Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir

What can be said about Food Network’s Ina Garten that fans of Food TV’s Barefoot Contessa don’t already know?

A whole lot, and home-cooking legend Ina Garten spills in Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir.

Born Ina Rosenberg in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, no birthdate is specified, but the reader can assume it’s about 1948 by all references to events in the book.

Her father is an oft-raging surgeon and her mother an emotionally detached homemaker, and when Ina was five, they move to a beautiful home in Stamford, Connecticut. Ina is forced to do what the other kids do, which is ballet lessons, then Girl Scouts, back “when there were only four varieties of Girl Scout cookies.”

Her brother, Ken, is four years older, so Ina visits him at Dartmouth when she’s a high school junior. Early on, she meets Jeffrey Garten there during one of her visits, so in about 95 percent of the book, he is very much a part of her life.

“Jeffrey took letter writing very seriously,” but Ina hates writing letters. She applies, “early decision” to Syracuse University to study architecture, and Jeffrey visits during days off from his summer job. Ina’s parents put on a show for Jeffrey, never revealing “my mother’s iciness and my father’s rage.”

Baking brownies to mail to Jeffrey, Ina realizes the love of baking and cooking. Jeffrey joins ROTC for financial reasons and will serve in the military after graduation.

They marry when Ina is just 20, so she leaves school to join her husband in North Carolina; she takes courses but ends up reading cookbooks. She also takes flying lessons. “. . . it was like driving a car, just . . . much more dangerous.”

Jeffrey graduates basic training and deploys to Thailand for one year—and Ina’s forced to live with her “judgmental . . . and mercurial” parents again—but gets a two-week reprieve visiting Jeffrey in Tokyo for two weeks. Ina finally graduates college, they briefly move to Colorado, and Jeffrey completes military service.

They decide to live as nomads in Europe for four months on five dollars a day with maps and a tent, enjoying the local, colorful vegetables and fresh fish. “Even the lowly potatoes . . . looked like little jewels.” At one of the campsites Ina takes an impromptu cooking class.

The couple lives in Washington, DC, for two years during Jeffrey’s grad school. Ina works a two boring jobs. Jeffrey graduates and works at the White House; Ina works there as well. It is the seventies, and Ina resents that they both work, but she has the exhausting role of keeping house and preparing dinner parties.

While living in DC, “real estate became my second obsession after cooking.” They buy and sell a few properties, both fixer and fabulous, during their DC years. Again, Ina—still with wanderlust—buys a gourmet shop in the Hamptons from a newspaper ad. Enter the Barefoot Contessa.

Ina quickly learns to cook in huge volumes—like from six brownies to hundreds at a time. “Where should I buy bagels? . . . How do I slice smoked salmon?” The seller teaches her. The Hamptons is quite the culture shock, “a sort of Studio 54 environment.”

Jeffrey still works in DC. Ina works marathon hours learning her business, playing “den mother to my team of volatile teenagers.” Incredibly stressed, catering to (only-)weekend-visiting Jeffrey causes a strain on their marriage. They separate, and living in the Hamptons is hopping.

The couple seeks therapy: “Eventually we found our balance.” Jeffrey becomes an investment banker in NYC, where they move. Dean & DeLuca and Zabar’s become Ina’s obsessions—a benefit to her store; she takes French cooking classes and ups the ante on the store’s offerings. “There were a few ‘oh shit’ disasters”; she learns from errors and how to train teenage staff.

Barefoot Contessa was the place to be. Peter Yarrow plays the guitar outside, while Ina fangirls Gloria Steinem on the street. Soon, Ina buys a 4,000 sq. ft. store and expands the Barefoot Contessa, buying the old Dean & DeLuca building.

Celebs abound at the new location—Steven Spielberg and Lauren Bacall to name a few. Jeffrey works for a while first in Tokyo, then in Hong Kong so they see each other once a month—either flies in for a visit.

Ina sees a therapist “and she changed the rest of my life.” Jeffrey and Ina buy a house in East Hampton, and she reconciles with her parents. After many stressful years, she sells the store in 1996; and, bored to tears and with the proper connections, she perfects the art of writing cookbooks (testing recipes, and cleaning out closets during writer’s block), leading to many bestsellers, nationwide book tours, a few food production ventures, and TV shows.

The couple buys and decorates a dream apartment in Paris and expands their Hamptons home. Ina plays beer pong after a Swiftie concert. She becomes an Instagram celeb during COVID; just a boomer with two iPhones! “How lucky am I to have the dean of the Yale School of Management [Jeffrey] as my business adviser?”

Ina plans Be My Guest for the Food Network, a kitchen “facelift,” and this memoir, requiring combing through 50 years’ worth of Jeffrey’s letters.

Her success involves hard work and being in the right place at the right time—and the memoir culminates in Ina receiving a Matrix Award for women in media.

Stunning photos throughout guide the reader on a thrilling, foodies’-namedropping travelogue of Ina’s gorgeous life, even if the book’s ending seems a bit drawn out to fill space.