"I actually thought it was a terrible name. Who calls a food store Barefoot Contessa?" she told MSNBC host Willie Geist during a virtual author luncheon benefiting Shelter Island Public Library on September 29.
Garten planned to choose a new name for the store after her first month, but by then she had already come around to the Barefoot Contessa.
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"I actually liked the name because it's about being elegant and earthy," she said. "It would've been a terrible thing to change it."
Ina Garten said the name of the Barefoot Contessa store came from its original owner
"She had been called that when she was a kid after the movie with Ava Gardner," Garten recalled. "The family used to call her the Barefoot Contessa, it was her nickname."
The owner spent a month showing Garten how to run the store, seeing as she had zero experience.
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Garten had been working at the White House — writing the nuclear energy budget for Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter's administrations — when she decided to leave DC behind and buy the New York store after seeing an ad for it in 1978.
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"I made a low offer. I thought maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't," Garten recalled. "The owner said, 'Thanks very much, I accept your offer.' And I thought, 'Oh sh*t, I actually have to do this now.'"
"Jeffrey said, 'If you love it, you'll be really good at it,'" Garten previously told The New York Times' Sam Sifton. "And that's the best advice anybody ever gave me."
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Garten began working 18-hour days to turn Barefoot Contessa into a success
The future Food Network star said she wanted to make sure her store was always a "fun place to go."
"There were always good smells in the store," Garten recalled to Geist. "In the winter we'd have hot apple cider on the burner so you could help yourself. I always made sure there was great music. I'd love when people would come in and Frank Sinatra was on and people would just dance in the store."
"I think the key is that I really loved doing it," she added. "And, because I loved it, I would be at the store until 8 o'clock at night."
Garten ran the Barefoot Contessa store for 18 years — eventually moving it from Westhampton Beach to a bigger location in East Hampton — before she sold it to two of her employees in 1996.
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Three years later, Garten published her first cookbook with recipes from her store. Then, Food Network came calling.
In the mid-1990s, it would also become the name of her publishing debut, "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook." As for how she came up with the name in the first place, full credit goes to the 1954 Hollywood classic of the same name starring Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart.
In the food world, no gastronome boasts a moniker quite as iconic as Ina Garten, affectionately known as Barefoot Contessa. The home-cooking expert and party host extraordinaire is not, technically speaking, an actual contessa — that would suggest her beloved husband Jeffrey is an earl or count.
Ina Rosenberg Garten (/ˈaɪnə/ EYE-nə; born February 2, 1948) is an American television cook and author. She is host of the Food Network program Barefoot Contessa, and was a former staff member of the Office of Management and Budget.
In a new interview for Julia Louis-Dreyfus' podcast, Wiser Than Me, Garten admitted that it "wasn't a struggle at all" to decide against having children. "I had no interest in having children," she told Louis-Dreyfus. "I had a terrible childhood, and it was nothing I wanted to recreate.
East Hampton, New York, U.S. The show's title, which comes from the Italian word for countess, was originally used by Garten in her best-selling cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook (1999). The cookbook was in turn named after Garten's specialty food store, which she bought already named in 1978.
The child's wish was to meet Garten because he would watch her show from his sickbed. Various blogs, articles and other media state Garten rejected the request because of scheduling conflicts.
Vincenzo is impotent due to a war wound. In a bid to produce an heir for his linage, Maria sleeps with their chauffeur. Consumed with jealously upon discovering the affair, Vincenzo kills her and her lover without ever knowing she was pregnant.
Barefoot Contessa hasn't produced new episodes since 2021, and anyone who still has cable knows that Food Network doesn't show Garten's TV shows as often as we'd like. However, Garten recently announced that she's working on new episodes for the cooking network.
Garten is Jewish by birth and heritage, as is her husband, but rarely refers to her religion and ethnicity, though they are showcased through the inclusion of classic Jewish cooking in her television show and cookbooks, when she makes such dishes as rugelach, challah, and brisket.
The one meal Ina simply couldn't live without is roast chicken. She even cites it as one of the reasons her husband, Jeffrey, proposed marriage in 1968.
Ina Garten once worked in the White House and worked her way up, which eventually put her in charge of writing the nuclear budget for the United States. She also managed to earn her MBA from George Washington University at the same time. Despite her success, she decided she wanted a different life.
Garten is Jewish by birth and heritage, as is her husband, but rarely refers to her religion and ethnicity, though they are showcased through the inclusion of classic Jewish cooking in her television show and cookbooks, when she makes such dishes as rugelach, challah, and brisket.
Currently, Jeffrey serves as the Dean Emeritus at the Yale School of Management and teaches courses on the global economy. According to his faculty page, prior to joining Yale, he worked for multiple White House administrations, served in the U.S. Army Special Forces and was a managing director on Wall Street.
Garten first became wealthy thanks to real estate. Before becoming famous, she purchased, renovated and flipped old homes, which gave her the funds to buy her original Barefoot Contessa shop.
Introduction: My name is Duane Harber, I am a modern, clever, handsome, fair, agreeable, inexpensive, beautiful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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