Ina Garten has final say on rumoured Martha Stewart 'feud'
Ina Garten has put allegations about her and Martha Stewart’s relationship to bed, admitting how she feels about being ‘put in some kind of juxtaposition’ with the icon.
The 87-year-old and Stewart, 85, go way back—crossing paths for the first time in the Hamptons in the 1990s, with the latter featuring Garten in her magazine, Martha Stewart Living.
Soon after, Stewart helped the New Jersey native connect with a cookbook publisher whilst her production company attempted to get a Garten-fronted Food Network show off the ground.
Despite the TV show never making it past pre-production, the celebrity chef later worked with the channel on almost 300 episodes of Barefoot Contessa.
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Following her five-month prison sentence for insider trading in 2004, the James Beart Broadcast Hall of Famer claimed in an interview with The New Yorker that Garten had ceased almost all communication with her.
She called the alleged period ‘extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly’.
Garten disagreed with the accusation at the time, reporting that their friendship fell out because Stewart moved to New York in 2000.
After decades of rumblings, Garten has come clean about the state of her friendship with the award-winning homemaker in 2026.
“Can I just say I admire her enormously? I think what she created is stunning, and she did it with vision,” the American said in a recent New York Times interview.
When asked about their apparent ‘feud’ and apparent ‘falling-out’, the Barefoot Contessa said: “I mean, we’re friendly; there’s no antipathy.”
“She moved to Bedford,” Garten told the outlet, referring to Stewart’s upstate New York compound. “She used to live in East Hampton, so we saw each other then.”
Garten was then questioned how it felt to ‘always get put in some kind of juxtaposition with’ Stewart.
“I had an interesting conversation with Alison Roman recently. I said to her that she and I are kind of in a continuum that started with Julia Child, who wanted to teach people how to cook with real food,” the Be My Guest legend said.
“When everybody was making boxed macaroni and cheese, she wanted you to appreciate a really good beef bourguignon. And then Martha came along and elevated home arts to something really worth doing well.”
Garten said that while Stewart—whose titular Netflix documentary was released in 2024—wanted to promote ‘beautiful’ tablescapes, ‘wonderful’ dinners and the idea that you should ‘carve out a pumpkin for pumpkin soup’, she had a different approach.
“I came along and said: OK, maybe don’t carve out the pumpkin. Set a nice table, but it doesn’t have to be over the top, and make a lovely dinner and serve it.”
She went on to say that Alison Roman has succeeded everyone with her ethos of ‘just put the pot of soup on the table and have a good time’.
“I think everybody’s getting a little simpler and simpler, but at the end of the day, we all like the same thing, which is gathering people around a table,” she added.
Topics: Celebrity, US Food, TV and Film
Ella Scott