In the introduction to World Travel: An Irreverent Guide (Bloomsbury), Laurie Woolever recollects a meeting with Anthony Bourdain in his Manhattan apartment on a spring afternoon in 2018. “Tony chain-smoked and free-associated for over an hour,” she writes, during a conversation which was meant to be the first of several brainstorming sessions the two were meant to have on the places and culinary history that Bourdain had experienced over two decades. But, with his sudden death in June 2018, Woolever knew she had a lonely road ahead.

“I tried very hard to stay true to the vision that Tony and I laid out during that first and only meeting about World Travel,” says Woolever in an email interview with mid-day. “I used that conversation as a blueprint.” Having first met him in 2002 and then worked with him on various projects over the years, Woolever had a good sense of his style of work. She explains how there were instances when she decided to drop a restaurant if it had shuttered, or included something if she sensed that he had forgotten to mention it in that meeting. But how different is this final result from the book they had initially imagined? “I think the fundamental heart of the book remains the same.”