Inside the Creative—and Mildly Chaotic—World of Ina Garten (2024)

Inside the Creative—and Mildly Chaotic—World of Ina Garten (1)

As you might expect, it all began in a kitchen. Five-year-old Ina Rosenberg lived with her parents and paternal grandparents, Bessie and Morris, in a Brooklyn brownstone, next door to the junkyard her grandpa owned. The house was the good kind of chaos. “My grandmother was always cooking for people, including everyone who worked for my grandfather's business,” Ina tells me. “And everybody knew that they could come into the house and go to the refrigerator to help themselves.” The kitchen was the center of the household, and Bessie worked hard to create a warm home “filled with relatives, friends, food, and love,” Ina says. It seems to be the only truly happy memory Ina has from her childhood.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Ina Garten, née Rosenberg, would spend the rest of her life trying to recreate that feeling. She became a culinary superstar who has sold 13 million cookbooks and filmed 315 episodes of her cooking shows, but her greatest passion—and the reason people love her—isn’t really the food. “Cooking for me isn’t an end, it’s a means to an end,” Ina writes in her new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens. “I cook for people I love, and when you cook, everyone shows up.”

Ina’s most ardent fans may already know the foundational story of her legend: how, on a whim, she bought a little specialty food store in the Hamptons called The Barefoot Contessa and turned it into a global phenomenon, a brand that’s all about inviting people in, not worrying about perfection, and enjoying a life surrounded by family and friends. But this memoir is the first time she’s told her own story in full and tried to explain—for herself as much as for us—how she built a multimillion-dollar empire and became a lifestyle icon, the Ina Garten we all want to be friends with. It is an achievement that required fearlessness, focus, quiet confidence, and steely ambition.

So how easy was that actually?

I’m an adrenaline junkie. I give myself a project that I think there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to do. And then I go do it.

Ina has invited me to her Upper East Side apartment to talk about her book, and we sit at her dining room table. Everything in this home feels nicely appointed yet totally effortless—a calming, neutral palette, a Corbusier table, an Archtander chair. Nothing seems decorated with a capital D. Ina worked with designer Daniel Romualdez, but even he admits that she was the mastermind. “She's as good as it gets,” Daniel tells me. “She’s a bit of a design fanatic. So she comes to the table knowing what she wants, and then at the same time, she's extremely open to ideas that are not necessarily hers.”

When Ina and Jeffrey Garten first saw this place five years ago, the kitchen was all wrong, which, to Jeffrey, felt like a deal-breaker. “He said, ‘I'm not buying that apartment until you figure out what to do with the kitchen,’” Ina says. “He knew I would never work in a dark room in the back of the house. I was like, ‘Don't worry about it. I'll figure it out.’ So, I sat down one Sunday morning and did the floor plan. And when Daniel saw it, he said, ‘That's just what I would do!’ I can do a floor plan for anything. Because it’s really about simplifying it.”

Few people other than Ina would call anything involving this level of renovation “simple,” but she seems drawn to—and perhaps even inspired by—the chaos of construction. Over the course of her life, she’s renovated more than a dozen properties, including, but not limited to, a Soho loft, a row house in D.C., a Parisian apartment (“That was the scariest thing ever—just insane,” she says), two massive retail spaces, a barn, and two houses in the Hamptons. In her book, she writes, “I loved the experience of walking into a new place and imagining the possibilities.” But, as we’re speaking, she explains that it’s much more than just an urge to break and build. “I’m an adrenaline junkie,” she says. “I give myself a project that I think there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to do. And then I go do it. And when it's over, I'm like, that worked out really well. I like having an impossible problem to solve. I like the challenge of trying to figure something out.”

Ina likes to say, “What goes in early goes in deep.” When she was five, she moved with her parents and her brother, Ken, to a pretty neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut. That home, while beautiful and well-maintained, felt the exact opposite of Bessie’s. “I think we choose our profession to work out our issues,” she tells me. “And I think there are three things about my childhood that were really missing: I had no control over my space, somebody else made all my decisions for me, and my mother was obsessive about food in kind of a bad way. She watched everything, including our carbohydrates.”

It’s almost shocking that a woman whose entire career was built on warmth and kindness could have a mother so chilly and distant. “There was something missing that prevented her from really connecting with people,” Ina writes in her book. But her father, a physician whom she describes as handsome, well-dressed and gregarious, loved people. He also had a terrible temper and was prone to abusive outbursts. “When he got angry, which was often, anything could happen,” she writes. “My parents didn’t believe in me or my potential, but they held me to impossibly high (and arbitrary) standards.” In their own screwed-up way, they all but dared her to become a success.

But Ina admits that her father instilled in her a distinct sense of artistic taste. He loved modernism, and she remembers him spending a lot of time thinking about the design of his office. “At a time when doctors had hospital-green offices, his floor was striped brown, like pumpkin, brown and white, and the furniture was comfortable,” she tells me. “He wanted people to feel good going to the doctor.”

He also invested in apartment buildings and would talk to Ina about his deals—conversations that would become early lessons in real estate. “It was almost the only thing that we would talk about," she says. "He loved real estate. He loved buying things. And my mother was terrified. So he would say, ‘Come talk me through this deal and see if it works.’ Not that I brought anything to it, but it was just somebody to talk about it.” Those conversations were formative. “I think in some ways I'm very much like my father, but without the anger.”

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Young Ina and her brother Ken.

At school, Ina’s favorite subject was science. “I loved the process of coming up with an idea for an experiment and testing my hypothesis,” she writes. “I liked it when anything could happen—when I didn’t know the results before I started. Surprises were what made science fun.” She also found herself drawn to design and architecture: When other girls were taking home ec class, Ina chose to take drafting and learned to make technical drawings. “I think I've always been interested in building things and renovating things,” she says.

When Ina graduated high school, her whole world seemed to open up. She went to Syracuse University to study economics (not architecture, like she’d originally planned) and was dating a boy named Jeffrey Garten, who was two years her senior and a student at Dartmouth. Although they had begun dating while Ina was still in high school, they now had the freedom to see each other whenever they wanted, and she would often make the five-hour bus trip (with a 3 a.m. transfer) for weekend visits.

They were madly in love: During those early years, Jeffrey would write letters about his fanciful dreams for their future (“We go to Paris once in the next five years…”), and Ina would bake and ship him brownies and oatmeal cookies. “It was at this time that I found out how much I loved cooking. I loved the smell of the house, but, most of all, I loved taking care of Jeffrey and making him happy. This was the very first time I thought of food as an expression of love,” she writes. They married shortly after Jeffrey graduated, even though Ina still had two more years of school to finish.

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Ina and Jeffrey early on and on their wedding day.

Those first few years of marriage were eye-opening and unpredictable, driven by the fact that Jeffrey, who joined ROTC when he was still in college, had army responsibilities to fulfill. They bounced around a lot (North Carolina, Colorado) and were separated for long stretches. (Jeffrey spent a year in Thailand, so Ina stayed behind and finished her degree.) On the upside, it allowed Ina to see the world. She was barely in her 20s and traveling alone to Belgium, Tokyo, and Bangkok, and it helped build up a worldly confidence she didn’t have as a child.

But together, they also developed a beautiful sense of adventure. She and Jeffrey spent one four-month period backpacking through Europe. The couple stayed at campsites and lived on only $5 a day, but the trip was a further aesthetic awakening for Ina. In France, she marveled at the open-air markets, the wine, and the gardens, but nothing had a more profound impact than the food. “It was anything but fancy,” she says. “The peaches were delicious, and I'd never had cheese like that. Cheese in the U.S. came in a wrapper or was sealed in wax. And nobody knew what a baguette was at that time!”

She also had a chance encounter with a woman who ran a campsite near Mont Saint-Michel, who invited them over for coq au vin. Ina was mesmerized by the complex flavors rendered with such simple technique. “She really awakened something in me that I was just dying to do, and I didn't even know it,” Ina says. "You never know the ripple effect of what you do when you do something nice for somebody. I'd like to go back and thank her!"

By the time the couple finally settled in D.C., where Jeffrey was attending graduate school, Ina was an expert at setting up a home. Her own day job in the Office of Management and Budget bored her to tears, so she poured her creative energy into cooking for Jeffrey and designing spaces. Not every investment was a winner: Their first home, a 1909 fixer upper in Dupont Circle, ended up with a very functional kitchen but a bedroom in which she'd accidentally hung the wallpaper upside down. (“I couldn’t afford to redo it, so every morning I’d wake up and go, Aw shit!” she laughs.)

But Ina ultimately realized she wasn’t happy being just a wife and a worker bee. “When I hit 30, I thought, I don't want to do the serious stuff. I want to do the fun stuff. How can I make that into a living?” she says. Somewhat impulsively, she answered an ad in the back of The New York Times about a specialty food store in Westhampton, on Long Island, a town she had never been to. “The two things I loved were cooking and renovating old buildings. So it was either going to be one or the other,” she says. “And the universe revealed itself in that ad.”

The Gartens bought The Barefoot Contessa for $20,000. (They negotiated the price down from $25K.) Ina had never run a business and had no formal culinary training, but she was guided by two defining principles. The first was that the design of the store was as important as what it carried. “I always had this philosophy that it had to feel good when you were there,” she says. She read books about retail psychology (Why We Buy by Paco Underhill was a favorite), had furniture built to showcase the food in just the right way (a long farm table with drawers was a centerpiece), and she would study her customers closely as they shopped to see what they engaged with.

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The original Barefoot Contessa store in Westhampton, New York.

Her second principle was that the store should be a five-sense experience. “There was always great music, always a screen door slamming that makes it sound like summer,” she says. “And then I put in French bread ovens, and we baked bread in the back (Edit note: They made 1,000 baguettes a day!) so the store smelled good, and you could see something being cooked.” There were samples out so people could taste things, and they would test and retest recipes to figure out which were the most addictive and popular. It was as if Barefoot was somewhere between a science experiment and a second home. “I always had my desk in the back, so if you needed anything, I could answer a question,” she says. “It felt like mom was home! There was somebody there—it wasn’t just a store.”

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Inside the Barefoot Contessa store in East Hampton, New York.

No detail was unimportant—even down to the art direction of the salad case. “I’d put a grilled lemon chicken salad that had peppers and sugar snap peas, but then the next dish was just sugar snap peas, so it was a solid color,” she says. “People don't know why this case looks good, but it looks good.”

Running Barefoot brought Ina immense personal purpose and local pride, but it was also emotionally exhausting and sometimes painful. There were sleepless nights, employees to manage, building renovations to supervise, and the pressures of maintaining a long-distance relationship. Jeffrey, who was still living in D.C., would visit on weekends when the store was at its busiest. What’s more, Ina wasn’t sure she and Jeffrey wanted the same life anymore, one defined by traditional gender roles. “It wasn’t the stupid chores that bothered me,” she writes. “It was the feeling that I wasn’t an equal partner in our marriage.”

Around this time, Ina asked for a trial separation. “It was the hardest thing I ever did,” she writes. “I needed to find myself, but was I really ready to lose him in the process?” Ina buried herself further in Barefoot, certain that at least that aspect of her life was exactly what she wanted.

At Ina’s insistence, Jeffrey agreed to go to therapy, and ultimately, the two found their way back to each other. He moved to New York City, much closer to Long Island, and they bought a farmhouse in East Hampton. And when his job as an investment banker landed him in Tokyo for more than a year, the couple traveled to see each other once a month. (Ina remembers that her only times of rest during those busy Barefoot years were on a plane.) Ina understood innately the soothing power of design and had Jeffrey’s apartment in Tokyo set up as an exact replica of their NYC apartment so he would never feel homesick. “Jeffrey moved every year when he was a kid,” she says. “He hates moving, and I love building things, so we kind of had this unspoken contract that I can build whatever I want, and I can make any decision I want—but I know what he likes. And I just take his clothes and his toothbrush and move him in, and he shows up, and it’s done.”

Inside the Creative—and Mildly Chaotic—World of Ina Garten (10)

Read the 1994 Cover Story

Meanwhile, in Ina’s hands, Barefoot Contessa became a massive success. “Everybody would say I’ll meet you at Barefoot, even if they weren't going shopping,” she tells me. In its prime, she had two locations, a roster of celebrity customers (Steven Spielberg! Lauren Bacall!), and a long list of cult-favorite menu items (the brownies had a rabid fan base). Ina’s food—and her inimitable style—was catching the eye of influential tastemakers and magazine editors. (Her home appeared on the cover of House Beautiful in 1994.) She was well on her way to reaching single-name status.

But the bigger Barefoot got, the less personal it felt. While some would have jumped at the chance to go global, Ina’s instinct was to keep things intimate. “A Japanese businessman came to me wanting to set up Barefoot Contessas all over the country, and my first thought was, Oh, that's exciting!” she says. “And then I thought, Oh my god, I’m gonna have 100,000 employees. I’d rather kill myself. I like knowing the people that work for me. I like the connection. Whenever I've strayed from that, I've regretted it.”

After 18 years, Ina sold the store and set about figuring out what was next. “Worst year of my life,” she tells me. “You have to prepare yourself to be alone and have nothing to do. I was just by myself in an office.” Eventually, her year of rest and contemplation led to a book deal, the wildly successful Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. In signature Ina style, it was about so much more than recipes. “When we’re designing a book, it’s not just that the type is the right type and the photographs are the right photographs,” she says. “It’s that when you open the book, it lies flat, so the pages don't go together. You don’t see the design, you don't see the work that went into it, but, you know, the book feels good.”

You can't swing for the fences if you have a budget. I know what I can afford, and I know what I can't afford. I'd rather not have something than have something bad.

Ina may not have 1,000 Barefoot locations, but what she built was arguably more visionary and far reaching. Call any number of recent lifestyle trends to mind and you can probably trace them back to Ina: Perfectly rumpled linen napkins. A centerpiece of small glass vases instead of one big one. Holiday buffets on a massive kitchen island. Overflowing, effortlessly styled charcuterie boards. Oversized hurricane lamps lining a patio. All of it came from her vision of what home should feel like.

She turned that Barefoot Contessa, “everyone is welcome” concept into one of the highest grossing cookbook collections ever published and a massively successful television series, with a 20-year run that scored 19 Daytime Emmy nominations and 14 awards. And it was all created with that signature warmth, the thoughtful nature, the fearless drive, and the eye toward inviting design that she had so carefully curated all those years.

I’ve seen Ina’s personal approach up close before. In 2014, I was helping produce a magazine story featuring Ina and a 24-year-old Taylor Swift. (Ina was a Swiftie in the early age of Swifties. “I’d seen her on the Today Show when she was 15—I was coincidentally booked on the same day—and I was just completely knocked out,” she tells me.) Taylor was going to cook with Ina, her culinary role model, in her barn; they would make a pavlova together.

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See Inside Ina's Barn

Walking into her test kitchen/studio barn for the shoot that morning was nothing short of a revelation. The feeling of comfort was a sensory assault. First, the sight: a space built by architect Frank Greenwald (featured in a 2008 House Beautiful cover story) but, like the Manhattan apartment, primarily designed by Ina. It featured massive exposed beams, a 20-foot farm table, an 18-foot island, and high ceilings, but the lighting, the paint on the walls, and the sunlight streaming through the windows made the space feel cozy. I was awed by the scale and moved by the intimacy. There was music playing, something classic and effortless (Tony Bennett? Nat King Cole?). There was crisp linen, pebbly granite, and soft velvet furniture. And then there was the smell: Ina was making Taylor a fig loaf, and I was absolutely knocked out by warm cinnamon and clove, like falling forward into a pile of cashmere leaves.

Taylor was gracious and kind, but there was no hiding that she was in awe of Ina, clearly dazed and thrilled to be there. She knew all of Ina’s recipes (she makes her flag cake every July 4) and couldn’t wait to try the fig loaf. They laughed as if they were old friends (and they’ve been close ever since). The selfie they took together went viral, and Taylor’s young fans showed up in the comments: “Oh my god, I love Ina too!” It was clear to me that day that we were all—popstars and regulars alike—under Ina's spell.

"It was one of the best days of my life," Ina tells me today. The fact that she gets to do all of this—meet incredible people, bring millions joy, and help shape her fans’ lives—is not lost on her. "What has happened is so much better than I could have ever dreamed," she says. "My dream is that we can continue this forever."

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Inside the Creative—and Mildly Chaotic—World of Ina Garten (2024)

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