When I arrive at Ina Garten’s bucolic home in East Hampton, where she’s lived since the ’90s, she has a silver tray of champagne flutes in her hands and a mischievous smile on her face. I was lucky enough to meet a universally beloved New York legend at an especially auspicious moment: 10 days into Pride Month, with the Knicks up 3–1 in the playoffs. On the other hand, we were a month out from this country’s highly inauspicious 250th birthday, a particularly pessimism-inducing moment. After the year of the gooner and the loneliness influencer, Garten’s cherubic grin embodies something that, if Knicks mania is any indication, American culture seems to be starving for: the ideal of neighborliness, a sense of abundance, a hearth.
Garten—the entrepreneur, celebrity chef, and hostess extraordinaire otherwise known as the Barefoot Contessa—offers a convivial welcome that might be as well-loved as her cooking. She adores greeting guests with a grin, a hug, a joke, and a drink. “A lot of people leave the door open and have the guests let themselves in,” she tells me. Rookie mistake: “How you feel at the door determines how you’re going to feel for the evening.”
Nearly 50 years since she took on her moniker (the name of a Westhampton specialty foods store she bought on a whim in the ’70s), Garten still embodies the “elegant and earthy” energy that drew her in in the first place. By the turn of the millennium, she had parlayed that title, along with her gift for conjuring casual luxury and insouciantly sumptuous recipes, into a Barefoot Contessa cooking show that rocketed her to stardom. Her 13 cookbooks have sold millions of copies.
These days, she hosts Be My Guest, an effervescently endearing cooking and interview show featuring Garten’s famous friends-cum-fans, from ballerina Misty Copeland to The New Yorker editor David Remnick. She’s preparing for the release of her forthcoming cookbook, Simply Ina, and the fall launch of her new podcast, Happy Hour with Ina, which started a bidding war. (Vox Media won.) Garten’s remarkable staying power reveals an enduring appetite: for her recipes, of course, but also for her devotion to the dying art of caring for and conversing with not just loved ones, but strangers who might well become loved ones—IRL and regularly.
“If you have a goal, you’re going to miss so many opportunities along the way.” —Ina Garten
Though Garten might be the physical incarnation of a bygone era’s boomer-style, cable television celebrity, her legions of acolytes span a shockingly diverse spectrum: When I mentioned I was writing about Garten to my own friends, almost everyone came out as a superfan. One credited Garten’s show, and her approach to “sucking the marrow out of life,” with saving her from a depressive fugue state—a balm for the wounding edicts of a world that constrains women’s appetites.
A straight man argued that Garten offers soothing “northeastern nonna ASMR.” Another, this one bisexual, called her a “hetero-optimistic-anti-natalist-icon” (Garten has been open—and sanguine—about her decision not to have children). Several gay guys, citing her long history of featuring queer friends on her show since the early 2000s without fetishizing or stigmatizing them, deemed her close to the platonic ideal of an ally. When I arrived at the Edenic barn where Garten films, it was immediately clear that God was a fan, too—the forecast had predicted thunderstorms, but the sky was the same inviting blue as her tidy chambray blouse.
I’d arrived mid-shoot, and we all migrated into her pastorally opulent gardens. Garten, a pair of hedge clippers in hand, was game for anything. When the photographer politely revealed that another of this issue’s cover stars had posed with gardening tools, so she might need to abandon them, she noted that they weren’t a prop—she was hoping to get some pruning done between shots. She passed them off to her assistant (also in oversized chambray), who began flitting about clipping “hangnails.”
I asked if there were any questions Garten had never been asked, but had always wanted to answer. She replied with an impish smile and a sideways retort: she would tell me her least favorite question: What’s next? “My current favorite expression is, ‘Go as far as you can see. When you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.’ If you have a goal, you’re going to miss so many opportunities along the way.”
In a world enamored with the concept of “agency” as promoted by our Big Tech overlords—one that emphasizes individualism and strict goal orientation—Garten lives according to a credo of can-do collectivity. “What I missed as a child was connection,” she says, leaning conspiratorially across the kitchen table to explain why she finds interviewing people to be so satisfying, and citing her intimate bond with the writer Ann Patchett as an example. “We all need to find somebody who believes in us. I didn’t have that growing up.”
After a childhood spent navigating difficult relationships with her parents, meeting Jeffrey, her husband—a fixture on the show and recurring character in her cookbooks—changed all that. (The pair have known each other since Garten was 15.) Garten rejects the favored trauma plots of the last decade in favor of a question: “What are you going to do with it?”
“I could succeed because of my own drive and intelligence, and didn’t depend on a man to promote me.” —Ina Garten
This question informs her feminism, which embraces a staunch emphasis on self-determination and a reverence for domesticity and care that she feels fellow feminists sometimes “look down on.” “It’s the ability to be conscious that you have all the options, which we didn’t have in the ’70s, [and] the ability to change your mind.” When asked what she thinks of tradwives, she said she doesn’t consider herself one, though she wouldn’t judge one, so long as they’re intentional about it. “A lot of people fall into a life, and then one day they go, Oh my God, I’ve got kids and dogs, and my husband’s out on a golf course, and I don’t like this life.”
Garten comes by this philosophy honestly; she purchased the Barefoot Contessa on a whim, while working a stultifying job in government finance. Dissatisfied in DC, she saw a classified ad for a store for sale and hit the road, realizing she “didn’t want to work in a place where I had zero chance of becoming head of the organization because I was a woman.” Instead, she switched lanes, driving full speed into one where “I could succeed because of my own drive and intelligence, and didn’t depend on a man to promote me.” Needless to say, she has executed that vision deftly.
As our conversation came to an end, Garten returned to her least favorite question, wondering aloud, teasingly, whether I might actually want to know what’s next for her. She wouldn’t predict anything too far out, but she could tell me what she’d be up to that weekend: a dinner party to celebrate Simply Ina, some prep work for her new podcast’s launch, and a few cosmos at Bridgehampton’s Topping Rose House to round things out. Her characteristic vivacity, not to mention her faith in the transcendent power of a straightforwardly good time, left me with an undeniable pep in my step. Two days later, the Knicks took home the championship.
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