Ina Garten is 78 and she just started a new show. She films it in her kitchen. It takes one hour. Her old Food Network episodes could take up to 15 hours of shooting for about 22 minutes of TV. The new one runs about 35 minutes, and the guests arrive by taxi.
The kitchen came first. Nora Knoepflmacher visited Garten’s Manhattan apartment for the Journal’s In My Kitchen column. Garten found the place on the Upper East Side in 2017. The kitchen was dark and closed in. Her husband of 57 years, Jeffrey Garten, gave her one rule. Know what you’ll do about the kitchen before you buy. She bought it anyway, then knocked the kitchen walls down and opened it to the dining area. Cooking in another room while the guests talk isn’t her idea of a party.
That open room is now the set of Happy Hour With Ina Garten, a video podcast that debuted last month. Guests sit at her dining table for drinks, a bite and a real conversation. Sofia Coppola got ricotta-and-fig-jam toast from the new cookbook, Simply Ina. The two met in the bathroom of an Air France lounge. Her Food Network guests had to travel to East Hampton the night before, then give up a whole day to filming. In Manhattan the commitment is a cab ride and an hour, she says, and the guest still makes dinner.
Smaller room, shorter day
She likes a small kitchen. It holds just what you need, she says, and nobody has to skate across it. The dining area is painted a burnt orange she first saw in a magazine. Everyone looks good against it, she says. The art is a wall of small paintings by an English painter who finishes roughly one a day and sells each at auction. Her designer hung some framed and some not. And then the eggs. Low heat, then ricotta in dollops when the eggs are three-quarters done. “It’s like a custard rather than scrambled eggs.” She wanted the show to feel like life. “Everything’s not perfect,” she said.
Our read
This is retirement planning (M10), even though nobody in the story is retiring. At 78, Garten didn’t stop working. She redesigned the work. Same skill, same table, a fraction of the hours, and the people come to her. That’s the move we’d copy. Most plans ask one yes-or-no question about work after the usual age. Garten asked a better one, the one-hour version of her job and who’d pay for it. Her husband’s kitchen rule applies here too. Know what you’ll do about the hard part before you sign. Nothing here touches a holding.
The thing in your plan this touches is the work line in the first years of retirement, the income you expect from working on your own terms. One check this week. Write down the one-hour version of your job, where you’d do it and what it would pay. If your plan counts on that money and the line is blank, that’s the review. Garten knew what she’d do about the hard room before she bought the house. You find the umbrella while the sky is still clear.