BE HER GUEST

The plush ambience of Ina Garten's good fortune.

- MOLLY FISCHER

Garten has been guided by the principle that people want to eat t things they know, but better-lavishly executed comfort food.

On a June evening that was pleasantly warm in East Hampton and too hot almost everywhere else, Ina Garten and her husband, Jeffrey, picked me up for dinner in a Mini Cooper convertible. It was one of many on the roads of Long Island’s East End. (“There was a Mini showroom in Southampton,” Garten, who has lived in East Hampton since 1985, later told me. “If it was a nice day, you went over and bought one.”) Garten’s is cream-colored, which suits her role as America’s reigning queen of tastefully deployed butterfat. For almost twenty years, Garten ran a food store in the Hamptons called the Barefoot Contessa, which catered to vacationing New York and Hollywood élites; then, starting in 1999, she published a series of best-selling cookbooks and starred in a show on the Food Network which turned her into the beloved national figure she has comfortably remained. From the beginning, her style was indulgent and inviting rather than polished and showy. “She’s the aunt that everybody wishes they had,” Kerry Diamond, the founder of the food magazine Cherry Bombe, told me. “She’s funny. She’s rich. She’ll let you eat the chocolate cake your mother said you couldn’t have.”

I had come to East Hampton to spend a few days with Garten in her domain, in anticipation of “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” a memoir she co-wrote with Deborah Davis, which Crown will publish in October. “We are VERY casual so don’t pack any evening gowns!” Garten had advised in an e-mail. “xxxx Ina.” She offered to lend me the Mini during my stay, and, when I declined, to pick me up from the Jitney, which is what a bus is called in the Hamptons.