Ina Garten

Early life

Born Ina Rosenberg to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Stamford, Connecticut, Garten was one of two children born to Charles H. Rosenberg, a surgeon specializing in otolaryngology, and his wife, Florence. Encouraged to excel in school, she showed an aptitude for science, and has said she uses that scientific mindset while experimenting with recipes. Garten's mother, an intellectual with an interest in opera, refused her daughter's requests to assist her in the kitchen and instead directed her to concentrate on schoolwork. Garten described her father as a lively individual with many friends, and has commented that she shares more characteristics with him than with her mother.

At 15, she met her future husband, Jeffrey Garten, on a trip to visit her brother at Dartmouth College. After high school, she attended Syracuse University but postponed her educational pursuits to marry.

Career

On December 22, 1968, Rosenberg and Garten were married in Stamford and soon relocated to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She began to dabble in cooking and entertaining in an effort to occupy her time while her husband served his four-year military tour during the Vietnam War; she also acquired her pilot's license. After her husband had completed his military service, the couple journeyed to Paris, France, for a four-month camping vacation that Garten has described as the birth of her love for French cuisine. During this trip, she experienced open-air markets, produce stands, and fresh cooking ingredients for the first time. Upon returning to the U.S., she began to cultivate her culinary abilities by studying the volumes of Julia Child's seminal cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her weekly dinner party tradition began taking shape during this time, and she refined her home entertaining skills when she and her husband moved to Washington, D.C., in 1972.

In Washington, Garten worked in the White House and took business courses at George Washington University, eventually earning an MBA, while her husband worked in the State Department and completed his graduate studies. Garten was originally employed as a low-level government aide, and climbed the political ladder to the Office of Management and Budget; eventually she was assigned the position of budget analyst, which entailed writing the nuclear energy budget and policy papers on nuclear centrifuge plants for Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

Strained by the pressures of her work and the stressful nature of Washington, Garten again turned to cooking and entertaining while also buying, refurbishing, and reselling homes for profit in the Dupont Circle and Kalorama neighborhoods. The profits from these sales gave Garten the means to make her next purchase, the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store.

Barefoot Contessa store

Garten left her government job in 1978 after spotting an ad for a 400-square-foot (37 m²) specialty food store called Barefoot Contessa in Westhampton Beach, New York. "My job in Washington was intellectually exciting and stimulating but it wasn't me at all," she explained four years later.

She made a hasty decision to purchase the store after traveling to view it and moved to New York to assume ownership and management. The store had been named by its original owner in tribute to the 1954 film starring Ava Gardner; Garten kept the name when she took over, as it meshed well with her idea of an "elegant but earthy" lifestyle, but as of 2006 she had not seen the film.

Within a year, Garten had moved Barefoot Contessa across Main Street from its original location to a larger property. The shop quickly outgrew this new location, and in 1985 Garten relocated the store again to the newly vacated premises of gourmet shop Dean & DeLuca in the prosperous Long Island village of East Hampton. In contrast to Westhampton's beach season atmosphere, East Hampton is a year-round community, providing a larger, wealthier demographic as a customer base. In East Hampton, Garten expanded the store from its original 400 square feet (37 m²) to more than 3,000 square feet (280 m²), over seven times its original size. In this new, larger space, the store specialized in delicacies such as lobster Cobb salad, caviar, imported cheeses, and locally grown produce.

While doing much of the cooking herself, Garten also employed local chefs and bakers as the business grew, including Anna Pump (who later established the Loaves & Fishes bakery and Bridgehampton Inn). Garten has credited Eli Zabar with the inspiration for her main cooking method, in which "all you have to do is cook to enhance the ingredients." The shop was praised in the press by celebrity clientele such as Steven Spielberg and Lauren Bacall.

In 1996, after two decades of owning and operating Barefoot Contessa, Garten again found herself seeking a change and sold the store to two employees, Amy Forst and Parker Hodges, while retaining ownership of the building itself. Unsure of what career step to take after selling the store, she took a six-month sabbatical from the culinary scene and built offices above the shop. There, she studied the stock market and attempted to sketch out plans for potential business ventures. Her website, Barefoot Contessa, became high-profile at this time as she began offering her coffees and a few other items for purchase online.

By 2003, Barefoot Contessa had become such a landmark gathering place for the affluent New York town that director Nancy Meyers chose to use the store as one of the settings for the Jack Nicholson-Diane Keaton film Something's Gotta Give. The store was permanently closed in 2004, however, when the lease expired on the property and negotiations failed between Garten (still the owner of the building) and the new owners. It has been reported that Garten's refusal to meet lease negotiations was actually a tactic for reclaiming control of the store after Forst and Hodges lost the business to competitor Citarella. Ultimately, Garten did not reopen the shop and instead retained the property for potential new tenants.

Barefoot Contessa cookbooks

After consulting with her husband, Garten reemerged in 1999 with her attention turned to publishing. She carried on the Barefoot Contessa name in her 1999 sleeper bestseller, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. Containing the recipes that made her store successful, the book far exceeded both Garten's and publisher Clarkson Potter's expectations. After an initial pressing of 35,000 copies, a typical number for a debut cookbook, it immediately required second and third print runs and eventually sold over 100,000 copies in its first year. In 2001, she capitalized on her new-found fame and released Barefoot Contessa Parties!, which also produced high sales and garnered good reviews, and followed this with Barefoot Contessa Family Style in 2002. The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and Parties! were nominated for 2000 and 2002 James Beard Awards, in the Entertaining & Special Occasion Cookbooks category. Parties! was a surprise entry, as she was considered inexperienced and untrained to compete with fellow nominees, revered French chef Jacques Pépin and international wine expert Brian St. Pierre.

Her cookbooks avoid an encyclopedic format, and are modeled on coffee table books. With many color photographs, including a full-page picture facing each recipe, some critics argue that this method sacrifices space that could be used for recipes. Nevertheless, her cookbooks have received positive reviews; in 2005, fellow chef Giada De Laurentiis named Garten one of her favorite authors. As of 2008, Garten's cookbooks have sold over six million copies combined. As of October 2014 she had published nine cookbooks.

Her newest cookbook, titled Cooking for Jeffrey was released on October 25, 2016.

Barefoot Contessa on Food Network

Garten established herself with her cookbooks and appearances on Stewart's show, and then moved into the forefront in 2002 with the debut of her Food Network program. After the success of The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and Barefoot Contessa Parties!, Garten was approached by Food Network with an offer to host her own television cooking show. She rejected this proposal several times, until the London-based production company responsible for the Nigella Bites was assigned to the deal. She acquiesced to a 13-show season, and Barefoot Contessa premiered in 2002 to a positive reception.

Her show features her husband and their friends and generally only hosts celebrities who are her friends. Barefoot Contessa has approximately one million viewers tuned in per episode, and has posted some of Food Network's highest ratings.

When Martha Stewart was incarcerated in 2004 on charges connected with obstruction of justice in a stock trading case, the press singled out Garten as a possible successor.

In 2005, the show was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award in the category of Best Service Show. In 2009, the show and Garten were once again nominated for Daytime Emmy Awards in the categories of Best Culinary Program and Best Culinary Host, and Garten won her first Emmy in the latter category.

That same year, Garten announced that she had signed a three-year contract with Food Network to continue her cooking show, and will release two more cookbooks following Barefoot Contessa at Home. Garten was reportedly awarded the most lucrative contract for a culinary author to date, signing a multimillion-dollar deal for multiple books. She has also been approached several times to develop her own magazine, line of furniture, set of cookware, and chain of boutiques (reminiscent of Stewart's Omnimedia), but has declined these offers, stating she has no interest in further complicating her life. Between 2004 and 2005, Barefoot in Paris sold almost 400,000 copies and rose to number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list.

Barefoot Contessa Pantry

In 2006, Garten launched her own line of packaged cake mixes, marinades, sauces, and preserves, branded as Barefoot Contessa Pantry, with her business partner Frank Newbold and in conjunction with Stonewall Kitchen. These convenience foods are based on her most popular from-scratch recipes, such as coconut cupcakes, maple oatmeal scones, mango chutney, and lemon curd. Pricing of these items is comparatively expensive (for example, the suggested retail price for a single box of brownie mix is ten dollars) and they are only sold through upscale cookware and gourmet shops such as Crate & Barrel, Sur La Table, and Chicago's Fox & Obel Market Cafe. She plans to expand this brand in the near future if the first line of products is very successful.

Barefoot Contessa other publications

After critical acclaim and high sales of her first three cookbooks, she went on to write Barefoot in Paris and several columns for O, The Oprah Magazine. She also serves as the entertaining, cooking, and party planning consultant for the magazine. House Beautiful, a shelter magazine, featured a monthly Garten column entitled "Ask the Barefoot Contessa" until 2011. In this column, she gave cooking, entertaining, and lifestyle tips in response to letters from her readers. She launched a small line of note cards and journals to complement her books, and wrote the forewords for Kathleen King's Tate's Bake Shop Cookbook and Rori Trovato's Dishing With Style. One of her recipes, 'lemon roast chicken with croutons', was featured in The Best American Recipes 2005–2006. Another of Garten's dishes was selected for Today's Kitchen Cookbook, a compilation of the most popular recipes featured on the daily news program The Today Show. For Thanksgiving 2010, her recipes were featured by Google on their homepage In June 2012, she started a Facebook blog and three weeks later had over 100,000 followers.

Personal life

Her husband Jeffrey Garten was Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade and dean of the Yale School of Management. He is now the Juan Trippe Professor in the Practice of International Trade, Finance, and Business at Yale. He can also frequently be seen on her cooking show, assisting his wife with simple tasks or sampling the dishes she has created. They divide their time among Manhattan, East Hampton, and Paris.

Ina Garten created a deep PR rift after her brand twice rejected Make a Wish Foundations request for an in person cooking session for Enzo Pereda, who was stricken with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2007. Upon the initial request in 2010 from Make a Wish foundation on behalf of Enzo, they were told no due to a scheduling conflict with Ina and the date requested by Enzo. However after he was told no, Ina's PR team said he could try again sometime later when her schedule opened up. In 2011, when the request was made again on behalf of Enzo, Make a Wish Foundation confirmed to his parents that Ina Garten had said a meeting would be impossible cited here:

Garten served as hostess of the 16th Annual Hudson Peconic benefit for Planned Parenthood. Her Food Network show frequently features appearances by her openly gay friends and their partners. Though she has made no explicit statement regarding gay rights or the gay community in general, she did write in one of her books:

...We all know that families now aren't necessarily like Ozzie and Harriet (it turns out Ozzie and Harriet's family wasn't all Ozzie and Harriet)... family has a traditional context, but today it's not as simple as two parents with 2-3 kids... it's about relationships... it's about people who are bound together by love and a sense of being responsible for one another... it's spouses with no children, like Jeffrey and me... it's a group of women who meet to cook dinner together once a month... it's a one-parent family with adopted children... it's two men who've made a life together... at the end of the day, all we have is love... getting love, but even more, feeling love...

Registered in New York as a Democrat, Garten has contributed to the presidential campaign funds of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama.

Garten also sits on the Design Review Board for East Hampton, a panel that grants building permissions and approves architectural and design elements of the village. The board seeks to protect the historical district and further the overall aesthetics of the area.

Criticism

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has criticized Garten's cookbook Barefoot Contessa: How Easy Is That? for its use of high-fat, high-calorie, and high-cholesterol meat and dairy ingredients. In response, Eric Felten of The Wall Street Journal called the report "an assault on cookbooks that dare to venture beyond lentils".

In 2009-10, a six-year old boy named Enzo, requested to cook with Garten as part of his the Make-a-Wish foundation. Garten denied the request twice. After a large round of bad publicity, Garten agreed to cook with Enzo. However, Enzo and Make-a-Wish decided to focus on the boy's second wish, to swim with dolphins.

Books

Magazine columns

Television