Ina Garten’s incredible life in photos

Garten was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, where her father worked as a surgeon. 

The future Food Network star didn’t spend much time in the kitchen during her youth. Her mother wanted her to focus on school instead, according to the Washington Post. 

It was love at first sight for Jeffrey, who spotted Garten from the library window. 

As it turned out, Jeffrey’s roommate knew Garten’s brother. Jeffrey sent her a letter with his photo inside, and Garten’s interest was instantly piqued.

“I just remember running through the house and going, ‘Mom, Mom, you’ve got to see this picture of this guy. He’s so cute!'” Garten told People in 2018. 

They had their first date just months later in New York, and Garten felt an instant connection as well.

“I have to say, I just knew he was the one,” she told Today Food in 2018. “He’s kind, he’s smart, he’s funny, and he takes very good care of me. It’s wonderful.”

The couple wed at Garten’s parents’ house in Stamford. 

In 2016, Garten told Vanity Fair that her greatest regret in life was “not marrying Jeffrey sooner.”

While celebrating the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary in 2018, Garten said the secret to a happy marriage was quite simple. 

“I think you marry someone who thinks you’re just the most important thing in the world, and you think he’s the most important thing in the world,” she told Today Food.

Jeffrey was only able to call Garten once during that entire year he was stationed in Thailand, but he wrote to her every day, he told People in 2018. 

Garten kept every single letter, including one in which Jeffrey said he’d love to take his new wife to Paris, where “we won’t have enough money for a hotel, but maybe we’ll go camping,” she added. 

The couple went on a four-month camping trip to Paris in 1971, where Garten said she first fell in love with cooking. Now, they celebrate every anniversary in the City of Lights.

Garten helped draft the nuclear energy budget during the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. At the same time, she was making her way through Julia Child’s books — teaching herself how to cook and throwing weekly dinner parties. 

Although she had a prestigious career, Garten didn’t feel at home in the upper echelons of DC. 

”My job in Washington was intellectually exciting and stimulating, but it wasn’t me at all,” Garten told The New York Times in 1981.

”I was sitting at my desk in Washington trying to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up, and I came across an ad for this business for sale in Westhampton,” she told the Times. ”I drove up that weekend, looked it over, and said I’d take it.”

Garten’s parents couldn’t believe their daughter had given up the White House for a grocery store, but Jeffrey gave his full support. 

“Jeffrey said, ‘If you love it, you’ll be really good at it,'” Garten told The New York Times’ Sam Sifton during a virtual chat for the release of her 2020 cookbook “Modern Comfort Food.”

“And that’s the best advice anybody ever gave me,” she added. 

“Honestly, the first month I was there I thought, ‘This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,'” Garten told Sifton. “I’d never been in the food business; I didn’t know how to do anything. But Jeffrey said, ‘If you could do it in the first week, you’d be bored in the second week.”‘

Garten worked 18 hours a day to turn Barefoot Contessa into a success, bringing on a chef, Anna Pump, to help.

“Mom was hired to cook, but the beginning of a beautiful friendship began,” Sybille van Kempen, Pump’s daughter, told Business Insider. “Mom and Ina motivated each other. They shared ideas and supported each other’s growth.” 

Garten credits Pump — who went on to run the popular Loaves & Fishes Foodstore in Sagaponack, New York, and died in 2015 — with teaching her “so much about cooking.”

Garten told Sifton that she got lucky, finding the store just as the specialty food business was starting to take off. 

“It was really the beginning of when women were going back to work, and they had jobs and families, and they had enough on their plate and didn’t have time to make dinner,” she said. “So they were starting to buy dinner to make at home.” 

Garten ran the store for 18 years before she sold it to two of her employees in 1996. The store officially closed in 2003.

It was those first Barefoot Contessa customers who taught Garten that “people eat differently at home than they do in restaurants,” she told Sifton. 

“I would put out chickens with fresh herbs, and it didn’t work,” Garten told Sifton. “I thought, OK, I’m going to take this huge platter and put the chicken in little red cups and do it really simply — and it sold like crazy. I really learned that people want simple food.” 

In 2021, Garten’s first cookbook was republished with four new recipes — including her overnight mac and cheese, her brown-butter skillet corn bread, and her avocado and fried egg tartine. 

Garten told Sifton it takes her two years to develop the recipes and design for each book, and that she’s “involved in every detail of it.” 

The “Barefoot Contessa” star has become beloved for foolproof dishes that are accessible to home chefs at any skill level. Garten credits this with the fact that she always tests out her dishes with an inexperienced cook. 

“Every time I make a recipe, I watch someone else make it,” she told Sifton. “And I learn so much about how someone uses the recipe. At least one person makes it, sometimes three.”

Garten actually turned down the Food Network multiple times before she decided to give the show a go, telling the network to “lose my number.”

“For years I said no, and they kept coming back with a better offer,” Garten told MSNBC host Willie Geist during a virtual author luncheon benefiting Shelter Island Public Library in September 2021. “I said, ‘I’m not negotiating, I just don’t think I can do this.'”

Executives at the network were shocked by her initial refusal.  

“They said, ‘People send us hams to even get an appointment to try and get a show,'” Garten told Geist with a laugh. 

Still, Garten said it’s been incredible to look back on her two decades in television. 

“Twenty years, it’s amazing,” she added. “I’m really delighted, I just can’t understand it.” 

“As soon as I started watching Ina’s show, I realized why so many people adore her,” Swift wrote. “Her goal is to make things easier for us. Fans love her warmth and generosity.” 

“She shows us how to create memories that we’ll treasure for years to come. For that, we will always cherish the merry and magnificent Ina Garten,” she continued.

Garten and Obama had tea together for her “Barefoot in Washington” special. And Garten told the Washington Post that it was “one of the greatest days of my life.” 

“When Mrs. Obama said she liked my work, that was, like, ‘Really?,'” Garten recalled. “She’s just somebody I admire enormously. She took on a role she never expected to, and she did it brilliantly.”

The “Barefoot Contessa” star became an internet sensation in April 2020 when she filmed herself making a huge drink at 9 a.m., telling her fans that it’s “always cocktail hour in a crisis!” 

Garten told Sifton that she was “adding like 100,000 people a week on Instagram” after the clip took off. 

“It was insane!” she said. “It was completely insane!” 

Garten pivoted her Instagram content to share easy, pantry-friendly recipes that her fans could make while stuck in various lockdowns. Now, she has 5 million followers.

Garten decided to make comfort food the theme of her 2020 cookbook because she knew it’d be coming out during an election year. 

“Two years ago, I thought, there’s going to be an election a month after this book comes out,” Garten told Sifton. “And everyone, no matter who you’re voting for, is going to be stressed out.” 

“I had no idea the layers of stress we would be dealing with now,” she added, referring to the pandemic. “Either I’m a genius, or I’m really lucky, and I’m sure it’s the latter. It was the right thing for the right time.” 

Highlights from Garten’s “Modern Comfort Food” cookbook include her bacon, egg, and cheddar breakfast sandwich, her “outrageous” garlic bread, and her lamb ragu. 

“The pandemic has had a huge impact on what I think of as dinner — and what I look for in a ‘go-to’ recipe,” Garten writes in the introduction of her cookbook. “When I planned a party before the pandemic, it was always a multicourse extravaganza. But then the pandemic happened, and everything seemed like so much work.”

“I started making simple dinners for Jeffrey and me,” she continues. “They were delicious, satisfying, and everything we needed and wanted for dinner. I began to question why I had been so rigid about what constituted dinner before. If I love eating this way, wouldn’t my friends like it too?” 

Highlights from Garten’s most recent cookbook include her favorite weeknight pasta, her scrambled eggs cacio e pepe, and her blueberry-ricotta breakfast cake.  

Garten shared new details about her childhood, her marriage to Jeffrey, and her incredible rise to household name status in “Be Ready When the Luck Happens.”

In her memoir, Garten wrote that she chose to work in food because she wanted a “life filled with good times and meaningful connections.”

“Business doesn’t have to be cutthroat and isolating,” she said. “It’s much more fun and productive to exchange ideas, to be genuinely curious about how other people do things, to be generous, and to root for a competitor’s success.”