Who Is Ina Garten’s Husband? All About Jeffrey Garten

Ina Garten was 15 years old when she met her current husband, Jeffrey Garten. After dating for five years, the couple married in 1968 in her parents’ backyard in Connecticut when she was 20 and he was 22.

The couple made an early decision not to have children.

“I really appreciate that other people do that — and we’re always going to have friends who have kids that we’re close with — but that was a choice I made very early on,” the Food Network host said during a 2017 episode. The Katie Couric Podcast.

“I really felt, I feel, that I could never have the life that I had,” she shared. “So it’s a choice, and it was a choice I made.”

In the five decades that followed, Ina wrote 13 cookbooks, hosted a hit show Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network, release a line of products, and recently host a new series called Be my guest with Ina Garten. Her husband had an equally successful career, including joining the US Army’s Special Forces while working for several presidential administrations and on Wall Street.

While Ina was in the public eye for decades, her husband kept a low profile, only occasionally appearing on her show (or being mentioned in the title – for example when he accidentally sent a love message intended for his wife by mistake!).

“My dear friend, who is also my publicist, sent her a message, he was thinking of me, he said, ‘You will be delicious tonight,’ and it went to her,” Ina said during the guest appearance. on The Drew Barrymore Show. “She was like, ‘Whoa.’ She replied: ‘I don’t think this was meant for me.’ ”

So who is Ina Garten’s husband? Here’s everything you need to know about Jeffrey Garten and his relationship with the famous chef.

They met through a mutual friend

Jeffrey Garten and Ina Garten at the 40th Annual Daytime Entertainment Emmy Awards on June 16, 2013 in Beverly Hills, California.

Allen Berezovsky/WireImage

She first caught Jeffrey’s eye while visiting her brother at Dartmouth College in 1963 while still in high school.

According to Food Network Magazine, Jeffrey stared out the library window and said to his roommate, “Look at that girl, isn’t she pretty?” His roommate knew her brother and helped him make the connection.

“He saw me on the street and then sent me a letter with his photo,” he said Barefoot Contessa star told PEOPLE. “I just remember running through the house saying, ‘Mom, mom, you have to see this picture of this guy. He’s so cute!’ ”

Six months after seeing her, Jeffrey showed up at her house to ask her out on a date.

Ina thought she would never see Jeffrey again after their first date

Taylor Hill / Getty Images

In November 2022, the celebrity chef told Drew Barrymore during an episode The Drew Barrymore Show that her first date with Jeffrey was a ‘disaster’.

“So he called and I just knew he was his friend and I thought, ‘Well, he’s a Dartmouth guy so he probably wants to go to a bar or something.’ I’ve never been to a bar so I said, ‘Oh, let’s just go to this bar, Hilltop,’ like I’ve been there many times.”

Ina was calm until they had to show identification to enter the bar.

“We parked there and went inside and there’s two big guys at the door and I said, ‘What was that?’ I didn’t understand what they were saying,” she said. “At the end Jeffrey said, ‘They want your ID,’ and I said, ‘What is that?’ ”

Ina revealed: “I had no idea I needed a fake ID to get into a bar when I was 16.”

However, despite Ina revealing that she “thought I would never see him again”, the date ended on a high note. Jeffrey kissed Ina in the car outside her house as he dropped her off.

Ina Garten and Jeffrey celebrate 50 years of marriage—see their sweetest photos through the years

Ina credits him for her success in her career

Jeffrey and Ina Garten at the Barefoot Under the Stars event on June 25, 2011 in Sagaponack, New York.

Sonia Moskowitz/Getty

Before becoming a barefoot contessa, Ina worked at the White House as a nuclear policy analyst in the 1970s after her husband encouraged her early in her marriage to build her own career.

“I was watching TV at 11 o’clock in the morning and Jeffrey said, ‘You need to figure out what you want to do with your life,’” she told PEOPLE. “I was shocked. It was 1969 and I was married. That’s what girls did.”

However, the work did not fulfill her: “One evening I came to him and told him: ‘It’s just not me. I want to do something more fun than this.’ ”

“From the time we got married, I was really interested in cooking, but I had never cooked,” she said. “He encouraged it so much by being so appreciative when I cooked, and that was really the start of my career.”

Ina saw a job for sale in The The New York Times in Westhampton Beach, New York, and decided to buy it, keeping the company name (Barefoot Contessa) and turning it into a specialty food store.

“It was just amazing that he was willing to put every dime we had into something I’d never done before, and in a city we’d never been to. He’s been doing just that the whole way.”

He is Dean Emeritus at the Yale School of Management

Jeffrey Garten.

Ina Garten on Instagram

Currently, Jeffrey is Dean Emeritus at the Yale School of Management and teaches courses on the global economy.

According to his college page, before joining Yale, he worked for multiple White House administrations, served in the US Army Special Forces and was a Wall Street executive.

He graduated from Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University.

While serving in the army, he wrote letters to Ina every day

COURTESY OF INA GARTEN

From 1968 to 1972, he served as a lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division, a captain in the US Army Special Forces, and an advisor to the Royal Thai Army.

He was deployed shortly after they were married, but he always had his new wife in mind.

“I wrote to Ina every day,” he shared with PEOPLE. “During the whole year, I only managed to call her once.”

Ina told PEOPLE that she keeps all the letters he sent. “I was reading them recently and I came across one that said, ‘I’d love to take you to Paris, but we won’t have enough money for a hotel, but maybe we’ll go camping,'” which Jesu. The couple now has a place in Paris where they spend their anniversary every year.

He speaks Thai fluently

Ina Garten and Jeffrey Garten.

Ina Garten on Instagram

According to Johns Hopkins Journalhe went on to study at the Foreign Language Center of the Defense Institute to become fluent in Thai.

The article states that he was stationed on the Thailand-Burma border in 1970 and served as an adviser to a Thai combat unit. There was an insurgency in Thailand at the time, and Jeffrey helped train Thai soldiers and occasionally accompanied Thai units to Vietnam.

He is a published author

Ina Garten/Instagram

Like his wife, Jeffrey is a published author, having written six books, mostly on global economics and politics.

His writings have also been published in BusinessWeek, The The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Foreign affairs, Foreign policy and Harvard Business Review.

He is a good sport when it comes to trying new recipes

Ina Garten/Instagram

After five decades of living together, Ina has cooked countless meals for her husband.

“I think the best way you can express love by cooking for someone is to figure out what they like, not what you like, what they like, and make it for them,” she told TODAY in February 2018. “And they will feel really good.”

Of her hundreds of recipes, Ina added that Jeffrey wasn’t a fan of one particular dish she experimented with, but he maintained a good attitude about it.

“There was one (dish) that I made very early on (in our marriage) that was like ground beef and corn that was just horrible,” she shared. “But we couldn’t afford to make another meal, so we ate it and said it was delicious.”

His secret to a long marriage is “love”

On their 55th wedding anniversary in December 2023, Ina and Jeffrey answered a series of questions on Instagram about each other. When asked about his secret to a long marriage, Jeffrey replied, “He loves Ina to death.”

“When Jeffrey and I first got married, I asked him, what do you want out of your life? He said, I want to be a good husband. I’d say you nailed it! Happy anniversary, Jeffrey,” Ina captioned the video.

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Source: HIS Education