Ina Garten, the star of Food Network’s long-running program Barefoot Contessa, is an endearing woman. Watching her show, you get the feeling that Ina, though herself childless, would make a great stereotypical Jewish grandmother, spoiling her second-generation offspring with baked goodies she handmade sometime in between the morning’s challah French toast and the evening’s brisket. There’s more to Ina than stereotypes, however. Mrs. Garten is by all accounts brilliant, holding an MBA and having served as a budget analyst for the Ford and Carter White Houses. Part of the appeal of the caricature of herself that she plays on screen is that Ina is a strong and wildly successful businesswoman, who just also happens to be self-taught in the art of classical French cooking. She even gives plentiful air time to her numerous gay friends! I should like her. I should.
Where Barefoot Contessa goes off the rails for me is the setting of the show. Shot in the expansive kitchen of her Gatsby-esque East Hampton mansion, I immediately entrench myself firmly on the poor side of a classist divide. Ina spends a great deal of her time on screen sipping colorful cocktails with her wealthy Upper East Side friends who drive out to the Island for the weekend. Occasionally we sit with Ina as she prepares a wonderful meal for her adorable husband Jeffrey, a high-ranking professor at the Yale School of Management, in a race against the clock as Mr. Garten makes the week’s end three-and-a-half hour drive back to the Hamptons from New Haven. I find it hard not to recoil in horror at the glowing portrayals of this lifestyle, a wide brush applying coats of gold paint over any and all problems in the world of East Coast academics. The show is almost a cinematographic adaptation of the Wikipedia article for “Liberal Elite.”
It is a true tribute to Ina’s likeability that I feel a little ashamed to point out any of this. I adore this woman’s bubbliness, her flexibility, her ability to discuss seemingly anything with seemingly anybody- but I just don’t identify with her television show at all. Perhaps this is the point. Maybe this is the one show on the Food Network meant to entertain the upper classes, lost among the bargain bin-divers Rachel Ray and Sandra Lee. Instead of discussing the pros and cons of caviar and the perfect quantity of beignets to make for your summer soiree, I’d like to see Ina in a studio kitchen more familiar to commoners. I think she would shine in this role, teaching classical cooking techniques to midday audiences as a modern Julia Child.
But it’s not my role to dictate the career goals of others. I can only lament the unfortunate wall placed between the general populace and the lofty Long Island excess of the delightful Ina Garten. I keep watching- hoping Ina has a moment of self-reflection that would allow the show to be more accessible to the lower classes, but I’m continually disappointed. In the meantime, at least it’s entertaining to watch these luxurious escapades.
Before the Deluge 