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 Hitchco*ck 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.
Garten’s culinary style has been guided by the principle that people tend to want to eat things they know, but better—lavishly executed comfort food.
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.”
