Ina Garten Remembers Her First Weekend As the "Barefoot Contessa"

Ina Garten's memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, is available now wherever books are sold. Be My Guest with Ina Garten airs Sundays at 12|11c.

I opened the door to Barefoot Contessa (now my door!). Then I felt a rush of panic. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know! Fortunately, the more rational me had prepared for this moment. Wisely, the deal I made with Diana was that she would stay with me for a month and we wouldn’t even tell anyone that I was the new owner, giving me time to work by her side while I figured it all out. I had made brownies for six friends, but I’d never baked a hundred brownies. Where should I buy bagels? What about cheese? When is Camembert ripe? How do I slice smoked salmon? How do I operate the cash register? Just a few of the things I had to learn...and fast! Diana was a wonderful teacher, and I managed to get through the first day without having a total meltdown.

That night, she was showing me how to cash out the registers, and I remember that the total income was eighty-seven dollars. That was before expenses like food, rent, and salaries. Jeffrey was there trying to help, and he calculated eighty-seven dollars times the number of days in the summer, looked at me sadly, and said, “I don’t think you’re going to make it here,” meaning, what happened to the “unlimited potential” and “gross over six figures in summer alone” the New York Times ad had promised? But I was undaunted. This was where I wanted to be, and I was determined to make it work.

That was the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend. Because we were new to the Hamptons, we had no idea what happens on Friday of Memorial Day weekend, when a sleepy little beach village turns into Times Square. The customers started lining up before we opened, ready to kick off the summer by treating themselves to pastries, bagels, and smoked salmon first thing in the morning. By the time we closed that night at ten p.m., the shelves were literally empty. Empty. Diana had purchased conservatively because she was worried about spending too much money when she knew I’d be responsible for the bills. Everything she had bought for the entire weekend was gone. Gone. Oh my God, how were we going to get through the rest of the weekend with no food?! Now I was starting to panic.

Melinda, our cook, could make anything (which was fortunate because I had no idea how to prepare food in the quantities we needed), but she had finished her shift and gone home, so we were on our own. Diana came to the rescue with a plan. She turned to me and said, “You and I are going to the grocery store to buy flour, sugar, and everything we need to bake and cook—all night!” She turned to Jeffrey and said, “There is a nice Danish bakery in the nearby town, Center Moriches, and they open at eight a.m.” (We opened at nine a.m.) “Why don’t you go there and buy some croissants and muffins and we’ll sell them when we open tomorrow morning?” And then Diana and I got busy making salads, dinners, cakes, pies, and anything we could think of to sell the next day.

On Saturday morning, Jeffrey drove his little robin’s-egg-blue Fiat two-seater sports car to the bakery, and he was the first one standing at the door when it opened. He looked at the baked goods, thought they looked delicious, and said to the women behind the counter, “I’ll take everything in the bakery!”

“What? Everything?”

“Yes, everything.”

The look on their faces!

One of the women immediately said, “We can’t do that!”

The other asked, “Why not?”

“Because we’ll have nothing left to sell.”

“Well, then we could go to the beach!”

Suddenly, selling everything to Jeffrey sounded like a really good idea, and they quickly packed up all the baked goods.

Jeffrey put the top down on that little two-seater sports car, loading the bags and boxes into every possible space. When he was finished, he raised the top and squeezed himself behind the wheel. He made it to Westhampton just in time for the Saturday madness, when a fresh batch of vacationers came in and cleaned us out again. The next day, Jeffrey went back to the bakery in Center Moriches, and when the saleswoman looked aghast at him, he nodded and said, “Yes, everything!” By Monday, Diana and I had figured out how to make enough muffins and croissants, so he didn’t have to go back to Center Moriches. I’ve always had this horrible thought that on Monday, the bakers decided they would make twice as much for Jeffrey and the store, and then he didn’t show up! I’m so sorry!

Late Sunday night, after we had just closed and we were wondering how we were going to stock the store for the next day, someone knocked on the door. “Do you have any cakes left?” the man asked. “No, I’m really sorry,” I told him. “We’re totally cleaned out—well, except for one incredibly expensive chocolate cheesecake, but we sell that by the inch, not by the cake.” “Great!” he said, peeling twenty-dollar bills out of his wallet. “I’ll take the whole thing.” Wow, I thought, this might be a really hard job, but at least I’m doing it in the right town! Jeffrey and I looked at each other. Maybe, just maybe, I was going to make it!

But I truly wasn’t thinking about money. The weekend had been a trial by fire, a blur of baking, selling, solving problems, and making mistakes. Diana and I worked twenty-to-twenty-two-hour days all weekend. We would go home, take a shower, and come back and bake some more. I was exhausted but so exhilarated. But there was a moment when I said to Jeffrey, “This is truly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I had no idea how hard this would be.” And Jeffrey, being the totally supportive husband he always is, said, “If you could learn the business in a week, you’d be bored in two weeks.” (Boy, did he know me!) Challenging work was exactly what I needed.

After that first weekend, Jeffrey went back to Washington—he still had a “real” job working for the secretary of state—so I had a little time to take a closer look at my new home. Barefoot Contessa was right in the middle of Main Street, which was only a few blocks long, where everything was very casual and beachy. I learned that each town in the Hamptons has its own vibe. There was a saying that Southampton is old money, East Hampton is new money, and Westhampton is funny money. It really was a sort of Studio 54 environment, with its own disco, Club Marakesh, and flashy Ferraris parked everywhere, with a mix of young people in the fashion industry and families with kids. It was fun but also very casual. I loved it! For me, it couldn’t have been more different from Washington, where everyone was young and working for the government in buttoned-up coats and ties. This beach town had so much more style and energy, and I was so happy to trade high heels, silk shirts, and issue papers for a pair of comfortable sneakers and a store that felt like a party. Barefoot Contessa was literally and figuratively the center of town, and everyone met there to pick up a coffee or lunch and sit outside to watch the world go by.

The store was very small—only about four hundred square feet. In fact, the kitchen was so tiny that it barely fit Melinda, who baked in the ovens in the kitchen and cooked everything else on the stove in the main part of the store, filling Barefoot Contessa with the tantalizing smell of whatever she was making. Our customers felt the way I did the first time I walked into the store and inhaled the intoxicating aroma of warm chocolate chip cookies. Like they’d come home.

The rest of the staff Diana had hired was young, beautiful, and really smart. Unlike now, when kids want to have a summer adventure like Outward Bound, in 1978, young people came to the beach with their parents and looked for a summer job. If it worked out, they came back the next summer, and most of the people Diana hired stayed for years.

Thirteen-year-old Shawn Warren and the teenage Esterling sisters, Lee and Sarah, had worked at Barefoot Contessa the previous summer, so they actually had more experience than I did! They were confident and completely at home in the store. Shawn loved working behind the counter and could charm even the surliest customer. Lee and Sarah could do anything: pack food, prepare special orders, whatever came up. All three were smart and gorgeous and spoke fluent French and delighted in carrying on rapid-fire conversations that no one else could understand. They could have been Mean Girls but instead, they were very sweet with customers and me. Instead of resenting the change in ownership, they were genuinely interested in helping me wrap my arms around this new business.

This was the first time in my life I was a boss—with a team!—and I was a little nervous. But I had learned about having employees by being an employee. I just had to ask myself how I’d like to be treated, then treat the people who worked for me exactly the same way. I wanted to show the girls that I was going to work just as hard—maybe twice as hard—as I expected them to work.

But I also wanted the store to be a place where we had fun, where there was energy, laughter, and good times—the kind of place that made you want to come to work in the morning. I certainly felt that way. I even wanted to come to work in the middle of the night! Why waste time sleeping when there was so much to learn and so many cakes to bake?

I think I proved that point one Sunday morning, when Sarah came in early to start packaging salads. She stepped behind the counter to reach for the plastic containers and found me, curled up on the bottom shelf, sound asleep. I was too tired to go home, so I had cleared a space, wrapped myself in a sweater, and went to “bed.” It was that kind of job.

Be Ready When the Luck Happens Copyright © 2024 Ina Garten. All photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.