473: Ina Garten Stops By!

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0:31I wanted a book that you opened and you saw the photograph and you thought, wow, that looks delicious. And then you looked at the recipe and you thought, well, actually, I could make that. And then you looked at the ingredients and said, well, I can get all those ingredients in a grocery store. I just had this idea that a recipe book should be that simple. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard. Ina Garten joins us in the studio for a really fun conversation that dips into her excellent new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, which is out this week. While the story covers Ina's technicolor life from a difficult childhood through her time working at the White House to opening her specialty food store Barefoot Contessa to her cookbook and television work, I really wanted to focus on Ina as entrepreneur and splitting time between New York and the Hamptons in 1970s New York.

1:30It was a different era, and she tells a great story about being held up at gunpoint. This is a wide-ranging conversation, and I think you will learn a lot about Ina before the Ina we all know and love. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

1:55Anna Garten, welcome to This Is Taste. It's wonderful to see you. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Nice to see you too. Yeah, this is pub day for you. Today's the day. How are you feeling? Feeling good. I mean, it's scary having it out there, but I think that ship has sailed. Right. You can't make those last minute edits or, oh my gosh, this memoir, I need to edit of some stuff. You've published many books with us here. And, you know, you probably have a little bit of a tradition when it comes to publishing. How do you celebrate with food and drink on your pub day? I'm usually on a book tour.

2:30So it's usually Kate Tyler and I celebrating somewhere with a nice cocktail. Yeah. What are your plans tonight? We're releasing this after the fact. Actually having dinner with a very good friend of mine from high school, amazingly, James Lapine, who's an award-winning writer, director of Broadway shows like Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park with George. You write about him in the memoir. I do. Get Ready When the Luck Happens. And really, it's out. And I thought a lot about how I would frame this conversation because we could go in many directions and talk about your early life. We could talk about your media persona.

3:08But I want to start by focusing on your business, because I think you have such a great story for many entrepreneurs out there who think about starting up anything. No, you've done a beautiful job in telling the story and the tenacity endurance that you had when you were launching and taking over this store in West Hampton. Talk about that early opening moment. Well, I saw an ad for Business for Sale, and I thought, wouldn't this be fun? As many people do when they think, wouldn't it be fun to open a restaurant? it's a lot of hard work and you know I just kind of jumped in with both feet just to learn how to do it and fortunately because I had no experience in the food business I made a deal with the seller who had already started the store about a year before that she would stay with me for a month and teach me what I needed to know and she she was a fabulous teacher but of course a month doesn't do it.

4:04So after that, I had to figure it out myself. And that's kind of like the, I like to learn that way rather than somebody telling me the way it's supposed to be done. I'd like to figure out how to do it that works for me. You pulled the listing for the store out of the newspaper and you were working in government at the time. I mean, did you realize that this was going to be such a dramatic change in your life when you decided to check out the shop? I think I saw the ad for a store. I thought about it and And I was talking to Jeffrey about what I should do with my life. And he said, why don't you do something that's fun?

4:38Just try it. And don't worry about whether you make money. If it's fun, you'll be really good at it. And I thought that was great advice. And I said to him, you know, funny, I'd seen this ad for Business for Sale. And he said, let's go look at it, which is crazy. And we just went up that weekend and saw the store. And there was something about being there. I didn't have any idea how to run a store. But I just thought I really want to be there. I want to make chocolate chip cookies and have the store feel like a party and, you know, just trade in my high heels for sneakers and work in the kitchen and create things.

5:15And I think when you read the section of starting Barefoot Contessa in West Hampton, you get a sense that you are a really accomplished home cook but not a professional. And when you're in these early days and you're making these pastries and cookies and dishes at scale, what's the challenge there for offering it to the public? It's not the same thing at all. I mean, if you can make 12 brownies, that's great, which is what I could do. But it has nothing to do with making 1 ,000 brownies. and it's just a whole other whole other thing but i really kind of i i had really smart people working with me i learned from them um i learned by trying things and i remember in in east hampton i had a big table um that was i didn't want the desserts behind glass the way you would have it in a refrigerated case it was just this enormous like viennese dessert table and i had the the person who built the table for me put drawers in in the front.

6:17So when you're waiting for your box of muffins to be done, you could pick something out of the drawer. And I just figured it out by doing it. So the first thing I put in the drawer were bags of cookies and nobody bought them. And I thought, okay, that doesn't work. I put in boxes of brownies. Nobody bought them. I put in, I don't know, all kinds of things and nobody bought them. And then one day I put in granola into all the drawers. And it's just, you just figure it out by doing it. And all the granola was gone at the end of the weekend. And I thought, okay, that's what belongs in those drawers.

6:50But one hit there. And I couldn't figure out what granola had to do with the bakery. And years later, I thought, oh, I know what it has to do. You're buying a box of brownies, and you want to do something healthy for yourself. It's so counterintuitive. But it was really just a matter of sort of process of elimination. I tried things and watch how people shop. I mean, you have a real knack in the book you write about. Your instincts kick in. So, for example, the return policy at the store was innovative in that, of course, if somebody didn't like anything, they got their money back. But then you kind of added this element of you offered them a product that you thought they would like for free.

7:31You just gave them something for free. I mean, talk about the way you innovated the business of Barefoot Contessa on the fly. Well, it seems so obvious to me that if I'm thinking about how a customer is treated, how about think about how the customer wants to be treated? So, for example, the return policy. Everybody walks into the store with, if they have a complaint about something, you're prepared for an argument. So you kind of pull yourself together and you prepare yourself for explaining why you didn't like it. So I thought, let me do this totally differently so the customer feels good. So the first thing of the return policies, before you even ask a question, you don't even need to know why they didn't like it.

8:10If they didn't like it, first thing you did was give them their money back. The second thing you did was ask what they didn't like about it. And the third thing was give them something that they will like. So maybe the cake was overbaked. It happens. So you give them a fresh cake. Maybe they don't like chocolate cake the way we make it. It's too dense. Give them a chocolate cake that's lighter. And customers would walk out of them going, wow, that was amazing. And we made customers for life by doing that. And it was just a$20 cake. For pennies, right? And you were smart about just keeping the community excited.

8:46And really, it was an extension of your own home in a way by offering these recommendations. I think about stores like the Silver Palette and Dean & DeLuca, those two stores in New York, I would imagine inspired some of the work you did when you launched your store. Well, when I launched the store, when I actually bought the store in 1978, especially food business was really just starting. Yeah, sure. I mean, women were going to work and they needed someplace to get dinner. And so specialty food stores were the beginning of it. I think the two stores that I know were operating at that point were Dina DeLuca and Eli's store EAT.

9:29EAT from Zabar. Eli Zabar. Eli Zabar. It's not Zabar's. It's EAT. Yep. Eli Zabar. Yep. And, I mean, there were extraordinary stores. And maybe Silver Palette was, too, at the time. I can't remember. And there were other stores like Word of Mouth. There were some small stores around. So when I came to New York, that's what I would do, is I'd go see what everybody was doing. And if this was a good idea or that was interesting or how something was displayed, you know, we all borrowed from everybody else. So that's how ideas happen. I think readers will be surprised when they find out that you personally were doing deliveries and pickups in the city in a vehicle.

10:08You're driving in by yourself in the 70s in New York. Everyone knows what New York was like at that time, not the best place. And so when you're doing these weekly pickups, what are you picking up around New York in this beat up car? And then tell us about that moment when someone asked for a little bit more than directions. I was actually in New York. You're right. It was in the village. And it was New York in the late 70s. And I stopped to pick up something. And I was on my way to the restaurant district to buy a refrigerator, which you had to do in cash. So I had like$2 ,000 in cash. And I got into my car and a man walked up to the car, pointed a gun at me and said, give me$50.

10:57And I just remember that moment when I thought, oh, this is how people get themselves killed. Just out of the blue. And so I put my hand in my purse knowing that I had$2 ,000. And I thought, I'm just going to pull out a bill and hope it's a$50 bill. And it was. So I gave it to him, thought he would go away, and he said, give me another$25. And there's no way I'm going to get$25 out of that envelope. So I pulled out a$50 bill, and I have no idea why I did this or whether it was a good idea or not. I said to him, listen, I'm not going to give you$25. I'm going to give you$50, and you're going to go away.

11:37And I gave him the$50, and he went away. I can't believe he didn't shoot me. But anyway, I'm not recommending that line of action, but somehow you never know what you're going to do under stress until it happens. You made the instinctual call, and boy, you are lucky. Wow. I'm really lucky. And we've all seen these great New York movies from the 70s in the streets, and I'm thinking of this guy and the gun. You had a gun put on you. Well, I mean, that's just so – to get aggressive with somebody who's pointing the business end of a gun to you is really crazy. I remember a story. Somebody told me that they were on the phone.

12:11This was in the same period. They were like on the phone on the street when you could make a phone call on the street before it's long before cell phones. And somebody held a gun to her when she was on the phone and she turned around and said, listen, I'm on the phone. And the guy left. I mean, negotiating with somebody with a gun on you was kind of a crazy thing to do. I mean, this just shows the spirit. And in the book, you write about your time growing up in Connecticut and living in New York. And it really must have informed you as like the way you do business. You're like doing it as a New Yorker.

12:50It's very different from if you're from other parts of the country. I mean, do you still think about that today that when you're doing your own business, this like foundation? I mean, I actually wasn't in New York. I came from Washington. And so New York was a whole new experience for me. That was the first time you were in New York. Okay, I got that. It was the first time I'd actually lived in New York. Wow. Okay, so you had it built into you in the beginning. I want to hear a little bit about this era that you were operating in. And, you know, you cite Alice Waters of Chez Panisse as an example of inspiration of how these, you know, these restaurants were starting up and they were not formalized.

13:29They were being informed by farms and they were being informed by a more casual approach, but also a deep love of products. Were there other inspirations in the world of restaurants that were inspiring the Barefoot Contessa when you were opening it? I don't remember anything specific, but I also knew when I first had the store, I thought it was a specialty food store. The food should be fancy. It shouldn't be just regular home cooking. And I remember bringing out a huge tray, a huge platter actually, of roast chickens. And I put it on a bed of fresh herbs. And it looked gorgeous. And I put it on the counter.

14:08And nobody bought them. And I just couldn't figure out why. And then I thought, well, maybe it's too fancy. And so I took that platter back and I put the roast chickens in those little red and white paper cups you get French fries in and put them on. And everybody bought them. And I learned that lesson that people eat differently at home than they do in restaurants, that they eat more casual food, more simple food. It's what I always say is roast chicken, roast carrots, coconut cupcakes. It's not fancy food. And so interestingly, when I went to write cookbooks, I remember thinking, what makes me think I can write a cookbook?

14:47But I actually had 20 years of experience in the store of knowing what people like to eat at home. And so that really informed the cookbooks. I like the moment in the book where you've finished the first season. And it's been a success. You've stayed open. You've had bumps along the way. And you're in New York and you're starting to test recipes and think about recipes. And I just think about that moment where you're going to go back for the next season, but you want to find these recipes, which I feel is the spirit of your book writing. Like in that moment back in 1979, you're thinking about what do people really want?

15:23Take us back to that time between season one and season two of The Barefoot Contessa. What are you developing? It seemed like there was pure joy in your life at that time. Well, just to clarify, what happened, the store was only open in the summer in West Hampton. So I had the winter to really figure out what I wanted to do the next year, which was an incredible luxury. So I was living in New York. Jeffrey was an investment banker. So we were in New York, and I had this great kitchen that I had built, and I was just testing recipes. And I would take ideas from wherever they came. I mean, there was a wonderful restaurant called Soho Charcuterie in Soho that was transforming Soho along with Dean and De Luca.

16:04And they had this wonderful cookie called the chocolate glob, which was like this enormous mound of chocolate on chocolate on chocolate. And I was trying to figure out how to make really good brownies with like good chocolate and chocolate chips. And I thought, wait a minute, maybe I can take that chocolate glob idea and bake it into a tray and make that a brownie. And that's what our brownies are. I called them outrageous brownies. I thought nobody was going to buy them. They were so expensive because I used really good chocolate and a lot of it. And it was expensive. I mean, maybe you would buy a brownie for 50 cents at that time.

16:45And I think these were, I figured they were going to be$3 each. And I thought nobody's going to buy them. And I figured I had to make them a little less expensive and I was selling them for$250. And we sold like, I don't know, I think it was like 1 ,500 of them the first weekend. And I thought, you know, that's such a good lesson because if the quality of the product is really good, people really understand that they're not being overcharged. It's just that's what it costs to make them. You think of it as like an affordable luxury, right? An affordable luxury. Exactly. You get like a$2.50 cookie, but it's the best eggs.

17:21Exactly. Then you don't mind spending the money. There was another example of that when I was in West Hampton, my friend Anna Pump had a store in Bridgehampton called Loaves and Fishes. And she used to sell lobster salad. It was like ridiculously expensive. When chicken salad was like$7.50 a pound, the lobster salad was like$35 or$40 a pound. And I thought, well, I mean, she sells a lot of it. And I thought, well, maybe people in West Hampton would like it. so I decided I would make 10 pounds of lobster salad and just see I mean you don't know so I put out lobster salad and the first person who walked in after I put it out looked at it and said how much is the lobster salad and I was like oh I'm so embarrassed to tell him it's 35 dollars a pound and he said he was like oh oh I he was just thinking and oh my goodness oh let's see I'll take 10 pounds, please.

18:13And I thought, you know, it's really good lobster salad. And after that, everybody that came off the beach at the end of the day would either buy like a half a pound or two pounds. It was like a treat. And because it was so good and because it really wasn't overpriced. I mean, it seems expensive, but lobster was expensive. It became a thing. A lot of lessons there for entrepreneurs listening to the show about the way that quality really means something in food and some of its price sensitivity is not for everything. Obviously, in the Hamptons, it's a little different economically. It is a luxury that I could buy whatever ingredients I thought I needed that were really good.

18:53It is true. But again, this is food, so people are willing to spend the money when it's quality. When it's quality. And they'll come back for it. But if you sell somebody a product that is gussied up to look like it's expensive, but it's not really intrinsically good, they'll never come back for it. Speaking of Jeffrey and working in finance, I was really intrigued by the long distance relationship you had and how there was a time when he was working in Tokyo and he had negotiated unlimited business class travel for himself. First class. Oh, you're right. First class. I wrote that in my notes because there is a difference.

19:31So like the best of the best in the plane. But my question is more not about the air travel, which could be a whole thing about air travel. And that must have been interesting. But man, going to Tokyo once a month for a year or more. I know I didn't realize this about you. I learned it. That is such a fascinating time to be in Japan in the 80s. What were your meals like? What was it like going out? In Japan? Yeah. I mean, let's remember how I did it. I would leave on Monday. Yeah. I'd arrive in Tokyo on Tuesday. I'd spend Wednesday there. And then on Thursday, because I didn't want to miss a weekend at the store, I'd get back on an airplane and fly all the way back to New York so I could be in the store over the weekend.

20:14So I didn't spend that much time in Tokyo. But I did that for a week, a month, for a year in Tokyo. And then he moved to Hong Kong. Hong Kong. So then I did it in Hong Kong. But he also did it my way. I have to say, I'm not a big Japanese food aficionado. But what they were really good at is pasta because the Japanese know how to make noodles. So we used to go to all these great Italian restaurants. And there was one restaurant right near us that was called Spago. And I thought, oh, my goodness, the Japanese kind of copied Spago, including the name. And so it was down an alley and we walked down there.

20:55And it turns out that a Japanese person went to Wolfgang Puck, as the story, I understand it, went to Wolfgang Puck and said, I'm opening a restaurant called Spago. You can either do it with me or not. And Wolfgang opened a restaurant, a fabulous restaurant in Tokyo called Spago. And we used to go there all the time. We got to know the metra d' with Johnny Romalia and we just became great friends. Yeah, you have such limited time there on these trips. You can't obviously comb the city. But do you remember any Japanese dishes that you tried for the first time during these times that sticks with you in that early time?

21:34There was something called teppanyaki, which I'm sure is still a thing, where you go in and you sit at a long counter and the chefs are in the middle of this U-shaped counter. Because obviously I didn't speak Japanese and they didn't speak English, you would point to something. You could point to shrimp and they would cook the shrimp and then you'd point to something else. So they would cook it. And I do remember that they served sake, which I had never had before, and it served warm. And every time your glass was empty, on a huge paddle, they would ask you to put your glass on and they would refill it.

22:08So we drank more sake than any I could possibly imagine. I remember walking home with Jeffrey. I mean, we're jet lagged. We drank all this warm sake, which has totally gone to our brain. And I do remember Jeffrey walking up to a tree and trying to put a coin in to make a phone call. And I thought, oh, we've really gone around the bend here. I think many of our listeners share that experience. Their first experience with Saki is maybe similar. I want to talk about cookbooks a little bit. What was your first conversation like with Roy Finnamore from Clarkson Potter? You write about a lunch that you had at Vong in 1997.

22:46And I love this book so much because you were apprehensive to write a cookbook and you're very honest about it. And, you know, you love being a shop owner and running businesses. And this cookbook world, which you, of course, would eventually, you know, publish many and be very well known for, was not really in your plan. But I want to take us back to Vong, that conversation you have with Roy. Well, I did. Roy, I sent in a proposal thinking I would never hear from anybody. and Roy was really, as far as I knew, the top cookbook editor in the country with what was Random House at the time. And he was Martha Stewart's editor.

23:28He was Lee Bailey's editor. And really extraordinary cookbooks. So I sent in a proposal through an agent and he accepted it. And I was just like, whoa, now I have to write the book. I was just trying to entertain myself. And he invited me for lunch at Vong, which I had never been to. I just adore Jean-Georges' restaurants. And we sat in the bar, which I thought was so New York. That was like a country bumpkin come to New York. And I said to Roy, okay, the first thing, we have to find somebody to write this. Because the last thing I wrote was a nuclear energy paper in the Carter administration.

24:06And he said, no, you're writing it. And I was like, whoa, okay. and we just kind of laid out what the book would be. And I don't know why, but it was almost like I always knew how I wanted this to be. I wanted a book that you opened and you saw the photograph and you thought, wow, that looks delicious. And then you looked at the recipe and you thought, well, actually, I could make that. And then you looked at the ingredients and said, well, I can get all those ingredients in a grocery store. I just had this idea that a recipe book should be that simple. And that accessible. And I have to say, 13 books later, I still have exactly that kind of format in my head.

24:47But I think it was very different at the time. I don't think, I think Roy got it, but I'm not sure the head of Clarkson Potter got it. And didn't think anybody would buy a book that only had 75 recipes. And I thought, well, you know what? 75 recipes, a lot of recipes. A lot of cooking right there. Exactly. And you don't want to buy a book of 250 recipes with no photographs where you make only two of them. And there are 248 recipes that you've bought that you're never going to use. So I just kind of stuck to what I wanted to do. And fortunately, it turned out okay. It turned out okay. I want to get into that first book that you're writing, the process of figuring out how to do it.

25:29And I think you write about it in your memoir. but I'd like to get more about how you're kind of making choices and you're really feeling this book is going to be your first and maybe last book. Tell us a little bit about writing that first book. Well, I certainly didn't think it was going to be more than one book. It was really something I was going to do while I was figuring out what to do with myself after I had sold the store. But once I started writing it, I thought, well, this is actually not as lonely an experience as I thought. Remember, I went from running a store that I always wanted to feel like a party to writing a book which felt very solitary.

26:05But then when I put the team together to do the photographs, I thought, oh, this is kind of creative. Like they were doing the food and they were styling it and photographing it. And all of a sudden it became a much more creative thing than I expected. Do you have favorite books in your canon? I mean, I know that everyone at the release time is your favorite, but in looking back at your cookbook, are there a couple favorites? You want me to choose one book out of all these? I'm not saying one. It's like choosing your children. I couldn't do it. I would never do it. I would say kind of the last one that I just worked on is the freshest in my mind.