On a June evening that was pleasantly warm in East Hampton and too hot almost everywhere else, Ina Garten and her husband, Jeffrey, picked me up for dinner in a Mini Cooper convertible. It was one of many on the roads of Long Island’s East End. (“There was a Mini showroom in Southampton,” Garten, who has lived in East Hampton since 1985, later told me. “If it was a nice day, you went over and bought one.”) Garten’s is cream-colored, which suits her role as America’s reigning queen of tastefully deployed butterfat. For almost twenty years, Garten ran a food store in the Hamptons called the Barefoot Contessa, which catered to vacationing New York and Hollywood élites; then, starting in 1999, she published a series of best-selling cookbooks and starred in a show on the Food Network which turned her into the beloved national figure she has comfortably remained. From the beginning, her style was indulgent and inviting rather than polished and showy. “She’s the aunt that everybody wishes they had,” Kerry Diamond, the founder of the food magazine Cherry Bombe, told me. “She’s funny. She’s rich. She’ll let you eat the chocolate cake your mother said you couldn’t have.”
I had come to East Hampton to spend a few days with Garten in her domain, in anticipation of “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” a memoir she co-wrote with Deborah Davis, which Crown will publish in October. “We are VERY casual so don’t pack any evening gowns!” Garten had advised in an e-mail. “xxxx Ina.” She offered to lend me the Mini during my stay, and, when I declined, to pick me up from the Jitney, which is what a bus is called in the Hamptons.
Her current TV show, “Be My Guest,” which premièred on the Food Network in 2022, makes literal her place as Everyone’s Favorite Hostess: she invites such well-known personalities as Jennifer Garner, Danny Meyer, and Stanley Tucci—many of whom are or have become friends—to her home to cook, drink, eat, and be interviewed. (David Remnick, the editor of this magazine, once joined her to make chicken cutlets.) At the beginning of each episode, we see her celebrity guest in their car, heading to East Hampton, often expressing giddy enthusiasm at the prospect of a day with Garten. These visitors, needless to say, do not take the bus. Still, Garten was determined to host me as thoroughly as she could, and had arranged for a montage of entertainments during my stay: dinners out, dinner in, a charity tour of her garden. “As Alfred Hitchcock said, movies are like life with the boring parts cut out,” she told me, explaining her approach to my visit. In person, her voice is throatier than it sounds on TV—the ideal register for a dinner party.
On that first night, Garten was behind the wheel and Jeffrey was tucked, gamely if a bit creakily, in the back seat. The two have been married for more than fifty years. She calls him Babe; he calls her Ine. He is short, but she is shorter. The early evening was bright as we drove east on Route 27 toward Mostrador, a restaurant at a beach hotel in Montauk where diners can sit on chairs in the sand. Garten, who is recognized everywhere she goes in the Hamptons, wore a straw hat that she kept pulled low. Jeffrey wore a Barefoot Contessa baseball cap.
We had spent the morning in the “barn” on Garten’s property, where she tests recipes and films her TV shows in a vast, open kitchen that is essentially two kitchens side by side—two refrigerators, two stand mixers, two ranges—with a continent-size island beneath a vaulted ceiling. This arrangement allows Garten and one of her assistants, Mica Bahn or Rose Brown, to cook simultaneously without getting in each other’s way. That morning, Garten had been trying to decide which of two old cake recipes to spruce up with a new topping and include in her next cookbook. While Bahn prepared a ricotta breakfast cake, Garten delivered a brief discourse on why over-mixing flour makes batter tough. (“Have I told you this?” Garten asked Bahn. “I don’t think you have,” Bahn replied politely.) Now, on the way to Montauk, Garten reported without particular disappointment that the cakes had been underwhelming—perhaps she’d try chocolate instead. She went to reach for her phone in the back seat to show me a photo, but Jeffrey suggested that this could wait until she was no longer driving.
The two of them had been to Mostrador the previous summer and liked it, and they had recently gone back to confirm that it was still good. The idea of proposing dinner at a place she’s been “meaning to try” appalls Garten. It’s the dining-out analogue to one of her rules of hosting: don’t serve anything that you haven’t made before. When Garten entertains, she cooks almost exclusively from her own recipes, which she has tested thoroughly. Her culinary style has been guided by the principle that people tend to want to eat things they know, but better—lavishly executed comfort food. “I love to take a familiar flavor and then push it over the top!” she wrote in her first cookbook, alongside a recipe for bread pudding prepared with croissants instead of “boring white bread.” People also want effortlessness, or, at least, the appearance of effortlessness; Garten believes that nothing ruins a party like palpable stress on the part of the person throwing it. She feels for both guests and hosts. “I think she’s very empathetic,” Jeffrey told me. “But lots of people are empathetic. She uses that empathy in a practical way.”
Driving toward the beach, Garten described the plans for her appearances on the “Today” show during NBC’s Olympics coverage—she would be showing viewers her favorite food destinations in Paris, where she and Jeffrey have had an apartment since 2000. “Today,” on which she first appeared in 1999, is one of Garten’s constants, like her uniform of button-down shirts (denim in summer, corduroy in winter, usually from Talbots) and her bob (first given to her, in the seventies, by a stylist at the Watergate Hotel named Sylvan Melloul, who later cut Hillary Clinton’s hair as First Lady). Once Garten finds something she likes, she sticks with it.
Garten parked, and we walked toward the restaurant, expecting to see the dinner rush, but the chairs on the sand were empty. Mostrador was closed. She proceeded to problem-solve. “We can have fun in a closet,” Garten said. “It doesn’t matter.” (“Fun” is a watchword with Garten. “If it’s not fun, it’s not done,” she told me.) As it happened, she and Bahn had been discussing Fini, a pizzeria in Amagansett, just that morning. “Their white pizza’s just stunning,” Garten had said. We got back in the Mini and set out for Fini.
At the pizzeria, we ordered slices and plastic cups of rosé. I insisted, as a journalist, on paying for my part of the meal, to Garten’s chagrin. Jeffrey, an expert in emerging market economies who now teaches as a dean emeritus at Yale, assured me that he knew how these things went—back when he was in the Clinton Administration (as Under-Secretary of Commerce for International Trade), the rules were “really strict.” Once, a C.E.O. offered him a flight home to East Hampton on a private jet; Jeffrey accepted it, but felt honor-bound to write him a check for the price of a first-class ticket.
In some fields, the line between business and pleasure is supposed to be obvious. The soft power of the hostess can make it more fuzzy. Abundance—forget the calories, forget the dishes, forget the cost—is Garten’s métier, and expense reports are no fun. “It just feels so ungracious!” she said, as she watched me pick up the check.
Deborah Davis, the co-author of “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” met Garten after sending a fan letter praising her coconut cupcakes and requesting a blurb for a book she’d written about Truman Capote’s Black-and-White Ball. Their writing process for the memoir involved recording long interviews over several years. “I gave her all the bricks, and she built the house,” Garten said.
The title reflects the evolution of Garten’s understanding of her own success. She long believed herself lucky; lately, she says, she has begun to recognize the roles that talent and hard work played. Still, it is striking, reading the book, just how much luck does happen. Sellers of houses lower prices at just the right moment; Jeffrey gets offered a loan from his bosses at Lehman Brothers when Garten’s scrambling to cover payroll. Rain threatens an outdoor wedding she’s catering, but, at the last minute, she finds a tent. “Whew!” she writes, and “Phew!” and “PHEW!” (Garten requested that copy editors preserve the book’s colloquial flavor, and they mostly obliged. “If there were three exclamation marks, they pared it down to one,” she said.)
Garten’s home in East Hampton is a near-exact replica of a house that she and Jeffrey previously owned down the street. When they decided that they needed more space, they bought an empty lot nearby and re-created it, adding an office for him. (“I could walk through the rooms blindfolded and know where everything was,” she writes.) Then, in 2006, Garten persuaded a neighbor to sell her an adjoining empty field, which is now the site of the barn, a quasi-public workplace on the grounds of her private life. The view from the barn kitchen is of her house, and the view from her desk in the house is of the barn.
It is a life she has constructed to her exact specifications, and it represents an emphatic response to an upbringing in which she felt that few of her wishes or tastes were satisfied. “I think I was starving my whole childhood,” Garten told me. We were sitting in the barn’s library, where the tops of the bookshelves are lined with white cake stands; she had her back to the floor-to-ceiling windows and her feet up on a large ottoman. This was one of our first conversations, and she had brought it swiftly to the subject of her early life, which she has tended to avoid in the past. Davis hadn’t been sure whether Garten would be comfortable discussing her childhood publicly, but, in time, she said, “the door opened.”
The future Barefoot Contessa was born in Brooklyn in 1948, the younger child of parents from immigrant Russian Jewish families who had met as counsellors at a summer camp. (She has an older brother named Ken.) Garten’s father, Charles Rosenberg, was a surgeon. Her mother, Florence, was trained as a dietitian, and her attitude toward food shadowed Garten’s childhood. Florence was “obsessed with what she ate,” Garten recalled. “It was all about nutrition rather than pleasure. My mother didn’t understand pleasure.” Florence did not, as a rule, serve carbohydrates or dessert, and, after Charles had a heart attack in his forties, cholesterol was forbidden, including cream for coffee. “Skim milk,” Garten told me. “You might as well pour water in your coffee.”
The family moved to Connecticut when Garten was five, and, though their life appeared to be a model of mid-century suburban prosperity, Garten experienced it differently. “I remember being terrified of my father,” she said. Florence maintained a rigid sense of order to avoid what Garten, in the memoir, calls her father’s “temper tantrums”—when he’d scream and hit his children. “He would just have a rage, where he would drag me around the house by my hair,” she said. “He never sexually abused me, but he had this love-hate relationship with me. I think he loved me, but he wanted me to be who he wanted me to be, without any consciousness of who I am.” At home, Garten holed up in her room, but at school she was vivacious and popular. As a teen-ager, she resolved never to date any boy who raised his voice to her.
Davis’s original draft of Garten’s memoir began with her childhood, but Garten said that this was wrong: her life began with Jeffrey. They met in 1964, when he spotted her through a library window at Dartmouth, where he was a freshman and she was visiting Ken, a sophomore. She was sixteen, wearing blue Pappagallo flats bought with her own money and a blue ribbon in her hair. “I could tell by looking at her that she was really smart,” Jeffrey told me. “She was talking to two people, and I could see the expression on her face, which was so incredibly alert, even as she was laughing.” Their relationship developed in letters and on weekend trips; they married when Garten was twenty and a junior at Syracuse University. In the course of the decade that followed, Garten transferred to North Carolina State University and worked a series of short-term jobs; Jeffrey proceeded to the military, to graduate school in international studies, and then to the State Department, where he worked for Henry Kissinger.
Garten’s fans know Jeffrey as an uxorious husband who delights in roasted chicken and literally everything else his wife prepares. Their romance has become part of Garten’s persona. But, of course, no actual relationship is so easy: the book’s account of a brief separation in the late seventies might surprise some readers. Garten explained to me that their early dynamic—with Jeffrey as the designated adult—made sense at first, but over time their roles began to chafe, especially amid the broader reconsideration of marriage taking place in the nineteen-seventies. (“It started to piss me off that I was the only one who made dinner,” Garten said.) Their reconciliation involved recognizing that they’d both be happier with more independence. In the mid-eighties, just as Garten opened her store in East Hampton and moved there full time, Jeffrey spent two years in Tokyo, overseeing Lehman Brothers’ investment banking in Asia, followed by a year in Hong Kong. By the nineties, “navigating unusual situations was ‘normal’ ” for them, she writes. In an episode of “30 Rock,” Liz Lemon heralds Garten as “that woman on the Food Network whose husband only comes home on the weekends and she spends the rest of the time eating and drinking with her gay friends.” But it is also true that the marriage Garten credits with saving her from a chilly, remote upbringing has been remote in a different sense.
She and Jeffrey did not quite make an explicit choice against parenthood; it was more that parenthood always seemed out of the question to her. “I remember thinking very clearly, I don’t know why people have children. I just thought, Why would you re-create that?” Garten said. “I would be terrified.” In the early years, Jeffrey would periodically ask whether they should talk about having kids, and she’d demur. “And then, at some point, we just didn’t talk about it anymore,” she said.
Jeffrey told me that it took him years to realize how troubled Garten’s relationship with Charles had been. “After we got married, I noticed great similarities between her and her father,” Jeffrey told me. Like Charles, who wore cashmere sports coats and had his office professionally decorated, Garten cared about style and was gregarious. And, also like him, she had an eye for real estate.
Throughout Garten’s childhood, Charles invested in property in Stamford, Connecticut, including an apartment complex that he rented out. He also bought a glassy modernist house built from blueprints by the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where Gordon Bunshaft was a star architect. (Garten told me that, years later, she got to visit Bunshaft’s own East Hampton residence, which had been purchased, in 1995, by Martha Stewart: “She said, ‘It’s the only house ever designed by Gordon Bunshaft,’ and I said, ‘This is so bizarre, because I know the only other house. . . .’ ”) She and Jeffrey now own the apartment in Paris, an apartment on the Upper East Side, and, in East Hampton, their home, two commercial buildings, and a three-bedroom house where her assistant Bahn pays a nominal rent. “I saw part of my job as investing Jeffrey’s money in real estate,” Garten said.
The property next door to Bahn’s recently came up for sale, and Garten bought that, too, because she didn’t want construction noise bothering Bahn. “I just want my guys to be happy,” Garten, who joked that her young employees are “substitute children,” told me. “And then send them out into the world to do what they want to do for themselves.” She paused briefly. “Sending them out in the world is hard.”
In Nancy Meyers’s 2003 movie, “Something’s Gotta Give,” Diane Keaton plays Erica Barry, a divorced fiftysomething playwright who possesses charm, beachfront East End real estate, and a great many turtlenecks. To convey her heroine’s sophisticated gestalt, Meyers sends her to the Barefoot Contessa. There, between piles of produce and an overflowing bakery case, Erica orders charcuterie in French. “Impressive,” her daughter’s much older boyfriend (Jack Nicholson) says, between slurps of an ice-cream cone.
Meyers and Garten met several years after the film came out, when the director spotted Garten having lunch at ABC Cocina, in Manhattan. Meyers recalls having “blabbed nervously,” but she and Garten soon struck up a rapport. Meyers would text her about recipes. They share an aesthetic kinship, and offer their audiences a similar fantasy of Boomer affluence—a world of spacious interiors furnished in unassuming good taste, with high-thread-count sheets and fully stocked refrigerators. So aligned are their styles that, when Garten visited the director’s house, Meyers told me, she complimented the kitchen-counter barstools. “Ina,” Meyers remembers telling her, “I copied yours.”
Garten’s version of that Boomer fantasy is anchored in the Hamptons—which she herself helped fix in the popular imagination. It was a different place when Garten first arrived, in the late seventies. For one thing, “no one called it ‘the Hamptons,’ ” the real-estate broker Frank Newbold, a friend of Garten’s and, for a time, her business partner on a line of baking mixes, told me. “It was like calling San Francisco ‘Frisco.’ It marked you as an outsider.” Newbold got into real estate in East Hampton in 1980. Wall Street was churning out corporate raiders and bond traders, and the second-home market was taking off.
The potted history of the Barefoot Contessa usually begins in 1978, with Garten seeing a Times classified ad for a “catering, gourmet foods & cheese shoppe” for sale in Westhampton Beach. The town was empty when she and Jeffrey drove up from their home in D.C., and so was the small store, save for a teen-age girl baking chocolate-chip cookies. “The scent triggered a rush of good feelings, like endorphins on steroids,” Garten recalls in the memoir. She made a lowball offer, which, to her surprise, was accepted, and set about rearranging her life.
Garten was thirty years old, and she’d only worked in jobs she didn’t particularly care about, most recently at the Office of Management and Budget. She’d developed an interest in cooking after a camping trip she and Jeffrey had taken in Europe, where she marvelled at the goods for sale in French markets, from seasonal produce to jarred pot-au-feu. When they got back, she began cooking her way through Julia Child. She remembers going to a dinner party on Park Avenue where guests talked about Lutèce and Craig Claiborne; meanwhile, at the dinner parties she threw in D.C., people talked only about work. “To me, it felt very narrow,” she said.
Garten soon found that running a store was something like throwing a daily party. Her first guests were, in effect, her young employees, a crowd of local high schoolers, college students, and kids whose parents had summer houses nearby. She organized themed costume blowouts (“M*A*S*H”; “Barefoot Olympics”) and accompanied her staff on after-hours skinny-dipping expeditions. “We thought we were rock stars working there,” Hunt MacWilliams, who was sixteen at the time, told me. “My brother was painting houses, and he was, like, ‘I want to go work for Ina.’ ” The role Garten played was about more than high jinks—MacWilliams came out to her before coming out to his family. “She brought me under her wing,” he said.
Customers were Garten’s guests, too, but they were also the subjects of ongoing research. What inspired them to spend? Sarah Esterling, who was fifteen when she began working for Garten, remembers her boss teaching her the power of abundance: “If you put out ten lemons, you’ll sell two,” Garten told her. “If you put out eighty lemons, you’ll sell sixty-two.” The trick was to both inspire and satisfy customers’ cravings. After three years, Garten moved the Barefoot Contessa into a space ten times larger across the street. The new location had white wainscoting and screen doors, like a summer house. Big sacks of coffee beans propped up baskets of fruit; these looked nice, but they weren’t really the point. Coconut cupcakes were the point—along with barbecued ribs, baguettes, and bagels with lox and cream cheese. “If it’s calories you’re after,” a 1981 writeup in the Southampton Press began, “this is the place.”
Garten sometimes talks about her early retail inexperience in terms of brownies. “I had made brownies for six friends, but I’d never baked a hundred brownies,” she writes in the memoir. The Barefoot Contessa’s brownies cost two dollars and twenty-five cents—three times what a brownie might have cost elsewhere—but they sold out every time. Esterling remembers a Fourth of July weekend when she had trouble closing the store’s safe because it was so full of money. On Monday, she and Garten went to the bank and dumped shopping bags of bills onto the counting table. “And Ina looks at it, looks at me,” Esterling recalled. “And she picks up bundles of cash with both hands, throws it up in the air, and goes, ‘Wheeeee!’ ”
Garten had decided to expand at the right moment. The late seventies and eighties saw a boom in specialty-food stores: the postwar allure of European culinary culture and, later, women’s growing presence in the workforce had created the conditions for a customer who cared about eating well but didn’t have much time to spend in the kitchen. These stores sold prepared dishes that shoppers could pass off as their own, plus such rarefied delights as sun-dried tomatoes and raspberry vinegar. The Silver Palate, a hole-in-the-wall shop on the Upper West Side founded by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins, became a generational icon with the publication, in 1982, of “The Silver Palate Cookbook.” Dean & DeLuca, which opened downtown in 1977, was an anchor of SoHo’s gentrification. It also had an outpost in East Hampton, and, in 1984, Garten got a call from its landlord. Dean & DeLuca was giving up its lease—would the Barefoot Contessa want to move in?
Westhampton (which, as its name suggests, lies on the west side of the East End) was casual, hard-partying, and a largely summertime scene. About an hour closer to the tip of Long Island, East Hampton, the location of the potential new space, was a long-standing blue-blooded summer colony, with the population to support a year-round business. Garten decided to head east, a choice that would prove as consequential as responding to that 1978 ad.
Early on, Garten had considered renaming her store: Barefoot Contessa had been the previous owner’s childhood nickname, and Garten had never seen the 1954 Ava Gardner movie it evoked. In the end, Garten decided that the name suited her style perfectly. “The Barefoot Contessa,” she often says, is about being “elegant and earthy”—like Gardner’s character, a Spanish dancer turned Hollywood actress. But the movie is also about becoming famous, and, with her 1985 move to East Hampton, that is what Garten proceeded to do.
The eighties had brought residents with star power to East Hampton. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t nameless Vanderbilts and Whitneys and whatever,” Newbold told me. “These were interesting people that got covered in the media . . . and Ina—her timing was just perfect.” Steven Spielberg, one of East Hampton’s recent arrivals, became a Barefoot Contessa regular, along with Kelly Klein, Lauren Bacall, Lee Radziwill, and Ron Perelman. (“I’m drawn in as much by its personality as I am by what they have to offer,” Spielberg would later write, in a blurb for Garten’s first cookbook.) On New Year’s Eve, which became one of Garten’s biggest days of the year, employees dressed in bow ties and bowler hats to look like Fosse dancers and poured champagne for celebrity clientele.
I asked Garten to take me to 46 Newtown Lane, the building on East Hampton’s main commercial strip which was once home to the Barefoot Contessa. In 1996, Garten, ready to move on, decided to sell the store to two employees, Parker Hodges and Amy Forst. Garten told me that she hadn’t been back inside for more than twenty years, which surprised me, especially because she and Jeffrey have owned the building since 1987. (“Walking into a tenant’s space just felt odd,” she explained. “It felt like I was snooping.”) At the time of the sale, she said, she had warned Hodges and Forst that she’d eventually need to raise the rent to meet the market. But in 2003, when their lease was up, the Barefoot Contessa shut down. These are the realities of retail, Garten told me: “If you don’t own the building, you have no guarantee you can stay there.” In the end, she says she gave them twice what they’d paid for the store to buy back its name. (Hodges and Forst did not respond to requests for comment.) The space now houses a Rag & Bone.
When we arrived, I turned to examine a street sign on the corner. “Don’t even look,” Garten said, with theatrical horror. “It’s so embarrassing!” Beneath a sign labelled “Barns Lane” was a second placard, which read “Ina Garten Way.” This was the handiwork of Drew Barrymore, who got the street renamed as a stunt when Garten appeared on a 2022 episode of her talk show.
Inside the store, Garten considered a straw bag, and pointed out the former kitchen, which had become dressing rooms. I asked her how it felt to be back. “It feels much smaller,” she said.
From the world of nineteen-nineties home entertaining, Martha Stewart and Ina Garten emerged—like Betty and Veronica or Jackie and Marilyn—as a pair of contrasting archetypes. “People would ask me, Are you an Ina or are you a Martha?” Alison Roman, the best-selling millennial cookbook author, told me. Martha was the regal blond domestic virtuoso. (Later, she became the businesswoman who would be brought low by overweening ambition and, more recently, the eighty-one-year-old who made the cover of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.) Ina, on the other hand, was the approachable brunette, the cozy sensualist, the relatable second-act success story—she was the celebrity chef fans imagined greeting them with a hug and an open bottle of wine. But, without Stewart, Garten might never have become a household name.
In 1990, Stewart bought a house south of Montauk Highway on East Hampton’s storied Lily Pond Lane. (“South of the highway” is often used as shorthand for property close to the beach; Garten’s East Hampton home is just slightly north of it.) Later that year, Stewart published the first issue of Martha Stewart Living, which included a writeup on the notable local business owner Ina Garten.
Chip Gibson, then the head of Crown Publishing, remembers a weekend drive in the nineties during which Stewart was “overcome” by the need to stop at the Barefoot Contessa. “We were in a gigantic black Suburban,” he told me. “And suddenly she veered almost crashingly to the curb and said, ‘I’ve got to get lemon squares.’ ” Personally and professionally, Garten became a part of the Martha Stewart universe. Garten told me about a New Year’s Eve when Stewart invited her and Jeffrey over for dinner and, beckoning Garten into the kitchen, proceeded to snip the loops of a whisk with a wire cutter, prop a broom handle over two chairs, and, using the snipped whisk, drizzle caramelized sugar over the broom in fine golden strands. “She had made spun sugar!” Garten said. “She’s stunning.” (“Stunning,” like “fabulous,” is one of Garten’s favorite adjectives, but it can suggest a double edge. She writes in her memoir: “No one needs to know how to make spun sugar.”)
Gibson remembered the lemon squares when, in 1997, an editor brought him Garten’s proposal for “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.” Her association with Stewart was promising, as was the title. “Who doesn’t want to see themselves as a barefoot contessa, particularly in affluent suburbs?” Gibson said.
Crown acquired the book on the condition that Garten spend eighty-five thousand dollars on five thousand copies (half of the initial print run) for her store. She also decided to hire her own publicist, food stylist, and photographer, at a cost of some two hundred thousand dollars. “Let’s invest in it as though we were starting a business,” she remembers telling Jeffrey—and, thanks to his time as an investment banker, they could. “I mean, the store made some money,” she said. “But certainly nobody was getting rich running a food store.”
With her cookbook, Garten hoped to translate the experience of shopping at her longtime store to the page. The recipes would be for customer favorites, and the design would convey the same sense of beachside bounty, with lots of sun-soaked photographs of farm-stand tomatoes and artfully mussed cake. Garten had a keen sense of her book as merchandise, and the first layout she saw dismayed her. “I wanted it to be a story about me, about the store, and the prepared foods,” she said. “Literally, and I’m not exaggerating, the first forty pages didn’t have a picture of me, the store, or the prepared foods.” When she went to Gibson with her concerns, he told the editor to get out of her way.
Her bet paid off. “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook,” published in 1999, sold so quickly that Crown had to reclaim Garten’s copies to meet demand. (It will be reissued in a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition this fall.) Concise and lushly illustrated, it marked an industry shift away from text-heavy, encyclopedic volumes, and became a best-seller. She and Jeffrey threw a book party in the garden of their East Hampton house, where media personalities drank rosé alongside the town’s business owners. “Walter Isaacson was hanging out, talking to Mr. Iacono,” Garten recalled, referring to a local chicken farmer. These were people who knew one another from across shop counters, and she had now switched sides.
In 2000, Stewart’s production company created a show starring Garten for the Food Network, with the working title “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Ina.” “Now you say ‘Martha Stewart,’ but then it was ‘Martha,’ ” Garten said. “I remember telling my mother about it, and she said, ‘Why does she want you?’ ” (“She has a broad appeal,” Stewart told me. “I did like the coconut cupcakes,” she added, though she said she has never cooked one of Garten’s recipes.) During the live-to-tape shooting, Garten found herself overwhelmed by the TV crew taking over her house, and worried that she was expected to fit Stewart’s mold. One day, Garten took a messy bite of a tea sandwich on camera and—still chewing—exclaimed over its tastiness. The director, she remembers, called cut and told her not to talk with her mouth full. To Garten, the whole experience was proof that TV wasn’t for her. In the end, the Food Network decided that the show didn’t work and shelved it, and Garten swore off television.
When Garten published her second cookbook—“Barefoot Contessa Parties!”—in 2001, her parents hosted a celebration at their Connecticut country club. They’d doubted her career path at first, but now they wanted to show her off. “My father and I were sitting in a corner. He said, ‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ ” Garten told me, tearing up. “I realized he was torturing himself—he tortured us, but he was torturing himself that he’d done it.” (He died in 2004; Garten’s mother died in 2006.)
Garten went on to publish twelve more successful cookbooks, all with Crown’s Clarkson Potter imprint. (She originally sold her memoir to Celadon, but, early this year, she decided to take the project to her team at Crown.) David Drake, the president of Crown since 2021, told me that he couldn’t think of another American cookbook author with a similar track record. The books’ contents, too, have charted a steady course: endless elaborations on ease, plenty, nostalgia, and butter. Pam Krauss has edited all of Garten’s cookbooks since the third. “Over the years I’ve had a lot of other cookbook authors come up to me, and they’re, like, ‘I don’t get it,’ ” Krauss told me, of Garten’s enduring success. “I think it’s the fact that her recipes always work. That may sound incredibly simplistic, or like the lowest bar on the planet when it comes to a cookbook. But I have never had anyone come up to me and say, ‘I made one of Ina’s recipes and it didn’t come out.’ It just hasn’t happened.”
Garten tests her recipes rigorously, and she also likes to collaborate with people she trusts. For almost twenty years, Sarah Leah Chase, the onetime proprietor of a prepared-food shop called Que Sera Sarah, on Nantucket, and a co-author of “The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook,” has helped with Garten’s recipe development. As a fellow-veteran of vacation-town takeout, Chase shares Garten’s sense of what people in beach houses want to eat. They met when Garten came into her shop in the eighties, and reconnected around the time Garten signed a multi-book, multimillion-dollar deal that her agent described at the time as the biggest ever for a cookbook author. “She pays me well,” Chase said.
The cooking show “Barefoot Contessa” premièred on the Food Network in 2002, and, like “Sex and the City,” it is a small-screen ode to turn-of-the-twenty-first-century female hedonism which opens with snazzy piano music. Episodes depict Garten at home in East Hampton, where, with chatty good humor, she prepares to host brunches and card nights and dinners on the patio.
TV made Garten an instantly recognizable pop-culture figure, fodder for memes, drag impersonations, and costumes. (Many people rely on “How to Cook Everything,” but, come Halloween, they don’t dress up as Mark Bittman.) Once again, she had good timing. The Food Network, which had once targeted a niche audience, was beginning to pursue a larger viewership, and Eileen Opatut, an executive brought on to assist in the endeavor, had witnessed Garten’s unhappy first foray into TV.
Opatut introduced Garten to Pacific Television, the production company behind Nigella Lawson’s show “Nigella Bites,” which promised a small crew and a less stressful shooting process. They seemed to understand Garten’s appeal and drew out story lines from her life—for example, Jeffrey’s weekly return from New Haven, where he was then the dean of the Yale School of Management—to create a sense of bustling, albeit very gentle, activity. The title of the first season’s finale is “Soup Lunch.”
“We wanted it to feel like, as a viewer, you literally had a place at the counter,” Olivia Grove, Garten’s longtime producer, told me. “We’d call it ‘best-friend TV.’ ” A repertoire of catchphrases soon emerged. “How easy is that?” Garten asked viewers. “Store-bought is fine,” she assured them. She counselled the use of “good” ingredients. In one early episode, she explains how to make a perfect cup of coffee: “It starts with, really, one thing: good coffee. If you buy inexpensive, bitter coffee beans, you’re going to end up with bitter coffee—hello! ” From a woman whose budget for good coffee seemed unlimited, this could have been alienating, but, somehow, it wasn’t. Garten’s great gift may be an ability to make audiences feel welcomed into the plush ambience of her good fortune.
“I don’t really understand the show,” Garten said. She has tried to quit on several occasions, but each time Grove and Rachel Purnell, Pacific’s executive producer, have talked her out of it. “It’s really hard for me, just to continually come up with something other than ‘Jeffrey’s going to love this!’ ” Garten told me. “It’s, like, ‘Oh, my God, if I say that one more time I’m going to kill myself.’ ” Yet the monotony that can make the show stultifying to its star is soothing to its viewers. Opatut thinks that “Barefoot Contessa” originally spoke to a post-9/11 desire for comfort and domesticity, and over the years Garten’s kitchen became a refuge from wider cultural vicissitudes. “In a bad economy, it’s more important to make yourself feel good,” she told the Washington Post in the fall of 2008. Purnell said that people will often tell her that they turn to Garten’s show in times of crisis. One afternoon during my visit, Garten was scheduled to lead a group of women on a tour of her garden—the woman who’d purchased the excursion at a charity auction had wanted it as a present for her mother after her cancer treatment.
Garten had just begun telling me a long story about a spur-of-the-moment trip to Paris when Brown, her assistant, interrupted us with news that the tour group had arrived at her gate. Garten was determined to finish the anecdote. “I’ll talk fast,” she told Brown. “Walk slow.”
She and Jeffrey had been on vacation in London when he was called to Paris for a meeting. Garten occupied herself with a shopping spree on Avenue Montaigne, purchasing a cashmere scarf, earrings, a suède purse, and opera-length suède gloves, while Jeffrey spoke to the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi about whether Lehman Brothers would restructure his debt. Jeffrey was against it. “He said to the guys at Lehman Brothers, ‘Just think about what this is going to look like on the front page of the New York Times’—which is the test I always use,” Garten said. Her acute consciousness of public perception amounts to a guiding principle.
In Garten’s telling, she and Martha Stewart lost touch after Stewart began spending more time at a new property in Bedford, New York. Stewart recalled a sharper break, after her conviction related to an insider-trading scandal. “When I was sent off to Alderson Prison, she stopped talking to me,” Stewart told me. “I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly.” (Garten firmly denies this.) Shortly after I got off the phone with Stewart, I received a call from Susan Magrino, her longtime publicist and friend. Magrino wanted to clarify that Stewart was “not bitter at all and there’s no feud.”
The barn library has a number of framed keepsakes on display, including a photograph of Jeffrey as a child, a photograph of Jeffrey as an adult, two photographs of Garten with Michelle Obama, and Garten’s Proust Questionnaire, from the October, 2016, issue of Vanity Fair:
Garten’s career enticingly suggests that the exact right amount of money and fame can, in fact, make you happy. “We live in this era of ‘How much more can I do? How much more famous can I be? How much more money can I make?’ ” Diamond, the Cherry Bombe editor, said. “She seems very satisfied with what she has.”
Garten feels no need to say yes to things that don’t suit her. When the beauty brand Glossier, for example, proposed naming a fig lip balm in her honor, she took a meeting but decided against it: she didn’t think her audience would believe that she used the product. She also avoids public activities that might be construed as political. As a model, she points to her warm and respectful relationship with her former longtime assistant Barbara Libath. “The way we operated is the way I think the world should operate,” Garten told me. “We had very different views on religion and politics, and we never discussed them.”
The fashion designer Daniel Roseberry, another fan turned friend, compared Garten to Dolly Parton in her ability to transcend cultural divides. Now the creative director of Maison Schiaparelli, Roseberry discovered the Barefoot Contessa in fashion school, when a classmate informed him that Garten was a gay icon; later, he introduced her work to his Christian family in Texas. “She’s someone that we can all agree on,” he said.
Garten’s commitment to smoothing over social friction has held firm even in the face of prejudice. Early on, she told me, she was asked to cater a party at a Hamptons golf club that excluded Jews: “I just said to them, ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t cater a party for a club that wouldn’t have me as a member.’ And the woman was perfectly lovely. She said, ‘I totally understand,’ and that was that.” After Garten filmed an episode of “Barefoot” with Michelle Obama, in 2016, that attracted racist vitriol on Facebook, she decided that even seemingly anodyne political engagement wasn’t worth the trouble. “I don’t think I would change people’s minds,” she said. Taylor Swift, with whom Garten has enjoyed a public mutual fandom, was studiously apolitical for a long time, and Garten took the singer’s decision to speak out against the hard-right politician Marsha Blackburn’s (ultimately successful) 2018 Senate campaign in Tennessee as evidence in favor of her own approach. “I admire that she got involved,” Garten told me, but noted that Blackburn “did get elected anyway.”
During my visit, Garten’s morning agenda included invitations to answer and Instagram stats to discuss. She’d recently posted a photograph, for Father’s Day, of herself on her father’s arm at her wedding, with a caption about their “complicated” relationship. “We got a great response for the picture,” Garten said, referring to the comments. “Didn’t change the numbers at all. Why, do you think?” Bahn wasn’t sure. Garten laughed at her own preoccupation with her follower count. “If it goes down for an hour, I’m, like, ‘What happened?’ ” she said. “I’m like a teen-ager!”
Justin Timberlake had been arrested that week in Sag Harbor on a charge of driving under the influence, and, during a morning meeting, Garten pulled up a TikTok sent by a friend. It cut from news coverage of Timberlake’s claim to have had “one Martini” to a viral video that Garten had posted in April, 2020, in which she mixes herself a Cosmopolitan the size of a birdbath. “I can’t believe they put together the Cosmo with poor Justin Timberlake,” she said. “I feel so badly for him!”
That night, she and Jeffrey had invited the filmmakers Rob Marshall and John DeLuca over for dinner. The couples had become friends some years back, after being introduced by their mutual florist; Garten and Jeffrey were fans of Marshall and DeLuca’s work. (“You were obsessed with ‘Chicago,’ ” Garten had said to Jeffrey over pizza at Fini. “Loved ‘Chicago,’ ” he’d replied.) Marshall is the source of her memoir’s title—it was paraphrased from advice Liza Minnelli gave him when he was a twenty-three-year-old Broadway dance captain.
Marshall and DeLuca appeared on the first season of “Be My Guest.” “They’re partners in life—and in work,” Garten explains, in her voice-over. They join her for dinner and watermelon Cosmopolitans. “Any day with Ina’s a great day,” Marshall and DeLuca observe, on the drive to her house. “Fun to be had,” she says, awaiting her guests. “So much fun,” she says, taking a sip of her cocktail once they arrive. They toast in front of a large desert landscape by the painter April Gornik, inspired by the opening scene of “The English Patient.” “How fun is this?” Garten says, and escorts her guests to a table to chat. She discusses their career bullet points, then leads them back to the kitchen, where the bright spines of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks are recognizable in the background. “One of the great days,” Marshall and DeLuca agree, driving home. “What a world-class fun day,” Garten says, in her closing reflection.
It was eerie to watch the episode, as I did later, after attending roughly the same party. Our Cosmopolitans were classic rather than watermelon; Marshall and DeLuca arrived in a Mini convertible rather than in a Porsche. And, of course, we had to watch the Justin Timberlake TikTok—Marshall and DeLuca had encouraged Garten to post the Cosmo video in the first place. But in both the filmed and the live versions I heard the story of how they came to make “Chicago” (pitching Harvey Weinstein in a meeting about “Rent”), and about the time Renée Zellweger had their house in the Hamptons decorated for Christmas as a surprise. Between the Miramax talk, the Cosmos, and the general sense of Justin Timberlake as a sympathetic figure, it felt a bit like we’d slipped through time to the early two-thousands, the moment when Garten first ascended to celebrity. Spending time in her orbit can be not unpleasantly like entering a period piece.
But the pleasures on offer existed in the present. The coral peonies that Garten had placed in a vase on the small, round dinner table were among the last of the season; since she had bought them that afternoon, they’d opened to expose a sunset burst of pollen. The filet of beef was so tender it barely required teeth. As we ate, night fell, and, in a window above Jeffrey’s head, the moon was ringed in mist. “Look at that moon, holy shit,” Garten said. “I organized this for you.” By now she had relaxed into the evening, and she was speaking almost to herself. ♦
