‘Fixer Upper’ co-star mixes tradition, modern tastes
The first Chip Gaines heard of avocado toast was in 2017.
He and his wife, Joanna, were about to open a 200-seat restaurant in downtown Waco, Texas, where their home design and construction business is based. The family pancake recipe was locked in, and the biscuits and gravy were good to go by the time Joanna Gaines mentioned adding a vegan option to the breakfast menu.
“That’s disgusting, babe,” Chip Gaines told her, shaking his head. “No one wants avocado on their toast.”
She persisted. She also suggested a juice bar.
“I don’t like any juices,” he said, unhappily sampling some trial smoothies. “I like bacon.”
In the end, as fans of the couple’s popular home makeover show, “Fixer Upper,” should know, Joanna Gaines prevailed. Magnolia Table opened with avocado toast on the menu and has added chai latte and a $12 “juice flight” alongside basics like sweet tea and blueberry muffins.
In just seven years, since “Fixer Upper” began airing on HGTV, the couple has renovated more than a hundred houses and expanded the Magnolia brand into
restaurants, craft markets, books, villas, real estate agencies, furniture, a magazine, a Target brand and — coming up shortly — their own cable channel, the Magnolia Network.
Their continuing negotiation between Texas tradition and modern taste makes for good television and has also proved to be a wildly popular approach to home design, beloved by millions of followers on Pinterest and Instagram. In their hands, there is no house too small, too dark or too old to be transformed with topiaries (formerly known as houseplants), giant clocks, ironwork and white shiplap into her signature bright style, best described as Boho-Glam-Industrial Farmhouse.
That’s the aesthetic at the couple’s own home, a Victorian farmhouse set on 40 acres outside Waco that makes frequent appearances on the show. They live there with their five children, ages 1 to 15.
Part of the appeal of “Fixer Upper,” which drew more than 16 million viewers a week in its final season in 2018, is seeing that spark of tension play out in their marriage. In the tradition of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and Homer and Marge Simpson, there’s one impulsive, enthusiastic risk-taker (Chip, 45) and one sensible, occasionally exasperated realist (Joanna, 42). And it takes both kinds to transform a business into an empire.
Although their work seems to divide evenly, along conventional gender lines, it’s clear that her taste and vision (not to mention her snappy confidence and great hair) are the main drivers of the brand and its legions of female fans.
“They are a couple who respect tradition and one another, and aren’t afraid to show their Christian faith,” said Lindy Baker, a teacher who lives outside Kansas City, Mo. “She is proud of being a wife and mother, and you don’t always see that on the cooking shows.”
In a Zoom interview from home last month, Joanna Gaines sounded like many parents who are currently working while attempting to be full-time educators, cheerleaders and cooks: frazzled.
“I had to get off social media for a while, so I made a full Texas dinner,” she said — chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and zucchini casserole. “It took three hours to make and it was gone in 10 minutes.”
Her mother is Korean, and her father’s heritage is Lebanese: She slipped recipes for bulgogi and Lebanese salad into her first book alongside pimento cheese, chili and breakfast casseroles. It has sold more than 2 million copies and was the No. 2 best-selling cookbook in the United States on the New York Times list in late April — behind her new cookbook. They are both titled “Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering” except that the second book
also mentions it is “Volume 2.”
“She’s like a Texas version of Martha Stewart and the Barefoot Contessa but younger and more relatable,” said Candace Fife, a superfan who started a Facebook group for cooks to post photos and notes on the Magnolia Table cookbooks. It has added nearly 1,000 members in the last two months, as home cooking has become a national necessity.
Joanna Gaines’ parents met in South Korea in 1969, when her father, Jerry, was serving in the U.S. Army. They married in Las Vegas in 1972 (to the displeasure of both families, she said), and settled in Wichita, Kan., where Gaines spent most of her childhood.
There, she said, the teasing about her looks began; she was the only Asian American child at most of the schools she attended. The family moved seven times for her father’s job with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co.; by the time Gaines landed at Round Rock High School, outside Austin, she had developed such a phobia of school cafeterias that she was unable to eat in one.
“I barely knew what Korean food was,” she said.
“But kids assumed that my food was different because I looked different.”
In fact, her mother, Nan, who was only 19 when she moved to the United States, didn’t know how to cook many Korean dishes and briskly adapted to local conditions by developing a variety of ground-beef recipes like meat sauce and beef Stroganoff. Only when her grandmother arrived from South Korea to live with the family, she said, did Gaines become familiar with homemade seaweed soup and bulgogi.
There is not much that is aspirational about the food in her books, but much that is inspirational, especially in the photographs of Gaines herself, of the children doing wholesome farm activities in muddy boots, of her cottage garden and white-tiled open kitchen.
Homely dishes like hashbrown casserole and peanutbutter brownies are presented against pure white and linen backdrops; some dishes are spilling over, or slightly overor undercooked.
“It all looks very natural, like she does,” Fife, the superfan, said. “I think people relate because her food is not pretentious, it’s not for the elites, it just brings people together.”