Who Is Ina Garten's Husband? All About Jeffrey Garten (2024)

Ina Garten was 15 years old when she met her now-husband, Jeffrey Garten. After dating for five years, the pair tied the knot in 1968 in her parents’ backyard in Connecticut when she was 20 and he was 22.

The couple made the decision early on not to have children.

“I really appreciate that other people do — and we will always have friends that have children that we are close to — but it was a choice I made very early,” the Food Network host said during a 2017 episode of the Katie Couric Podcast.

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

In the five decades that have followed, Ina has gone on to author 13 cookbooks, host the hit show Barefoot Contessa on Food Network, release a product line, and most recently, host a new series called Be My Guest with Ina Garten. Her husband has had an equally successful career, including joining the U.S. Army Special Forces in addition to working for several presidential administrations and Wall Street.

While Ina has been in the public eye for decades, her husband has maintained a lower profile, only occasionally making a cameo on her show (or being mentioned in a headline — like when he accidentally sent a love text meant for his wife to the wrong person!).

"My dear friend, who's also my publicist, he sent a text to her, and he meant it for me, and he said, 'You're gonna be delicious tonight,' and it went to her," Ina shared during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show. "She was like, 'Whoa.' She sent back, 'I don't think this was meant for me.' "

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

He and Ina met through a mutual friend

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

According to Food Network Magazine, Jeffrey was gazing out the library window and he said to his roommate, "Look at that girl, isn't she beautiful?" His roommate knew her brother and helped make the connection.

“He saw me on the street and then sent me a letter with a photograph of himself in it,” the Barefoot Contessa star told PEOPLE. “I just remember running through the house and going, ‘Mom, Mom, you’ve got to see this picture of this guy. He’s so cute!' ”

Six months after laying eyes on her, Jeffrey showed up at her house to take her out on a date.

Ina thought she’d never see him again after their first date

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

"So, he called, and I just knew he was a friend of the friend and I thought, 'Well, he's a Dartmouth guy so he probably wants to like go to a bar or something.’ I had never been to a bar and so I said, 'Oh, let's just go to this bar, Hilltop,' like I'd been there many times."

Ina played it cool until they needed to show identification to gain entrance to the bar.

"We parked there and walked in and there are two big guys at the door and I said, 'What was that?' I didn't understand what they were saying," she shared. "Finally, Jeffrey said, 'They want your ID,’ and I said to him, 'What's that?' "

Ina disclosed, "I had no idea that I needed a fake ID to get into a bar when I was 16."

However, despite Ina revealing that “I thought I’d never see him again,” the date ended on a high note. Jeffrey kissed Ina in the car in front of her house while dropping her off.

Ina credits him with her career success

Before becoming the Barefoot Contessa, Ina worked in the White House in the ‘70 as a nuclear policy analyst after her husband encouraged her early in their marriage to forge 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 was what girls did.”

However, she didn't find the work fulfilling: “I came to him one night and I said, ‘It’s just not me. I want to do something more fun than this.’ "

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

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

“It was just unbelievable that he was willing to invest every penny we had in something I’d never done before, and in a town we’d never been to. He’s just done that all the way."

He is the Dean Emeritus at the Yale School of Management

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

According to his faculty page, prior to joining Yale, he worked for multiple White House administrations, served in the U.S. Army Special Forces and was a managing director on Wall Street.

He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University.

He wrote letters to Ina every single day while deployed in the Army

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

He was deployed shortly after they got married but always kept his newlywed top of mind.

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

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

He’s fluent in Thai

According to Johns Hopkins Magazine, he went on to study at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center to become fluent in Thai.

The article noted that in 1970, he was stationed on the Thailand/Burma border 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 escorted Thai units into Vietnam.

He is a published author

Just like his wife, Jeffrey is a published author, having written six books, mainly on global economics and politics.

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

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

Having been together for five decades, Ina has cooked countless meals for her husband.

"I think the best way you can express love by cooking for someone is 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'll feel really good."

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

“There was one (dish) I made very early on (in our marriage) that was like ground beef and corn that was just dreadful," 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 answered, "Love Ina to death."

"When Jeffrey and I were first married I asked him, what do you want for your life? He replied, I want to be a good husband. I’d say you nailed that! Happy anniversary, Jeffrey," Ina captioned the video.

Ina thinks he would have been a "great parent"

In April 2024, during an appearance on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ podcast,Wiser Than Me, Ina admitted that Jeffrey "would have really loved having children."

She added: “I think Jeffrey would have been a great parent. But, he wanted me to be happy, and it was okay with him. I had no interest in having children. None. I just had a terrible childhood, and it was nothing I wanted to recreate."