In person, Ina Garten is exactly the way she’s been immortalized on TV. On the day I visit her at her idyllic East Hampton compound, she’s wearing one of her signature oversize navy button-up shirts, which she buys in bulk from Eileen Fisher, Talbots, and Lands’End. She moves around the property with an unhurried efficiency; she speaks warmly but firmly. We’re supposed to be making mustard-crusted chicken with fingerling potatoes and a frisée salad for lunch, and when she gives me a tour of her garden, she bends over and casually snips exactly the right amount of thyme for her recipe. This morning, she’s expecting a quick visit from some neighbors who have guests in town and would like to introduce them to Garten. Warning: Objects are just as comforting and delicious as they appear on camera.
What did I expect? This soothing reliability is the foundation of Garten’s brand, after all. She’s built an empire on being unchanging, using the same simple, high-quality ingredients for her simple, flavorful dishes, and cultivating a neutral sense of luxury that is just shy of unattainable for the average viewer or reader. She’s published 10 cookbooks,
each selling better than the last, and filmed 16 years of her Daytime Emmy–winning cooking show, Barefoot Contessa. Go back and watch her debut episode, which aired in 2002, and it will feel virtually indiscernible from one filmed last year. People gravitate to her because she’s good at her job, but they also come to her because she’s an oasis of easy cheer and familiarity in an era increasingly short on both. When the apocalypse arrives—and some feel as if it already has—I’ll take shelter at Ina Garten’s estate.
“I could not leave the house for a year and be perfectly happy,” Garten says.
Garten with her most famous millennial megafan, Taylor Swift.
The conceit of her work is as basic as her recipes: “My generation, and the generation before me, our mothers were in the kitchen cooking. But the women of my generation became doctors and lawyers and businesspeople, and they weren’t home,” Garten explains. “I think my generation is the first generation that misses hanging out in the kitchen with someone. And when we started the show, we decided it would be filmed very close, so you would feel like you were on the other side of the counter.” Garten smiles serenely, adding, “I think we’re missing that kind of grounded part of our lives, where Mom was home and taking care of us.”
Garten’s property is maximized for comfort, utility, and entertainment purposes. Today her husband, Jeffrey, the subject of so much delighted online chatter, is absent, working on a book of his own. She used to do all her cooking and filming in the house but then began to fear that “Jeffrey would divorce me,”she says, breaking into a fit of laughter. If Garten is different in person, she is sillier: prone to maniacal giggling. (Or, as she characterizes it, “Just like on TV, but with worse language.”) Garten’s assistant and social media manager, a blond, soft-spoken 27-year-old aspiring chef named Lidey Heuck, is present. Among many other duties, Heuck acts as a recipe tester, a dishwasher, a cheerleader, a confidante, a friend, and a personal DJ. Heuck picks me up at the East Hampton train station, and when we arrive at the barn, Garten is gushing overthe new shoes she’s ordered for herself and Heuck, inspired by her makeup artist: fuzzy slippers with giant pompoms on top. The two even wear the same shoe size. Garten is 70 and childless, and one can’t help but feel that her maternal instincts are playing out on Heuck, who acts as a stand-in for the millions of young women who view Garten as a domestic and professional icon.
While they do seem to live in a cocoon of pleasure, there are constant reminders that pleasure is a business. Today there is a plumber present and a book tour to be planned for Garten’s forthcoming cookbook, Cook Like a Pro (out this month), plus a promotional video to be filmed for a sales conference for Costco. Garten is already planning her twelfth cookbook. Oh, and Jennifer Garner will be here this weekend. “Okay, Lidey, we need tunes,” she instructs, firing up the oven.
Garten began her career working in the White House Office of Management and Budget during the Carter administration. Already bitten by the entrepreneurial bug at age 25, Garten would buy houses and flip them for cash. She eventually saved up enough money to buy the Barefoot Contessa, a gourmet food shop in East Hampton, which she owned for 18 years before writing her best-selling debut cookbook. Since then, she’s become a heroine of modern femininity, a woman whose joie de vivre is her livelihood. You could write a dissertation about the meaning of work-life balance using Garten’s empire as a case study.
Garten’s newest book, Cook Like a Pro: Recipes and Tips for Home Cooks
Garten’s longevity is somewhat counterintuitive: She’s become such a cultural fixture chiefly because she is able to resist the tides of trends, rather than be cowed by them. A lifestyle brand she is not. She shouldn’t be compared to Gwyneth Paltrow or Martha Stewart. Garten is constantly turning down offers to license her name for food items, fertilizers, and clothing lines. She has a few friends in the restaurant business but is largely disconnected from the insider-y world of Manhattan chefs. (She never met Anthony Bourdain, who once described Garten as “one of the few people on the Food Network who can actually cook.”) She deliberates every professional opportunity rigorously, and right now she is mulling the possibility of a collaboration with Antoni Porowski, the pretty-boy foodie of Netflix’s Queer Eye reboot. (“Do you like him? Do you know him?” she asks the room when his name is mentioned.) I inquire if she’s followed the rise of the Instant Pot, and she tells me that she bought one. “But I still haven’t used it,” she confesses.
I ask her if she watches other cooking shows—she doesn’t, really. “One day I turned on a show, and they were cooking baklava. The recipe went on and on and on,” she remembers. “And I thought, I’m never making baklava. So I changed the channel, and there was Martha Stewart making baklava! Martha, I have to say, was really interesting. You have to score the top, and she took an X-Acto knife and did it. It looked like she did it with a ruler; it was astonishing.”
Garten did a Food Network special with Michelle Obama in 2016—her barn is ornamented with framed photos of the pair together—but for the most part, she avoids discussing current events. Would she consider doing another special, with Melania Trump? “I think I can say Melania probably won’t be inviting me to cook for her,” she says. “She doesn’t strike me as somebody who loves to cook. She has other interests.” Any discussion of the #MeToo movement, which has infiltrated the food world, is taken off the record. “I always stay away from politics,” she concedes. “Nobody benefits from that.”
“I could not leave the house for a year and be perfectly happy."
Still, this doesn’t mean Garten is willfully out of touch. When Heuck came on board in 2013 and insisted her boss start using Instagram, she protested. Heuck responded by simply downloading the app on Garten’s phone and encouraging her to play around at her leisure. Eventually Garten relented, seduced by the pleasures of such a visual medium. Now “it’s the first thing I do in the morning when I wake up,” she admits. She also keeps up with the quirky hive of online fans, and she understands that she’s a meme-able internet folk hero. She knows there’s someone out there with a license plate that says “inagartn,” and that there’s a guy on Instagram who’s made it his life’s mission to attempt all her recipes. (They randomly bumped into each other at a restaurant in Paris recently.) She knows that Meghan Markle name-checked her engagement roast chicken, and she’s delighted by all the conspiracy theories that Jeffrey is in the CIA. “He always tells me, ‘The wives are the last to know,’ ” she says, and breaks into one of her giggling fits. I ask if she’s ever read any of the fan fiction written about her and Jeffrey, in which a blogger imagines what the couple’s arguments are like. Her face lights up. “How about we don’t argue!” she protests. “Will you please send that to me?”
On a strategic level, Garten’s been able to drill down into the statistics of her audience and knows that the majority of her Instagram followers are between 18 and 35; the gender breakdown has been 83 percent women and 17 percent men for the last five years. “I think in the world we live in, writing a book every two years is a long time,” she says. “With Instagram, people feel like you’re sharing with them, which is a good thing.”
“A lot of people have said to me, How do I build a brand? You don’t,” Garten continues. “A brand is really a set of emotions.”
She swivels in her chair, nodding toward Heuck. “What do you guys think about that?”
“You’re making real sense,” Heuck says. “I think people can feel the difference.”
These days, though, Heuck is working on building her own brand. She’d risen early that morning to test out some roasted potatoes and was disappointed by the results. As we gobble up our lunch, Garten probes her assistant about the potato problem.“So the potatoes are okay?”
“Oh yeah, they’re great,” Heuck says.
“So you think you just had bad potatoes?” Garten asks.
“I think it was me,” Heuck shrugs.
“Could it be that I used more olive oil on mine?” Garten asks, eager to crack the case.“ Could be why,” Heuck says. “But I used a lot. I’m going to make them again tonight and see what happens.”
Garten could do anything at this stage of her career, but mostly she still wants to be doing exactly this: hanging out at home, speculating about the ratio of olive oil to potato. She could write a memoir, and surely it would sell. But she’s conflicted. “The truth is, I’m not sure. There has to be some drama to your life. I’m not sure that my life is that dramatic.”
This article originally appeared in the October 2018 issue of ELLE.
