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Ina Garten has built her cooking empire on the intersection of quality and accessibility. The chef’s famous mantra of “store-bought is fine” and her viral Instagram full of step-by-step tips is as inspiring to novice foodies as it is comforting. Garten’s is a friendly, creative, go-at-your-own-pace world — a scene into which the high-stress rigor of a professional kitchen simply doesn’t fit. In an interview with Radio Cherry Bombe from September 2024, Garten shares, “[W]e will definitely not have an Ina Garten restaurant. I think that’s the hardest work on the planet. It’s just grueling. Everybody crammed into a small space.”
To the Unofficial Patron Saint of Home Cooks, making smaller portions of comfort food classics (enough to feed a houseful of loved ones, but not enough to feed an entire restaurant, and doing it at a slower speed) more than gets the job done. “I remember the book that was written about Mario Batali’s restaurant, Bill Buford’s book, about when he said, ‘I just couldn’t figure out where to go in the kitchen.’ He said, ‘Not that I didn’t know which station to go. I didn’t know where my body was going to fit,'” Garten recounts, in the interview. Ultimately, choosing to pursue the restaurant biz is a matter of different strokes for different folks, and the Barefoot Contessa doesn’t see it in her future. “If you have to change your tongs from your right hand to your left hand, you’re already in the weeds,” she notes.
Ina Garten prefers a slower, less stressful pace in her personal kitchen
Garten’s career has been led by following her intuition and the guiding compass of what felt right at the time — an integrity-steeped modus operandi to which most folks aspire, within the food world and beyond. She left the White House Office of Management and Budget to pursue a more creative path, buying a specialty food store in the Hamptons. Garten ultimately stepped away from the store and wrote her first cookbook, “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.” It’s a journey of innovation, growth, and creativity, all at Garten’s own pace.
On the flip side, fellow gourmand Anthony Bourdain painted the professional kitchen as a darkly glamorous troupe of militant iconoclasts expertly brandishing knives and swapping edgy insults. As he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential,” “Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Saturday night. Seeing two guys who’d just as soon cut each other’s throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organized religion.”
This colorful, rowdy menagerie is magnetic — but decidedly not a vibe one might anticipate when cracking open a Barefoot Contessa cookbook (and she’s written 13 of ’em). “That kind of pressure, I understand why people get an adrenaline rush from it, but I couldn’t do that anymore,” Garten tells Radio Cherry Bombe.
