Topline
Her no-frills cocktail recipes and approachable take on luxurious home cooking have made Ina Garten popular with generations of television and online foodies, but on Tuesday she revealed one of the things that appeals to her youngest audience the most—her true love story with longtime husband Jeffrey—almost didn’t survive the start of her superstar career.
Ina and Jeffrey Garten attend the 2015 "Time 100" Gala.
Key Facts
In an excerpt from her upcoming book published in People, Garten revealed a tumultuous time in the couple’s relationship that started when she moved to Westhampton Beach, New York, from Washington, D.C., leaving Jeffrey behind, to run the speciality food store the Barefoot Contessa, for which her empire would later be named.
She was working overtime to run the store, she said, and Jeffrey, who would visit on weekends, “expected a wife that would make dinner."
While that's exactly what Garten does for a living, she writes in the upcoming memoir that she was cooking, cleaning and shopping "as a businesswoman, not a wife."
She said Jeffrey's weekend visits were a distraction, and she resented that he was "fully formed and living the life he wanted to live" while she was expected to prioritize being a wife over her dreams.
As a result, she asked her husband for a separation that lasted for six weeks and included trips to couples therapy, at the end of which she says they emerged as "equals who took care of each other."
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Crucial Quote
“Thank god I did," Garten told People of asking for the separation. "I think how crazy that was and how dangerous it was, but we wouldn't have the relationship we have now if I hadn't done it. It changed him, but it also changed me too."
Key Background
The Barefoot Contessa empire started with a store of the same name, which Garten bought in 1978 after seeing an ad for a “catering, gourmet foods & cheese shoppe” in the New York Times. It was at the store that she first experimented with cooking beyond the scale of an average housewife, and she moved the store to East Hampton in the 1980s where it became a favorite of famous residents like Ron Perelman and Steven Spielberg, the New Yorker reported. Garten sold the store in 1996 (it closed in 2003) and she published "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook" in 1999, when she was 51. Her popular Food Network show debuted in 2002 and ran for 28 seasons, until 2021. She now hosts the show “Be My Guest” on Food Network and invites celebrities for dinner at her East Hampton home. She has written 12 best-selling cookbooks and continues to share her life and recipes on social media (she has 4.6 million Instagram followers).
Tangent
Garten, 76, told the New Yorker earlier this year that her life truly began when she met Jeffrey, 77. They met in 1964 while he was a student at Dartmouth and she was visiting her older brother. They were married four years later and both worked for a time at the White House, Jeffrey in the State Department for Henry Kissinger and Ina as a budget analyst. Today they live in East Hampton, where they also own a second home that is rented to Ina's assistant Mica Bahn, as well as an apartment in Manhattan and another in Paris.
What To Watch For
"Be Ready When the Luck Happens" by Ina Garten, a former Forbes 50 Under 50 honoree, will release Oct. 1.
