The Barefoot Impresario
By
MICHELINE MAYNARD
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y.
INA GARTEN’S life changed for good in April 1999, near the corner of 50th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. Running late for an event, she barely had time to stop outside her publisher’s offices and double-park her car while her editor ran downstairs with a book.
It was the first copy of “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook,” the title taken from the store that Ms. Garten had run for almost 20 years in the Hamptons, but that she had sold three years before.
“I was stunned,” Ms. Garten said of the moment when she held the book, which had a bright photograph of her Provençal potato salad on the cover. “I remember thinking, ‘Nothing will ever feel like this.’ ”
It represented an expensive gamble. Ms. Garten had spent $200,000 of her own money hiring a food stylist, a photographer and an assistant to help test recipes, as well as planning a publicity campaign, all for a book that she hoped would be as much an escapist read as an instructional guide.
And despite the support of famous friends like
Martha Stewart, who wrote the introduction, Ms. Garten feared that it would end up a little-noticed regional title, appealing only to her former customers.
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