Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten shares her secret for a great dinner party : NPR

Ina Garten, the host of the Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa, still remembers a disastrous party she threw when she was 21. She’d invited 20 guests, with the intention of making an individual omelet for each person — except she barely knew how to cook an omelet.

“I was in the kitchen the entire time,” Garten says. “It was such a bad party, I almost never had another party again.”

Garten says she learned a few things from the experience — not the least of which was to keep things simple. Her ideal dinner party is six people sitting at a small, round table. And, yes, the shape of the table matters.

“Very often people have long, rectangular tables that are way too wide and people are seated too far apart,” Garten says. “I like when everybody’s knees are almost touching and it feels very intimate, with a dark room and a candle in the middle.”

Garten’s relaxed approach to entertaining is the hallmark of Barefoot Contessa, which debuted in 2002. Filmed in the kitchen of her home in East Hampton, N.Y., the show follows Garten as she shops for ingredients, tests recipes and sits down to eat with her husband Jeffrey and their friends.

“When you cook for people you love, they feel taken care of, and you make great friends and you create a community for yourself,” she says. “And I think that’s really what we all need, and what we all kind of hunger for.”

An Emmy and James Beard Award winner, Garten has also penned 13 cookbooks. In the new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, she details how she went from working in the White House to becoming a beloved culinary voice, with fans from all walks of life.

“One of the things I love about what I do is that everybody cooks,” she says. “I was walking up Madison Avenue one day and a woman in a big fur coat … said, ‘Darling, I just just love your cookbooks.’ And a block later, a truck driver pulled over and said, ‘Hey, babe, I love your show.’ And I thought, That’s food. Everybody’s interested in food.”

Interview highlights

On how working for the federal government in the 1970s connects to her love of cooking

I worked in a group called Office of Management and Budget, and what we did was write the president’s budget that was sent to Congress. And I worked in nuclear energy policy. … I’ve always been very interested in science, and the way I feel about what I do now is it’s science, but you end up with something delicious instead of enriched uranium.

On buying a specialty food store in Westhampton, N.Y., when she was 30

I walked in and they were baking chocolate chip cookies. And I just remember thinking, Wow, this is where I want to be. … So we met with the owner and I made her a low offer. She was asking for $25,000, which was more money than we had in the world. And I just, on a whim, offered her $20,000, thinking, Well, we’ll go home, we’ll negotiate, I’ll have time to think about this. And we drove back to Washington [D.C.]. And Monday morning, I was in my office and the phone rang, and … [the owner] said, “Thank you very much. I accept your offer.” And I remember thinking, s***, I just bought a food store. I remember going to my boss and going, “You’re not going to believe what I just did.”

On the store’s name, Barefoot Contessa

The name really related to Diana [Stratta, the previous owner], not me. But then as the summer progressed, I realized it actually had a resonance. … It was about being elegant and earthy at the same time. And I think that really was what the store was about.

On a time when she separated from her husband Jeffrey

This was the ‘70s and we both assumed that he would be the husband and I would be the wife and that he would take care of the finances and I would have dinner on the table. I mean, we had prescribed roles, but it was a time when women were becoming aware that just because we were women didn’t mean that there were things that we had to do. I really credit Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan for making us think about it. And it may be that you want to have dinner on the table, but it doesn’t mean that because you’re the woman, you’re the only one who should have dinner on the table. So I was becoming aware of this, and Jeffrey, who had no reason at all to change his mind, wasn’t. And so I found some frustration with being in a prescribed role as the wife. …

One weekend in Westhampton, that first summer, we took a long walk on the beach and I said, “I feel like I need to be on my own for a while.” And Jeffrey said the right thing. He said, “If you feel you need to be on your own, then you need to be on your own.” And he went back to Washington and didn’t come back. And it was a tough time, but it led us back to a different kind of relationship.

On writing about her unhappy childhood

Remember, this was the ‘50s. It’s not the era of helicopter parents who are encouraging their children to do extraordinary things. This is an era where you did what the parents told you to do. And my parents were particularly harsh about it. … [My mother] dealt with it by pushing us away and making sure that she didn’t actually have to spend time with us. So I spent most of my time in my bedroom, and my brother spent time in his. And then my father was a really, really harsh authoritarian figure. If you didn’t do exactly what he wanted you to do, it was met with pretty serious anger and sometimes … hitting. And it was a very difficult way to grow up. … The only thing I remember is just total disappointment, because I wouldn’t do what they wanted me to do. They never gave me an opportunity to do what I wanted to do.

I talk about this in the book, not so much because it was such a terrible childhood. It certainly wasn’t a happy one, but there were so many worse childhoods. But I wanted people to know that the story of your childhood doesn’t necessarily need to be the story of your life.

Therese Madden and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.