Ina Rosenberg Garten (first name pronounced
/ˈaɪnə/ EYE-nə; born February 2, 1948) is an
American author, host of the
Food Network program
Barefoot Contessa, and former
White House nuclear policy analyst. Known for designing recipes with an emphasis on fresh ingredients and time-saving tips, she has been noted by
Martha Stewart,
Oprah Winfrey, and
Patricia Wells for her cooking and home entertaining.
Garten had no formal training; she taught herself culinary techniques with the aid of
French and
New England cookbooks. Later, she relied on intuition and feedback from customers and friends to refine her recipes. She was mentored chiefly by Eli Zabar, owner of Eli's Manhattan and Eli's Breads, and food-show host and author
Martha Stewart. Among her dishes are
cœur à la creme, celery root
remoulade, pear
clafouti, and a simplified version of
bœuf bourguignon. Her culinary career began with her gourmet food store, Barefoot Contessa; Garten then expanded her activities to several best-selling cookbooks, magazine columns, self-branded convenience products, and a popular
Food Network television show.
Early history and career
Born Ina Rosenberg in
Brooklyn,
New York, and raised in
Stamford, Connecticut, Garten was one of two children born to Charles H. Rosenberg, a surgeon specializing in
otolaryngology, and his wife, Florence.
[1] Encouraged to excel in school, she showed an aptitude for
science and often won top honors in local
science fairs. Garten's mother, an intellectual with an interest in
opera, refused her daughter's requests to assist her in the kitchen and instead directed her to concentrate on schoolwork. Garten described her father as a lively individual with many friends, and has commented that she shares more characteristics with him than with her mother.
[2] At 15, she met her future husband,
Jeffrey Garten, on a trip to visit her brother at
Dartmouth College.
[1] After a year of exchanging letters, they began dating. After high school, she attended
Syracuse University with plans to study
fashion design, but chose to change her major to
economics. Shortly thereafter, she postponed her educational pursuits to marry.
On December 22, 1968, Rosenberg and Garten were married in Stamford, and soon relocated to
Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She began to dabble in cooking and entertaining in an effort to occupy her time while her husband served his four-year military tour during the
Vietnam War; she also acquired her pilot's license, according to an interview she gave to the
Raleigh News & Observer.
[3] After her husband had completed his military service, the couple journeyed to
Paris,
France, for a four-month camping vacation that Garten has described as the birth of her love for
French cuisine. During this trip, she experienced open-air markets, produce stands, and fresh cooking ingredients for the first time.
[4] On returning to the U.S., she began to cultivate her culinary abilities by studying the volumes of
Julia Child's seminal cookbook,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
[4] Her weekly dinner party tradition began taking shape during this time, and she refined her home entertaining skills when she and her husband moved to
Washington, D.C., in 1972.
In Washington, Garten worked in the
White House and took business courses at
George Washington University, eventually earning an
MBA,
[5] while her husband worked in the
State Department and completed his
graduate studies. Originally employed as a low-level government aide, she climbed the political ladder and was assigned the position of
budget analyst, which entailed writing the
nuclear energy budget and policy papers on nuclear centrifuge plants for Presidents
Gerald Ford and
Jimmy Carter.
[7]
Strained by the pressures of her work and the serious, high-power setting of Washington, Garten once again turned to cooking and entertaining in her free time, constantly arranging dinner parties and soirées at her home on the weekends. Meanwhile, she was buying, refurbishing, and reselling homes for profit ("
flipping") in the
Dupont Circle and
Kalorama neighborhoods. The profits from these sales gave Garten the means to make her next purchase, the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store.
Garten left her government job in 1978 after spotting an ad for a 400-square-foot (37 m
2) specialty food store in
Westhampton Beach, New York. The store was named Barefoot Contessa. "My job in Washington was intellectually exciting and stimulating but it wasn't me at all," she told
The New York Times four years later.
[8] She made a hasty decision to purchase the store after traveling to view it, and moved to New York to assume ownership and management. The store had been named by its original owner in tribute to the
1954 film starring
Ava Gardner; Garten kept the name when she took over, as it meshed well with her idea of an "elegant but earthy" lifestyle.
[dead link][9] As of 2006
[update] Garten had not seen the film.
[10]
After a month of training with the original owner, she took over full ownership and management of the shop. Barefoot Contessa became extremely successful in short order, bolstered by Garten's sophisticated but simple dishes, her self-branded line of gourmet
coffees (manufactured by Eli Zabar), and party catering services.
While doing much of the cooking herself, she employed local chefs and
bakers as the business grew, including
Anna Pump (who later established the Loaves & Fishes bakery and Bridgehampton Inn). Within a year, she had moved Barefoot Contessa across the street from its original location to a larger property. However, it soon outgrew this new location; in 1985, she relocated the store to the newly vacated premises of gourmet shop
Dean & DeLuca in the prosperous
Long Island village of
East Hampton. East Hampton was a year-round community in contrast to Westhampton's beach season atmosphere, and provided a larger, wealthier demographic.
At
East Hampton, she expanded the store from its original 400 square feet (37 m
2) to over 3,000 square feet (280 m
2), over seven times its original size. In this new, larger space, the store specialized in delicacies such as lobster
Cobb salad,
caviar, imported
cheeses, and locally grown produce. The store quickly became a landmark gathering place for the affluent New York town, to such a point that, in 2003, director
Nancy Meyers chose to use the store as one of the settings for the
Jack Nicholson-
Diane Keaton film
Something's Gotta Give.
[11] The shop was also praised in the press by celebrity clientele such as
Steven Spielberg and
Lauren Bacall. In 1996, after two decades of owning and operating, Garten again found herself seeking a change; she sold the store to two employees, Amy Forst and Parker Hodges. Unsure of what career step to take after selling the store, she took a six-month
sabbatical from the culinary scene and built offices above the shop. There, she studied the
stock market and attempted to sketch out plans for potential business ventures. Her website, Barefoot Contessa, became high-profile at this time as she began offering her coffees and a few other items for purchase online.
The store was permanently closed in 2004, when the lease expired on the property and negotiations failed between Garten (the owner of the building in which Barefoot Contessa was housed) and the new owners.
[12] It has been reported that her refusal to meet lease negotiations was actually a method of reclaiming control of the store after Forst and Hodges lost business to Citarella, a new competitor.
[13] Ultimately, she did not reopen the shop, and instead retained the property for potential new tenants.
Barefoot Contessa Cookbook
Under the guidance of her husband, Garten reemerged in 1999 with her attention turned to publishing. She carried on the Barefoot Contessa name in her 1999
sleeper bestseller,
The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. Containing the recipes that made her store successful, the book far exceeded both Garten's and publisher Clarkson Potter's expectations. After an initial pressing of 35,000 copies, a typical number for a debut
cookbook, it immediately required second and third print runs and eventually sold over 100,000 copies in its first year.
[14] In 2001, she capitalized on her new-found fame and released
Barefoot Contessa Parties!, which also produced high sales and garnered good reviews, and followed this with
Barefoot Contessa Family Style in 2002.
The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and
Parties! were nominated for 2000 and 2002
James Beard Awards, in the Entertaining & Special Occasion Cookbooks category.
Parties! was a surprise entry, as she was considered inexperienced and untrained to compete with fellow nominees, revered French chef
Jacques Pépin and international wine expert Brian St. Pierre.
Her cookbooks avoid an encyclopedic format, and are modeled on
coffee table books. With many color photographs, including a full-page picture facing each recipe, some critics argue that this method sacrifices space that could be used for recipes. Nevertheless, her cookbooks have received positive reviews; in 2005, fellow chef
Giada De Laurentiis named Garten one of her favorite authors.
[15] As of 2008
[update], Garten's cookbooks have sold over 6 million copies combined.
[16] As of 2009
[update], she has published a total of six cookbooks, adding
Barefoot in Paris: Easy French Food You Can Make at Home (2004),
Barefoot Contessa at Home: Everyday Recipes You'll Make Over and Over Again (2006), and
Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics (2008). Garten's latest book,
Barefoot Contessa: How Easy Is That?, will be published in October 2010.
After the success of
The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and
Barefoot Contessa Parties!, Garten was approached by
Food Network with an offer to host her own television
cooking show. She rejected this proposal several times, until the London-based production company responsible for the popular
Nigella Bites was assigned to the deal. She acquiesced to a 13-show season, and
Barefoot Contessa premiered in 2002 to a positive reception. The program focuses on hearty, guest-oriented food, and Food Network found a popular hostess in the "calm, Rubenesque" Garten.
[17] The press began comparing her television presence to that of her mentor, Martha Stewart, but with a softer edge and more nurturing, comforting manner.
Barefoot Contessa has approximately 1 million viewers tuned in per episode, and has posted some of Food Network's highest ratings.
[1][dead link][18] In 2005, the show was nominated for a
Daytime Emmy Award in the category of Best Service Show.
[dead link][19] In 2009, the show and Garten were once again 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.
Personal life
Family, religion, and marriage
Garten is known to guard her private life closely, and declines to take part in Food Network charities and activities. Her family of origin is shielded almost completely from the spotlight; unlike her friends and colleagues, they are not featured on
Barefoot Contessa. However, her road to fame and personal life were explored in the Food Network series
Chefography, an hour-long
documentary similar to the
A&E program
Biography. The show featured candid interviews with her husband, close friends, and former clients. No members of her family of origin were interviewed for
Chefography.
Garten is
Jewish by birth and heritage, as is her husband, but rarely refers to her religion and ethnicity. It is showcased only through the inclusion of classic
Jewish cooking in her television show and cookbooks, when she makes such dishes as
rugelach,
challah, and
brisket.
Her husband,
Jeffrey Garten, went on to become the
Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade and dean of the
Yale School of Management.
He is now the Juan Trippe Professor in the Practice of International Trade, Finance, and Business at Yale. He can also frequently be spotted on her cooking show, assisting his wife with menial tasks or sampling the dishes she has created. They divide their time between
Manhattan,
East Hampton, and
Paris.
Elena Satine is a film actor and singer.
Meet Shakti Stream who only happens to be Colt Brennan’s girlfriend. She was a motorist of a automobile which plunged head-on in to an additional automobile whilst pushing in Hawaii upon Nov 19th, 2010. The former quarterback of a Hawaii Warriors was harmed in a automobile collision as was she. See photos as good as video highlights here as full sum of a headlines have been emerging.
