33 Facts About Ina Garten

Ina Rosenberg Garten is an American television cook and author.

Ina Garten is host of the Food Network program Barefoot Contessa and was a former staff member of the Office of Management and Budget.

Ina Garten's grandparents immigrated to the United States from Russia.

Garten's mother discouraged Ina from helping in the kitchen, instead directing her towards schoolwork.

Ina Garten described her father as a socializer and admits she shares more characteristics with him than her mother.

On December 22,1968, Jeffrey and Ina Garten were married in Stamford and soon relocated to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Ina Garten began to dabble in cooking and entertaining in an effort to occupy her time; Jeffrey served a four-year military tour during the Vietnam War.

In Washington, Ina Garten worked in the White House; Jeffrey worked in the State Department earning his PhD at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

Ina Garten used the profits from these sales to make her next purchase, the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store.

Ina Garten left her government job in 1978 after spotting an ad for a 400-square-foot specialty food store called Barefoot Contessa in Westhampton Beach, New York.

Ina Garten found it better for her marriage for her and her husband to lead more independent lives, as a more traditionalist configuration earlier on, in which Jeffrey was the head of household, became stifling and led them to briefly separate.

Ina Garten often worked 12 hour days at the business.

Ina Garten kept the name; it meshed well with her idea of an "elegant but earthy" lifestyle.

In East Hampton, Garten expanded the store over seven times its original size, from its original 400 square feet to more than 3,000 square feet.

In 1996, after two decades of operating Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten again found herself seeking a change; she sold the store to two employees, Amy Forst and Parker Hodges.

Ina Garten did not reopen the shop but kept the property for potential new tenants.

In 1999, Ina Garten reemerged with her attention turned to publishing.

Ina Garten carried on the Barefoot Contessa name in her 1999 sleeper bestseller, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.

Ina Garten eventually sold over 100,000 copies in the first year, immediately requiring second and third print runs after the initial printing of 25,000 cookbooks were sold.

Ina Garten's cookbooks have many color photographs, including a full-page picture facing each recipe.

The richness of Ina Garten's recipes has long been noted, with The New Yorker calling her "America's reigning queen of tastefully-deployed butterfat".

Ina Garten established herself with her cookbooks and appearances on Martha Stewart's show, and then moved into the forefront in 2002 with the debut of her Food Network program.

An early effort with Stewart's production company in 2000 proved unsuccessful, as Ina Garten struggled to adjust to the large television crew and highly structured environment.

Ina Garten's show features her husband and their friends and generally only hosts celebrities who are her friends.

In 2009, the show and Garten were 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.

Ina Garten has been approached several times to develop her own magazine, line of furniture, set of cookware, and chain of boutiques, but has declined these offers saying she has no interest in further complicating her life.

In 2022, Ina Garten launched Be My Guest on Discovery+ and the Food Network.

Ina Garten serves as the entertaining, cooking, and party planning consultant for the magazine.

House Beautiful, a shelter magazine, featured a monthly Ina Garten column entitled "Ask the Barefoot Contessa" until 2011.

Ina Garten 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.

Ina Garten was the dean of the Yale School of Management from 1995 to 2005.

Ina Garten sat on the Design Review Board for East Hampton, a panel that grants building permissions and approves architectural and design elements of the village.

Ina Garten has written a memoir with Deborah Davis, titled Be Ready When the Luck Happens, published in October 2024.