Ina Garten Says a Roast Chicken Nobody Wanted Taught Her Her Best Lesson

Before Ina Garten became one of the most trusted names in home cooking, she learned the food business one roast chicken at a time. Delish reports that on The Mel Robbins Podcast, Garten looked back at the early days of Barefoot Contessa, a tiny specialty food store in Westhampton, New York. She bought it when she was 30, even though she had never run a store. Before that she had worked on nuclear energy policy in Washington, D.C. Garten said that if you are cooking, you are testing things, but instead of ending up with chemicals, you end up with a roast chicken.

The learning curve was steep. Garten said she did not know how to cash out a register or slice smoked salmon. She also had to figure out how to turn the 12 brownies she could bake for friends into 1,000 for customers. After her first week she told her husband, Jeffrey, that it was the stupidest thing she had ever done.

Her first day as the owner did not look promising. The register held only $87, and Jeffrey told her he did not think she would make it. But the next day, a busy Friday before Memorial Day weekend, the store sold out of everything. Garten and the previous owner stayed up all night making chocolate cake and chicken salad so they could do it again.

One of her most important lessons came from food that did not sell. Garten assumed a specialty shop in the Hamptons needed fancy food, so she made dishes such as veal with morels and showed roast chickens on a huge white platter with fresh herbs. Nobody wanted them. When she moved the same chickens into small red-and-white checkered baskets, they sold in ten minutes.

Her conclusion was that people have elegant taste, but they do not want fancy food at home. She said that idea shaped all of her cookbooks. When she began writing them, her formula was simple: reliable recipes, beautiful photos and ingredients you can find at the grocery store.

At the end of the interview, when Robbins asked for her favorite recipe, Garten chose a French apple tart, made with a thin, buttery crust, sliced apples, butter and sugar. She called it very simple and gorgeous.