How The 'Stupidest Thing' Ina Garten Ever Did Shaped Her Future

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Ina Garten had several reasons to doubt her decision to spend $20,000 to purchase a specialty food store in a beach town two hours outside of New York City. After all, the 400-square-foot store grossed just $87 on its first day — not including expenses — and she spent the rest of the Memorial Day holiday weekend working 22 hours a day to make enough food to keep the store stocked. "I remember telling Jeffrey this may be the stupidest thing I've ever done, but it was also so exhilarating," she posted on Instagram in 2024. Today, Garten is reportedly worth $60 million, has written 13 cookbooks, and has had a television show that appeared on the Food Network for nearly 20 years. Maybe Garten wasn't so stupid after all.

Garten was working as a nuclear policy analyst in the Jimmy Carter administration, when she noticed an ad in the New York Times placed by Diana Stratta to sell the Barefoot Contessa, her gourmet food store in Westhampton Beach, New York, for $25,000. The store — and later Garten — got the name Barefoot Contessa from Stratta's childhood nickname, which itself had come from a 1954 movie of the same name. With her offer of $20,000 accepted, Garten, whose only food experience until then was hosting and preparing for dinner parties in her then Washington, D.C., home, started a whole new career.

Ina Garten learned a lot of things after that precarious start in May of 1978 that she would carry with her throughout her subsequent career. As she recounted in her memoir, "Be Ready When the Luck Happens," her customers weren't looking for fancy restaurant food. "They wanted the best home cooking without the trouble of making it at home," she wrote. The menu Ina Garten designed for the store was split 50/50 between standby items customers knew they would always find there and new items. So, the store always had roast chicken, poached salmon, chicken salad, potato salad, and coleslaw on hand.

Nor were Garten's customers looking for fancy displays. After noting when she displayed roasted chickens on a beautiful white platter on a bed of herbs they didn't sell, she put each chicken in a red-and-white paper container, and they all sold within 20 minutes. "The paper containers screamed," she wrote, "'Put me on a picnic table!' 'Take me to the beach!' 'Eat me with your hands.'" The Barefoot Contessa kept things casual, not unlike Garten's go-to Italian specialty store, Peck, in Milan. The lessons — and the $20,000 — paid off. Just after her second summer, Garten expanded into a space across the street that was ten times the size of the original.