4 NYC Spots Where Ina Garten Sourced Specialty Foods For The Barefoot Contessa Store

True fans know that Barefoot Contessa is not just a charming nickname for celebrity chef Ina Garten — it was also the name of the specialty food store that she owned from 1978 to 1996, located in the Hamptons. Inspired by a 1954 film starring Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart, Barefoot Contessa also went on to become the title of her first cookbook, the name of her Food Network show, and soon enough Garten became known as the iconic Barefoot Contessa herself.

At her namesake store, Garten was not the type of owner that just checked in from time to time. She was the one running the shop and sourcing the best ingredients, which included renting a station wagon once a week and driving into New York City before sunrise to pick up all the products she needed. Her favorite spots? Alleva Dairy, Voilà Bakeries, Bazzini, and Raffetto's. "I raced from supplier to supplier, picking up food and dropping off checks. Traffic was a nightmare, parking was impossible, but the suppliers were wonderful," Garten shared in her new memoir, "Be Ready When the Luck Happens."

Look at any of Ina Garten's recipes, and you'll see that not every ingredient is homemade, but the chef always specifies the importance of using "good" products, be it butter, vanilla, or even mayonnaise. She followed the same principles with stocking the shelves at Barefoot Contessa, picking delicious store-bought substitutions that were Garten-approved.

At Alleva Dairy, Garten loved the homemade fresh and smoked mozzarella. The New York City location has since closed, but there is still a storefront in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. The now-shuttered Voilà Bakeries was Garten's stop for croissants — in her memoir, she called the aroma of the freshly baked goods "better than any perfume." Bazzini — once located in New York's Soho neighborhood — was where Garten purchased nuts. To this day, the store's classic snack packs can be found across the city in bodegas, subway stations, and even Yankee stadium. Greenwich Village institution Raffetto's has been selling fresh pasta since 1906, so it is no wonder Garten stocked up on noodles there. The shop still carries more than 50 different varieties of fresh, dried, and stuffed pastas.

Garten has called these weekly tours of New York City — and the subsequent drive and late-night shelf stocking — "exhausting," totaling up to nearly 21-hour workdays, but it was also a routine that gave her a lot of joy. As she wrote in her memoir, "I loved connecting with all these small producers who made extraordinary handmade products for me to sell."