, enough to make a book, and do a little bit of editing and clarifying as needed. So that was my first editing project with him post-Les Halles Cookbook.

Tony was such a great writer. He didn’t really need somebody to write for him. But a lot of times, he was an incredibly busy person who traveled so much that he sometimes needed a second pair of eyes to look at something, or he would ask me to sort of punch something up or to give him the outline of something and then he would fill it in.

It was the same way that he worked with his producers on his television show. He would come back from shooting, and then he would have to write a voice-over. A lot of times, the producers would give him the skeleton of what they wanted him to say, or the facts that he needed to hit, and he would take it and make it his own.

He didn’t have a lot of ego around knowing that sometimes you just need help, sometimes you just don’t have the bandwidth to do it all yourself. And I learned a lot about that from him.

What went into the decision to move forward with “World Travel” after his death and how did your responsibilities for the book change?

Maybe a month or two, or maybe less, after he died, I had a conversation with Tony’s agent, who’s also my agent. She was working closely with his estate. Everyone agreed that this is what Tony would have wanted, that we had started this thing, that all of the raw material was there, and that there was a way that we could thoughtfully and sensitively and tastefully move ahead with the project.

Photo: Ecco

Tony had such a huge amount of output — close to 20 years of traveling for television, and writing books and writing articles — so there was so much material out there, but there was no one carefully curated collection of those observations, thoughts, recommendations, and jokes. And so it just made sense. It was like, this is a way that we can curate some version of his legacy or some part of his legacy. It certainly doesn’t represent his entire legacy. But it is one part and a way to share with people who missed him, who followed along his whole career, who loved reading his books and watching his shows — this is a way to put all of that together in one place.

Tony’s brother, Christopher, wrote essays for the book, along with other people who also knew Tony. Why did you include them?

Part of the plan initially for the book was for Tony to write a bunch of essays. He had some ideas, and I’m sure that we would have developed more ideas as we went on in the process. Unfortunately, he just didn’t get the time to do that. He was so busy. He had sort of earmarked the summer of 2018 as the time that he was going to really dig in and do that work of writing those essays.

I still loved the idea that there would be essays, longer ruminations on things throughout this book. And it just made a lot of sense to pull in people who knew Tony, especially people who had traveled with him.

It made perfect sense to me to talk to his brother because he had so many memories that were not exactly the same, but very complimentary memories. And because they had traveled together, both as children and as adults, I thought it was a really good and useful perspective. And in some ways, they’re very similar. Christopher is also quite articulate and literate and is funny and eloquent in his speech. And his ability to recall details is very, very sharp. So it’s a nice sort of echo of the voice in a way. But of course, he has his own perspective and his own style, too.

What about other changes to the style of the book?

I tried to stay very close to the blueprint that we laid out in that one conversation. There were, of course, cases where I did have to make some decisions. If places that Tony had remembered and loved didn’t exist anymore or had changed significantly, it wouldn’t be fair to represent them as the places that he once loved.

There are a few places where I slotted in some of my own recommendations. I went to Rome in 2019 to do research for the book. There were a few places that just weren’t the same that he had recommended — they had just sort of changed like places do over the years. But there were some places that his Rome fixer Sara Pampaloni took me to that were very representative of the kinds of places that he loved in earlier years. So I included those in the book with a note that they weren’t places he had himself visited, but if you’re looking for that rustic Roman trattoria experience, these are those places to go to.

You talk in the book about the “Bourdain effect” and how it can lead to positive and negative results. Does “World Travel” also signify the impact that Bourdain had?

Yeah, it’s interesting. I was going over some of the entries in the Spain chapter for a little piece I was working on. I was trying to understand this one dish at one restaurant that Tony really loved — seared wild mushrooms with a raw egg yolk and foie gras. He talked about it on Parts Unknown. When I was researching the place online everybody that wrote a little review of it talked about that dish. And so in that specific case, I was thinking, does everyone really love this dish? Or do they love it because they saw Tony talk about it on TV, and then it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy?

He had that impact on things. I went to Pastrami Queen in Manhattan recently and they have a picture of him on their front window. They have a picture of him on their website, and this great quote he gave to Variety magazine about how it’s the first meal he gets when he comes back to New York.

I think in the best case, the Bourdain effect can be really galvanizing for a restaurant and really give some places a second life. And then I think in some cases it can sort of pigeonhole a place, or a place that was very quiet and understated and only known to locals can become overrun with people who just want to do what Tony did.

It’s the risk that you take, as a business, consenting to be on television. And there were plenty of places that said, “great, we were so thrilled we would love to be featured.” And there were plenty of places that said, “no, thank you. We can’t; we know what happens,” and, “that’s not our vision for ourselves,” or, “we know that we won’t be able to sustain what we do if we have that level of scrutiny and spotlight from television.”

I think you can take it either as a negative or positive. If it makes a business into sort of a shit show, that’s not great. But I think the flip side of it is that by focusing on places that are not just fine dining, or not the most well known, gets people curious about what’s in my neighborhood, or what’s in a different part of the city that I’m staying when I’m visiting someplace else? I don’t think he ever set out to say, “these are the definitive places that you have to go in any one city.” It was like, “here’s what my producers and I found, here’s the stories that we got, here’s the people that run this place.” Use it as a jumping-off point, use it as a starting point, but definitely explore on your own.

You’re working on an oral history of Bourdain’s life. Why do you feel it’s important to continue its legacy?

I think he had an enormous impact on so many people. I don’t think I even realized working for him. It just became sort of a room tone that Tony is important to me because I work for him. And he’s important to the people around me because we all work for him and we’re all supporting each other.

I think [it was that way] until his death and until that incredible outpouring from people all over the world, and world leaders and millions of people, who were moved by him. I do think that when it’s so sudden and unexpected like that, people have questions, people have a lot of feelings.

As much as I was very immersed in him and his life and his story, I thought that I knew pretty much all there was to know. I myself was surprised by every single one of the nearly 100 interviews that I did in the service of that book. I learned a lot about Tony that I didn’t know. And I think that’s always the case. He was very, very open with his own story, his own biographical details. Obviously, Kitchen Confidential told the story of his life from childhood to about his mid-40s. But that’s his version of the story. That’s a storyteller’s, a raconteur’s, version, which is entertaining, but necessarily incomplete. I’m sure I’ll be able to talk more about the biography closer to publication. But suffice it to say, I think there’s still a lot left to learn about Tony, and hopefully, this book will speak to that.

How do you think Tony changed travel writing?

I think that he was part of a wave of change. And maybe the face of a wave of change in travel writing and travel media of a less polished, less service-oriented kind of offering, whether it’s television or writing this sort of true-to-oneself storytelling.

I think it represented some big risks on the part of various networks and producers and executives. And I think they saw the charisma and the heart and the intelligence in Tony. They were willing to take that risk and know that if we’re going to break the mold, this is the guy that’s going to do it successfully for us. There are a lot of people that have tried to follow in his footsteps, and I think that’s great. I think the more honest, and real, our media is — even if it’s meant to be entertaining, or meant to be in service of tourism — I think the more honest it is, the better off we all are.

Photo: Donald Bowers Photography/Shutterstock

I don’t want to speak for him, but I don’t think that he would want to take credit for changing the travel media landscape. Certainly not single-handedly. I mean, everything that he did also represented the work of dozens, if not 100 people, per episode, per book, per series, per film. But there was some combination of his charisma, his intelligence, his humor, and the risks that people were willing to take to go along with him on this journey that really was a very singular thing. So my fondest hope is that, as much as possible, that is contained in World Travel.

How did working with Tony change your perspectives and approaches to traveling?

I had traveled a fair bit before I worked with him, and then I had a baby. And that kind of grounds you for at least a couple of years. Once my son was a little older, I made a plan on my own to go to Colombia. I asked Tony, “I’m going to Cartagena in a few weeks, what did you really love there?” These were the kind of emails and phone calls that he would get from friends all the time. And again, this is sort of another reason for World Travel: people asking themselves where would Tony Bourdain go? I myself would ask him those questions.

So he said, “Oh, you’re going to Colombia? Alright, well, I guess so you’re ready to start traveling again. You know, if you want, you can start coming along with us on shoots. Pick one shoot a year and I’ll pay your expenses and just kind of hang out and see what we do. Or you can pitch your own stories, while you’re there.”

So I started going along once a year on a shoot with the crew. We were in Hue in central Vietnam, and there were times where they were shooting stuff that I knew wasn’t going to be that interesting for me to hang out in the background and watch them shoot B-roll of someone painting, or hours of trees swaying in the breeze, or exteriors. I was very much encouraged to go out on my own, and I was a little nervous. Tony said, “find a motorcycle guide, they’re everywhere, they’re super safe, and just see what you can.” And so I did. I found a guy, he had this book of recommendations, and I trusted him by my gut. He ended up being my private tour guide for a couple of days, and, from the back of his motorcycle, I went to a bunch of temples and had lunch in the countryside.

It was so great to have him encouraging me to take that little risk. As a mother, getting on the back of a motorcycle with a stranger made me pause. But once I did, it was like, this is great. We’re only going like 30 miles an hour. I could probably jump off the motorcycle if things got sketchy. But they didn’t, and it was an experience that had I not pushed myself a little bit out of my comfort zone I never would have had walking around the city proper. I wouldn’t have seen all these amazing things, and to be alone doing it was fine.

I went to Japan with him twice. We went to Sri Lanka, Manila, Hong Kong. Every one of those places I had that sense of like, just push yourself a little bit out of your comfort zone. And something amazing always happened. So I really appreciate that he gave me that courage.

Our time is just about up, but I was wondering, what do you think, Tony would think of this book?

It is my fondest hope that he would be proud of it, that he would be glad that we finished it. I think he would be really grateful to all the people that contributed — not only the essayists who were a huge part of it, but also all of his producers and directors who were hugely valuable in giving me access to transcripts, answering a million questions, and helping me double-check things. All of the friends that we have all over the world who helped make the shows who also were very, very helpful.

I think it would be a different book if he were here, but think that he would be hopefully pleased with the way that it came out.

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