On a June evening that was pleasantly warm in East Hampton and too hot almost everywhere else, Ina Garten and her husband, Jeffrey, picked me up for dinner in a Mini Cooper convertible.
From the beginning, her style was indulgent and inviting rather than polished and showy. David Remnick, the editor of this magazine, once joined her to make chicken cutlets. At the beginning of each episode, we see her celebrity guest in their car, heading to East Hampton, often expressing giddy enthusiasm at the prospect of a day with Garten. These visitors, needless to say, do not take the bus.
Still, Garten was determined to host me as thoroughly as she could, and had arranged for a montage of entertainments during my stay: dinners out, dinner in, a charity tour of her garden.
In person, her voice is throatier than it sounds on TV—the ideal register for a dinner party. On that first night, Garten was behind the wheel and Jeffrey was tucked, gamely if a bit creakily, in the back seat. The two have been married for more than fifty years. She calls him Babe; he calls her Ine.
He is short, but she is shorter. The early evening was bright as we drove east on Route 27 toward Mostrador, a restaurant at a beach hotel in Montauk where diners can sit on chairs in the sand. Garten, who is recognized everywhere she goes in the Hamptons, wore a straw hat that she kept pulled low. Jeffrey wore a Barefoot Contessa baseball cap. That morning, Garten had been trying to decide which of two old cake recipes to spruce up with a new topping and include in her next cookbook.
