47 pages • 1 hour read
Ina GartenBe Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Tokyo, How Hard Could That Be?”
Garten is anxious about the size of the new location, wanting to maintain the intimate, casual feel of the original. She anchors the space with a small shop and bakery surrounded by stalls leased to local farmers and producers. As the workforce expands beyond the original crew, Garten nurtures young chefs, such as Kathleen King, the founder of Tate’s Cookies. She also learns that her customers are willing to pay a premium for her products when she raises the price of her brownies from 75¢ to $2.50 (the chapter ends with a recipe for these brownies.) In another instance, a man unwilling to wait two hours for a $15 roast duck offered another customer $100 for hers.
As a result of the Barefoot Contessa’s success in Westhampton, a landlord from East Hampton reaches out to see if she is interested in taking over the lease for Dean & Deluca, a luxury food store that is closing. Garten admires the store and is shocked to hear it is closing; when she reaches out to owner Joel Dean, she learns that he is giving up the lease because the landlord is raising the rent 50¢ per square foot. Garten implores him to reconsider, but Dean refuses. After some debate with her friend Anna, who owns a nearby food store, Garten accepts the lease. Dean & Deluca move into a new location for nearly $5 per square foot more than their previous lease, but the business does not make enough money to meet its expenses, and they soon close. Garten takes this as a sign not to be too stubborn.
As the Barefoot Contessa is growing, Jeffrey accepts a prestigious job with Lehman Brothers in Tokyo. Garten is shocked that he would accept, given her busy schedule. To back out of the job, Jeffrey demands the company provide both Garten and Jeffrey free first-class tickets between New York and Tokyo once a month, as well as a fully-furnished apartment for them. Remarkably, the company agrees. The couple agree to try it for a year, alternating their monthly visits.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Pinochle Club”
Garten takes over the East Hampton property on January 1, 1985, bringing on several employees from the original Westhampton location. After an awkward introductory period, the store becomes a wild success, bringing in celebrities such as Lauren Bacall and Steven Spielberg. Garten begins travelling between the two stores as often as she can, but this proves difficult in the busy summer months. Her monthly trips to Tokyo to visit Jeffrey also complicate her schedule. As Garten settles into a routine, she begins to worry that she is too comfortable without Jeffrey and asks him to come home. He agrees, but makes a quick stop in Hong Kong to visit a client; the client asks him to stay and work on a project, and Garten agrees to another year apart.
In an attempt to slow down, Garten reluctantly closes the seasonal Westhampton location in order to focus on the year-round business in East Hampton. With the help of a therapist, Garten realizes that she is deeply unhappy and tries to seek out sources of joy. She also realizes that her parents had a profound impact on her self-esteem as a child and that they are the reason she never felt comfortable having children.
As work at Barefoot Contessa grows routine, Garten begins an ambitious house renovation to challenge herself. Jeffrey’s work moves to Washington, DC and then to Connecticut, making his weekly commute much more manageable. The petty frustrations of running a store—such as dirty jobs and difficult customers—become overwhelming, and Garten decides to sell the store to two of her employees. While determining her next steps, she rents an office near the Barefoot Contessa and fills her days with busywork. Jeffrey encourages her not to give up on her passion for food despite the sale.
Chapter 14 Summary: “I Can Sell This Book in La Jolla”
Garten begins work on The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, a collection of the store’s most popular recipes, such as the roast chicken, brownies, and coconut cupcakes. Her goal is to produce impressive but uncomplicated recipes using fresh, accessible ingredients. She secures a publisher on the condition that she purchase half of the books printed to sell at her store. She agrees. Later, she learns that Martha Stewart, a Barefoot Contessa customer and friend of the publishing company’s head, influenced the decision to publish the book. The publisher also sensed that the spirit of the Hamptons might be influential across the country.
The writing process engages all of Garten’s creative muscles as she scales down the store’s recipes for home cooks and tests and retests new recipes. She finds the writing process difficult but rewarding, recording the story of the store and her own growth as a chef. Garten uses her connections at the magazine Martha Stewart Living to hire an all-female team of photographers, designers, food stylists, and prop stylists. On set, she is relieved to delegate responsibility for cooking and plating the food, instead choosing to focus on big-picture questions of style.
The resulting cookbook contains seventy-five recipes and multiple full-page photographs, a stark contrast from the encyclopedic food bibles containing hundreds of recipes and no photographs that are popular at the time. Garten’s publishing team rejects the design, calling it unsellable and offering a new, pared back version. Convinced that her vision will sell, Garten pushes back and insists on her original design. Ultimately, the book is a wild success, and the publishers take over the responsibility of selling the books. Garten notes that, as of publication, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook has sold over 1.4 million copies and is still being sold.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Lose My Number”
Garten’s second cookbook, Barefoot Contessa Parties!, is inspired by her love of hosting and determination to make it easier. While writing her second book and touring to promote the first, Garten realizes that she needs help running her business. She hires Barbara Libath, first as a part-time assistant and then as a full-time recipe assistant and recipe tester. Libath’s relative inexperience in the kitchen makes her a useful stand-in for Garten’s readers.
Shortly after, Garten is approached by Martha Stewart’s TV production company about developing her own cooking show. Despite her self-doubt, she agrees, and the production company takes over her home. For eight long weeks, Garten fights with producers about nearly every aspect of the shoot. When they provide her ingredients pre-portioned and sliced, as they do for Stewart on her show, she insists that she begin with the raw ingredients, so she can show viewers how to cut and measure them. She refuses to shoot with a script, choosing instead to talk to viewers like a friend offering a casual lesson. When the crew’s use of her personal bathrooms causes a sewage line to burst, Garten shuts down production and refuses to consider reshooting or working with another production company.
After the publication of Barefoot Contessa Parties!, Jeffrey suggests that Garten invest the profits from her first two cookbooks into an apartment in Paris. After some heartbreak while searching, Garten falls in love with an old apartment in a perfect location on Paris’s Left Bank. While living in Paris to oversee the extensive renovations, she rediscovers her love for French markets and cooking. The result is her third cookbook, Barefoot in Paris, which aims to simplify the best of French cooking and make it accessible for American home cooks. With the success of this third cookbook, Martha Stewart’s producers begin calling to beg her to reconsider her refusal to film.
Chapters 12-15 Analysis
As she details the growth of the Barefoot Contessa brand in these chapters, Ina Garten depicts herself as a self-assured businesswoman who works to support her peers, especially women, rather than compete with them. This self-imaging reflects the memoir’s thematic interest in The Importance of Instinct and Self-Determination. When Garten opens her second store, she faces resistance from her friend Anna, a former employee who left to open her own shop, Loaves and Fishes, just down the road. Although Garten supported Anna when she left, Anna does not want Garten to open, fearing competition. Ultimately, Garten decides that “I had to trust my own instincts” (174) and open the store. Although she describes it as “a difficult decision” (183), she determines that “it was the right thing to do” (183). At several points in the memoir, when facing a difficult decision, Garten states simply, “it was the right thing to do.” The straightforwardness of this language suggests the degree to which she trusts her instincts and her ability to make the right choice.
Garten follows this pattern throughout her career, with repeated success. In 1996, she decides to sell the business even though “it seemed insane to walk away from the success of Barefoot Contessa” (193) at the time. However, Garten is “pretty miserable and [ca]n’t see another way” (193), so she trusts her instincts and sells. The cookbook that she writes in her new-found free time is a resounding success, leading her to advise readers to “stand up for yourself, even when it’s hard, even when it means taking a risk” (209). During the process of developing the book, she receives and rejects negative feedback from the photographer Richard Avedon, a personal friend. Again, she attributes her decision to her belief in the importance of self-assurance: “here was a world-class creative genius sharing his knowledge and experience, but I had to have the confidence to understand—and to believe—that what may have been a good idea for Avedon was not necessarily a good idea for me” (211). Rejecting Avedon’s advice proves useful, as her book outsells his. This pattern repeats when she films with the producers responsible for Martha Stewart’s television show. When they try to make her film a show like Stewart’s, she rejects their ideas, insisting that “you already have Martha. You want me to do it the way I do it” (220). Ultimately, Garten finds success with another crew. In each of these episodes, Garten’s belief in herself and the importance of her unique vision leads her to success. Garten’s depiction of her business success underscores the importance of instinct and self-assurance.
Garten also depicts herself as a steadfast supporter of women at Barefoot Contessa and beyond. The workforce at the Barefoot Contessa stores is comprised almost entirely of female college students working summer jobs. Garten refers to the students as “my little sorority of workers” (166). In addition to this female workforce, Garten seeks out female food producers, such as “Kathleen King, a very young baker in Southampton” (163) who provided cookies for the Barefoot Contessa. King eventually launched the company that became Tates, “the company that defined the chocolate chip cookie” (163). When she decides to leave the Barefoot Contessa, Garten sells to her manager Amy, a former seasonal worker. Rather than forcing Amy to take an out expensive loan, Garten finances the sale herself, “presenting an exciting path to ownership” (194) to her longest-running female employee. These episodes demonstrate Garten’s dedication to supporting the work of women in the food industry while at Barefoot Contessa.
The production of Garten’s first cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, offers a direct insight into how Garten cultivated female talent. When searching for creative partners, she seeks out the opinion of established women like “Susan Spungen, then the head food stylist [at Martha Stewart Living]” (203). Spungen correctly predicts that “you’re going to hire Melanie Acevedo (203), who in turn “suggested Rori Spinelli Trovato” (203) as a food stylist. Garten “hired Rori, then asked her who she would hire as a prop stylist” (203), and hires her suggestion, Denise Canter. Garten describes the process of curating this group of female creatives as an “add-a-pearl” (203) process in which she relied on women to support and promote the work of their peers. She continues this process by naming the women responsible for the production of her first book in this memoir. Garten’s intentional depiction of the chain events that led each of these women to be hired, and her repetition of their names in these passages, reflect her desire to support the work of women in the food industry.
