Martha Stewart and Ina Garten have known each other for decades. Not surprising, considering they’ve built their respective NY-based brands in similar fields, though Ina has kept her focus on cooking whereas Martha sought dominance over home arts at large. As fate would have it, both of them have biographical projects coming out next month: Ina’s memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens on October 1, and the Netflix documentary Martha on October 30 (whether the real Martha likes it or not). So these women are knee-deep in promotional duties, to the point where they’re even overlapping. The New Yorker recently ran an article on Ina, and they called on Martha for some comments. This is standard practice for profiles, and it’s generally understood that the people contacted offer positive anecdotes on the main profile. But not our Martha! Instead Martha told the magazine that Ina snubbed her when she went to prison, and that it was terribly “unfriendly” of the contessa.
“When I was sent off to Alderson Prison, she stopped talking to me,” Stewart said. “I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly.” (Although she maintained her innocence, Stewart was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction and two counts of lying to investigators related to her involvement in an insider trading scandal in 2004. She was sentenced to five months in prison, five months of home confinement and two years of supervised probation.)
While Garten “firmly” denied Stewart’s recollection of the end of their friendship, Stewart’s longtime publicist, Susan Magrino, maintained that Stewart was “not bitter at all” about the fallout.
“There’s no feud,” Magrino, 62, told The New Yorker.
Stewart and Garten first crossed paths in the early ‘90s after Stewart was shopping at the latter’s now-closed Barefoot Contessa store in East Hampton, New York.
“We were in a gigantic black Suburban,” Chip Gibson, who was head of Crown Publishing at the time, told The New Yorker. “And suddenly she veered almost crashingly to the curb and said, ‘I’ve got to get lemon squares.’”
“My desk was right in front of the cheese case and we just ended up in a conversation,” Garten told TIME of their meeting in 2017. “We ended up actually doing benefits together where it was at her house and I was the caterer, and we became friends after that.”
Stewart later connected Garten with an editor, who would go on to work with the future Food Network star on her first cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa. Nearly one decade after meeting, Stewart introduced viewers to Garten during a 1999 episode of her Martha Stewart Living.
Stewart also penned the foreword of Garten’s cookbook, in which she wrote, “It took a while, but I finally understood what motivated Ina, realizing that here was a true kindred spirit with really similar but unique talents.”
Additionally, Stewart’s production company tried to help launch Garten’s television career on the Food Network with a show whose working title was Someone’s in the Kitchen With Ina. However, after a director called her out for taking a bite of food on camera and speaking with her mouth full, Garten said she decided TV wasn’t for her and the show was shelved.
She would later go on to star on the network’s hit cooking show Barefoot Contessa, which ran from 2002 to 2021.
Though rumors of bad blood between the pair have plagued them for years, Garten hasn’t shied away from praising Stewart.
“I think she did something really important, which is that she took something that wasn’t valued, which is home arts, and raised it to a level that people were proud to do it and that completely changed the landscape,” she previously told TIME. “I then took it in my own direction, which is that I’m not a trained professional chef, cooking is really hard for me — here I am 40 years in the food business, it’s still hard for me.”
You know who I feel for? Martha’s publicist! “There’s no feud! Martha’s not bitter! Nothing to see here!” I don’t think this story will damage either Ina or Martha’s reputations; if anything I think each woman comes out maintaining her publicly-perceived image. But I must ask, what was Ina expecting?! I mean, we’re talking about the same Martha Stewart who criticized Ina for being pro cosmo-drinking as we were all muddling through the pandemic (a comment Martha made while launching a chardonnay line, btw). The same Martha Stewart who’s ready for her friends to die so she can date their husbands. I think it’s fair to say that if you’re turning to Martha for a character reference, that gamble is entirely on you. The real scoop of The New Yorker article, in my opinion, is the account of Martha nearly crashing into the Barefoot Contessa yelling, “I must have lemon squares!!!” I need a dramatization of this event put on screen STAT.
PS — I simply adore the title Someone’s in the Kitchen With Ina.
photos via Instagram and credit: Jennifer Graylock-Graylock.com / Avalon