Ina Garten left a White House job to pursue a cooking career—how the ‘crazy risk’ turned her into a millionaire

Ina Garten built a multimillion-dollar empire teaching people how to host intimate dinner parties and roast the perfect chicken, but her career didn't start in the kitchen. 

In her 20s, Garten worked in the White House for Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter writing policies for the nuclear energy budget. 

At first, she loved the job. In her new memoir, "Be Ready When the Luck Happens," Garten, 76, reveals that her work was close to the president and that the projects she worked on amounted to $50 billion in value.

But despite the prestige, Garten soon grew restless. "I was withering a little more each day," she writes. The slow pace of government work and limited creative freedom left her wanting more. 

She realized her future at the Office of Management and Budget depended on others — mainly men — choosing her for leadership roles.

 "In 1978, that would never happen," she writes. "I needed to find an alternate track where my success was measured by my own business skill and nobody could stand in my way."

Garten had no idea that her next chapter was waiting 300 miles away — in a tiny 400-square-foot food shop in Long Island, New York. 

One April morning in 1978, Garten, then 30, was reading the New York Times in her office when an advertisement caught her eye.

It was for the Barefoot Contessa, a specialty food store in the Hamptons that promised to bring in "over six figures in the summer alone." The owner was selling it for $25,000.

Garten thought she might be happier working in the food business over politics, as cooking was her passion. 

She spent evenings poring over Julia Child's cookbooks, testing out complicated recipes, and weekends hosting dinner parties at her apartment for friends. 

Compared to her stifling government job, Garten thought the food business could offer a greater sense of freedom and creativity. Plus, she recalls, her "low threshold for boredom" meant that she was willing to take "crazy risks just to get out of that miserable state."

The following weekend, Garten and her husband Jeffrey drove out to New York and bought the shop for $20,000. 

"It sounded a little crazy, but I was out of my mind with excitement," she writes. "I didn't know if it would be the best decision or the worst mistake I ever made."

Success didn't come instantly. On the first day of running the store, she and Jeffrey earned just $87 before expenses. "We thought it was a disaster," she remembers. Garten had no experience running a food business, but she quickly learned one key lesson as a new entrepreneur: flexibility is crucial.

She worked 20-hour days most weekends restocking shelves, running last-minute errands, and experimenting with new menu items based on customer feedback. She wasn't discouraged when things didn't sell — she adapted, asked her team of teenage employees what the locals liked, and kept tweaking her offerings.

By the end of that first summer, the line was out the door.

In 1996, after 18 years of serving customers in the Hamptons, Garten sold the shop to her chef and manager. 

"It seemed insane to walk away from the success of Barefoot Contessa, but I was pretty miserable and couldn't see another way," she writes. 

She added: "I felt that I wasn't doing anything new, and I certainly wasn't bringing any creativity to my work. I knew the business would suffer if I continued running on autopilot."

Once again, Garten knew it was time to switch things up in her career. She took over an office above the store and decided to try her hand at writing a cookbook to document the story of Barefoot Contessa and some of her most popular recipes. 

In 1999, at age 51, Garten published her bestseller, "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook," catapulting her career. By 2002, she published two more cookbooks and started filming her Food Network show, Barefoot Contessa, cementing her status as a star chef.

The secret to making a successful career change, Garten previously told CNBC Make It, is to not hold back or hesitate too long — just do it.

"I think that people stand on the side of the pond trying to figure out what the pond's going to be like," she said. "You've just got to jump in and just be brave and make a change."

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