Celebrity food personality and bestselling cookbook author Ina Garten, and her husband
of nearly 50 years, Yale professor Jeffrey Garten, are #couplegoals for the hardcore
Food Network fan.
After first laying eyes on each other in the early '60s, these two have lived a love story
for the ages, and, if you've ever seen them on TV adorably fawning all over each other,
you know that these two are the real deal.
Every last chapter of Ina and Jeffrey's life together shows they're in it for the long
haul and will forever be into one another.
Here are some of the stranger things you didn't know about the delightful, love-fueled-and-filled
entity that is the Gartens.
Love at first sight
When Ina Garten was 15 years old, she and her parents visited her brother, who was studying
at Dartmouth College, where Jeffrey Garten also happened to be matriculating.
Ina recounted the story in her in her cookbook Cooking for Jeffrey, writing,
"Unbeknownst to me, Jeffrey and his roommate were in the college library studying as I
walked by outside.
Jeffrey just happened to look up at that moment.
He asked his roommate, 'Who's that girl?'
Strangely, the roommate did know that girl, it was Ina Rosenberg, and he had a date with
her that night, set up by Ina's brother.
Jeffrey ignored the competition from his roommate and went for it anyway.
He got her address and sent Ina a letter.
In her book she recalls the moment, writing,
"[I] received a beautiful handwritten letter in the mail […] with a photograph of the
most adorable guy I'd ever seen."
A few months later, Jeffrey came to visit Ina in Connecticut and she tried to take him
to a bar… despite being only 16.
Naturally, they were refused service.
In her book, she recounts the experience, saying
"I'd never actually been to a bar, but I figured that's where a college guy would expect to
go, right?"
A romantic marriage
While people got married younger in the good old days, Ina and Jeffrey were shockingly
young when they got hitched.
When Jeffrey and Ina made their love state-official in 1968, he was 22-years-old and she was only
20.
But it's worth mentioning that the couple were together for nearly five years before
they tied the knot.
"This is to putting up with me for 45 years.”
The ceremony took place at Ina's parents' home three days before Christmas.
In an interview with People, Ina described the romantic day, saying
"It was a perfect day for a wedding.
Right in the middle of the ceremony, it started to snow."
When she answered Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire in 2016, Ina said that her "greatest regret"
was, quote, "not marrying Jeffrey sooner."
If your biggest mistake isn't locking down the love of your life as quickly as possible,
then you have led a charmed life.
The Gartens go to Washington
Believe it or not, Ina Garten once worked in a field about as totally opposite to making
high-end comfort food as you can get: She worked for the feds.
“I was working with OMB, Office of Management and Budget.”
“For the Federal government?”
“Yeah.
For Ford and Carter, and I worked on nuclear energy policy.”
Not to be outdone, Jeffrey Garten contributed his expertise in economics to four presidential
administrations: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton.
For the latter, Garten was the undersecretary of commerce for international trade, focusing
on emerging markets.
So, they've both been close to the room where it happens.
Isn't it nice when couples have things in common?
Changing careers
Ina Garten may be one of the most famous names in American food, but she didn't go to culinary
school and she isn't a chef.
She made her mark because she had a love, passion, and knowledge for the culinary arts,
coupled with opportunity.
By 1978, she'd burned out on working in nuclear policy and was ready to make a major career
change.
At the time, Garten also had a good side hustle flipping houses, it was about then when she
saw a classified ad about a small, full-service specialty foods store, the Barefoot Contessa,
for sale in the Hamptons.
“I went home and I told Jeffrey about it, and he said pick something you’ll love to
do.
If you love doing it you’ll be really good at it”
Despite not having any prior experience in the food world, she ran the store for nearly
two decades.
Long distance relationship
Both Jeffrey and Ina Garten have enjoyed extremely successful and busy careers in their respective
lines of work.
While Ina ran a store and parlayed it into a career as a TV personality and author of
11 cookbooks, Jeffrey Garten became one of the world's foremost minds on business, finance,
and international trade.
In 1995, he was named the dean of the Yale School of Management.
He held the position for ten years before stepping down, but he remains on staff as
an instructor with the title of Dean Emeritus.
According to his Yale profile, he's also worked on mergers and acquisitions in the private
sector, written a monthly column about global business for BusinessWeek, and found the time
to write six books on economics.
All of this is to say that the Gartens don't see each other too much during the week.
Ina stays in East Hampton working on her career as a food icon, and Jeffrey hangs out at Yale
up in New Haven, Connecticut.
“One thing we always do is we always connect with each other during the day.
And the thing is, even though he’s away, he’s like this anchor in the middle of my
life.”
C’est la vie!
Together, Jeffrey and Ina have lived a shared life of seemingly boundless love, romance,
and whimsy.
For Jeffrey, it all culminated on one very special day, which, in an interview with Food
Network, he called the "single best moment in his life with Ina."
“So I’ve got another surprise for you…”
It went down in May 2002, when Jeffrey took a red-eye flight from New York City to Paris
and then took a cab to a building he'd never visited before, despite many memorable trips
to the City of Light with his wife.
Ina buzzed him up to an apartment.
This was a little place in Paris that Ina had purchased a year before and extensively
remodeled … all without ever showing Jeffrey a single picture or revealing any details.
In an interview with the Food Network, Ina said,
"The secret to a happy marriage is that he trusted me.
I wanted it to be a surprise."
No kids, no problem
Both Jeffrey and Ina Garten are in their 70s now, so the opportunity for them to have children,
at least biologically, has passed.
Jeffrey and Ina consciously made the decision together to not start a family, or rather,
make theirs larger.
In 2017, Ina Garten opened up about their decision on The Katie Couric Podcast,
"We decided not to have children"
"But I really felt, I feel, that I would have never been able to have the life I've had...and
so it's a choice."
The secret chicken
Viewers of Ina Garten's shows know that, when she and Jeffrey reunite each week, they often
dine on roast chicken.
At least for that reason, the roast chicken is a very important dish to the woman who
makes great food for a living … and she thinks it should be an important dish for
just about everybody, too.
“One of the great gifts you can give to people is to cook for them.”
In 2017, Ina told Time that the first thing anyone should learn how to cook, in addition
to coffee, should be a "roast chicken."
It's a special meal she enjoys with her husband, but it's also apparently a special meal that
can land a person a spouse.
In 2018, Ina Garten told NBC's Today,
"[I] met some young women [...] and they told me they call the roast chicken in [...] The
Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, 'Engagement Chicken,' because they found that every woman in the
office that made it for their boyfriend was engaged within 24 hours."
It may have even worked for the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle.
In 2016, the soon-to-be Duchess told Good Housekeeping,
"There is nothing as delicious (or impressive) as a perfectly roasted chicken.
If you have an Ina Garten-level roasted-chicken recipe, it's a game changer."
And in their first interview after their engagement, the couple shared details on the night that
Prince Harry popped the question.
“It was just a standard typical night for us"
"Cozy night, what were we doing?
Roasting chicken and-”
“Trying to roast a chicken.”
Guess that's how Markle snagged Prince Harry, and how Ina's kept Jeffrey happy for decades.