By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Fall 2018

Act I

The late wine magnate and one-man conclave Robert Mondavi once declared Patrick O’Connell the “pope of American cuisine.” Watching O’Connell emerge from the dimness of the Inn at Little Washington’s main dining room, it is clear he would not look un-fabulous in a mitre.

A long, slim figure of 73, he is the proprietor and chef, the everything of the Inn, a venerated luxury hotel and a three Michelin-starred restaurant set for 40 years in one of Virginia’s most idyllic towns: “Little” Washington. It has become the unlikely seat of O’Connell’s culinary see, and all of it—the warm rooms, rustic grounds and bewitching stagecraft—is a testament to the splendid force of O’Connell’s élan vital.

It is early August, a sunny Wednesday, and we’re eating lunch at one of the Inn’s white-cloth tables in one of the Inn’s dining rooms. O’Connell is explaining how all this happened here.

“Because it didn’t exist,” says the chef, who attended George Washington University in the late 1960s, “people didn’t know that it could. But seeing it there, proliferating throughout Europe, reinforced the idea that if it could be embraced there, perhaps Americans would be capable of embracing it here also.”

“Were you nervous about that?” I say. “That people wouldn’t come? Was there apprehension? From talking to you and reading about you, it sounds like you just knew absolutely all the time that this might work, and I don’t know if that’s true.”

He smiles.

“I willed it.”

“Bold,” I say.

“If I have learned any really important life lesson, it’s if you want something badly enough, you can make it happen.”

“And why did you want this so badly?”

“I read that if you hadn’t done something with your life by the time you were 33, you never would.”

I tell O’Connell I’m 33.

“It’s a wonderful age,” says O’Connell, presumably abasing himself. “But it’s also a scary age. It spooked me so badly even though I recognized that I wasn’t, by my own standards, a failure. But I certainly was by many other people’s because I had never, what they might call, made a go of anything. … It was life or death.”

“Well, what if you couldn’t will it? Did you ever think about that?”

“There is a power that you have that, if you have to draw on it, is there. It’s the reserve tank in a car—like the truck that backed over the 2-year-old’s leg. The mother runs out of the house, lifts the truck up and frees the toddler. She has no earthly idea where the energy came from or the power to do that. If you asked her to lift a quarter of the car again, she couldn’t. She doesn’t know what lifted the car, but it happened. That car had to be lifted, so she cheated. She drew on superhuman strength without ever being conscious of it.”

O’Connell says that, like his mother, he is transcendentally inclined. He claims that later in life she developed the ability to slip back and forth, Billy Pilgrim-style, through time.

“She would say, ‘Did you see Mama and Papa last night?’” O’Connell says. “And at first I would say, ‘Mom, you know your mother died about 64 years ago and your father’s been dead 50 years,’ and I wasn’t [a] safe [person] to talk about it with. Finally, as it happened with greater frequency, she would say, ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ And I would say, ‘No, I think it’s wonderful. I think you have a gift, to be able to transcend this plane and enter another.’ She was going back and forth. So she had a two-dimensional sort of experience. I’ve had a multidimensional experience for a long time, even as a small child.”

O’Connell describes his abilities as more empathic than trans-temporal.

He studied theater at Catholic University and GW but found the curricula overly traditional, and he despaired of all the Shakespeare. He started working in restaurants at age 15—his first job was at the takeout joint, Mr. H’s Hamburgers, in Clinton, Md., his hometown—and gradually he came to view waiting tables as improv.

To him, restaurants were “living theaters.” They were places where he could be himself after enduring a guarded childhood lived like a “long-tailed cat walking through a room full of rocking chairs.” Years later, he built his stage.

“I always call the guests ‘the humans,’ because otherwise you would confuse them,” O’Connell says. “‘I have a deuce on table 46!’ or ‘Those four top on table 36!’ Just tell me how many humans! And then I’ll say to [the staff,] ‘Don’t you see this is a simple enough business?! You feed the ******* humans! Don’t make more out of it than it is. I’ll do that.’”

He pauses.

“So, one day, all hell’s breaking loose back there and I’m screaming about the humans, and one little boy says, ‘Chef, chef, may I ask you a question?’ ‘Well, yeah!’ He said, ‘If they’re the humans, what are we?’ ‘You idiot, we’re the ******* superhumans!’” “What was he doing?” “He was peeling something.” Another pause. “You have to enter a profession with the idea that you can do it so well, you become a superhuman.”

Act II

“Little” Washington, Va., cuddles the eastern nape of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s about 20 miles west of Warrenton and about 70 miles southwest from “Big” Washington.

Named for George Washington—he, purportedly, danced in a building that’s now part of the Inn—Little Washington has a population of about 140 and it sits in roughly the geographic center of 267-square-mile, 7,300-resident Rappahannock County.

The county’s per capita income is not quite $35,000. There are no stoplights or chain businesses. Most of Little Washington’s money comes from the meals and lodging tax first levied about 25 years ago to take advantage of the millions in revenue generated by the Inn, where dinner costs $228, a wine pairing $150 and a room for a night at least $500.

Little Washington, it would seem, is an odd place to build an aristocrat’s playland.

“It’s in a small, rural county with hardworking people,” says John Fox Sullivan, who’s in the final year of his second four-year term as Little Washington’s mayor. “And then someone comes along and creates, first, it’s modest, then it’s famous, a restaurant that serves ‘fancy food’—and Patrick painted the building interesting colors. It’s like a different world that they were bringing to the county, and the populace didn’t like it.

“There were cultural differences and there were some in the county that saw the Inn as a place where a bunch of wealthy people come from New York or Washington and spend all this money for fancy food. … That’s always been there, and in the early days of the Inn, there were some fractious relationships. All that’s gone, though. But there’s a history that goes back and he’s got some scars. ... I’d have to say that it started to shift 15 years ago, or something like that. Some of the power structure that was in the town with whom he had some fights sort of passed on, left, retired, died.”

The Inn at Little Washington opened in January 1978 in an old gas station. O’Connell was 33 and had a mustache. He used to pass that gas station while on childhood family vacations to the Shenandoah Valley with his (at the time) four brothers and mom and dad, who had an old Navy buddy that lived in Little Washington. O’Connell now owns that buddy’s house, absorbing it into the 17-acre, 22-building Inn complex that’s staffed by 150 people and features a meadow the size of two or three football fields.

The Inn has grown to be the county’s second-largest employer after the public school system. It also relies on area farms for meat and produce, a practice that started in the Inn’s first years because suppliers delivered not to the hinterlands. (Conscripting local farms also served a political purpose. It gave suspicious residents a stake in the interloping restaurant.)

After 40 years, O’Connell owns much of Little Washington, including the post office and many other buildings. The town’s longtime lawyer also pays rent to O’Connell, who saw in Little Washington a setting that mimicked the lovely hillocked vistas around the rural Michelin-starred restaurants he visited during various formative trips to France.

He first went to France in 1967 after, he says, a GW English professor observed his flagging scholastic enthusiasm and, over a one-hour lunch at a Chinese restaurant, encouraged O’Connell to do something more personally edifying. Two weeks later, O’Connell says, he boarded an ocean liner, the S.S. France, to Le Havre. He was 21 and stayed nine months, wandering about Europe.

There’s also a now-famous January 1979 trip, suggested by among other noted early Inn fans, David Brinkley, and financed by the Inn’s first-year profits. O’Connell spent weeks ranging around France, eating at as many Michelin-starred restaurants as time and funds allowed. It was education and it was inspiration. He returned an aspiring voluptuary, believing he could do in the provinces of Washington, D.C., what they’d been doing in France since the age of Auguste Escoffier.

“The Inn is Patrick O’Connell,” Sullivan says. “People say, ‘Well, what happens when Patrick O’Connell is no longer here?’, which is an interesting question. He just dreams up things to do that are constantly entertaining or different. He doesn’t get set in a rut. Let me put it differently: He’s obsessed.”

Act III

Patrick O’Connell and I are sitting in an auxiliary-type dining room that’s also a wannabe sun porch. The ceiling is a carnival tent and there are flowers looking adamant in their vessels.

We’re at one end of this dining room. At the other is the main dining room, a draperied place made luxe by neo-Victorianism and Wonderland elegance, cautious eccentricity and mirrors in strange places, potted ferns, aged arras, nap-worthy cushions, fine, fine furniture and a large toy cow on wheels that conveys cheeses to the well-dressed guests.

The dining rooms were decorated by a British stage designer and, of course, match.

We each had one half of an off-menu grilled-cheese sandwich and tomato soup before O’Connell curated some Inn dishes proper as I ate them. He offered guidance and perspective and spoke in disquisitions.

There was a caviar sandwich, a ravioli with dill and chanterelle mushrooms, and finally, a sorbet flight arranged semi-circularly on an artist’s palette made of glass.

“It’s cut,” O’Connell says of the caviar sandwich, “so you can pull a little one if you want to be dainty, but it’s kind of fun to throw the whole thing in your mouth.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever had caviar,” I say.

“Oh, that’s exciting. We should have brought a bowl of it.”

O’Connell is seated just askew of next to me, posed as if next in line for the throne of Bacchus.

He has on a chef’s coat and chef’s pants. The former is a holy shade of white and the latter a handsome Dalmatian print. (A Dalmatian named Luray is the Inn’s mascot.) O’Connell wears both like ecclesiastical vestments.

“Close your eyes,” O’Connell says. “And shove the whole thing in your mouth and try to think about the mouth-feel as if it were bubbles of champagne that you wanted to burst quietly.”

“How would you describe a ‘mouth-feel?’”

“Oh god, in so many ways. It helps if you close your eyes. Let’s focus.”

“So this is caviar with radishes? I see a little red onion—”

“And some compound butter, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you’re primitive now. So think of, uh—sex. It’s all the same.”

I eat. He is dismayed.

“You opened your eyes very early,” he says.

“Sorry.”

“Are you receiving any sensation of fullness in your mouth?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, good.”

“Oh, there’s an aftertaste.”

“Yes, yes, this is good. What most people don’t focus on is that there is: one, two, three—there’s an echo chamber that continues.”

“When did you throw this together? Wait, is that reverent enough?”

“Oh, that’s perfect. A month ago. Six weeks ago. Don’t make more out of it than it is. It’s just you and that. You’re blind—I love primitive, peasant ingredients paired with expensive and decadent things.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I have a foot in both camps. Aristocratic food—it lacks soulfulness and a connection to the earth. It’s sort of over-refined sometimes. So the sandwich would be okay without the caviar, but it puts [the sandwich] into a different light, and it makes [the caviar] accessible and it makes it more exotic than just having, you know, caviar on toast.”

“Do you try to do that with all the things you make?

“You always want something. What we’re conveying here is the sense that you’re visiting someone’s home, so that it has a great deal of personality and authenticity. And whatever you’re eating is probably what you would be likely eating in someone’s home who loved food or loved to cook. It wouldn’t be in any way restaurant-like. It wouldn’t feel like you were in a restaurant. Every two days, I have to tell the staff, ‘Would you stop acting like you’re in a restaurant?!’”

He laughs.

It might be the soundtrack to a magnificent sin.

Act IV

There is a tendency to conflate, in a mystical fashion, the Inn at Little Washington and its puckish chef.

O’Connell is not just the restaurant’s chef and proprietor, he is its first mover and sustainer, its once and present force. He shaped the tiny, Rappahannock County town of “Little” Washington, Va., around the Inn and into his own pocket universe, remaking it in the image of fine, pastoral restaurants in France and the lucid dreams of Lord Dunsany.

Over time, the Inn at Little Washington has become one of the world’s great shiny objects, burnished daily for 40 years by O’Connell’s fanciful immanence.

“I don’t know what would happen to the Inn without him,” says former Inn sous chef Tarver King, now the executive chef at the Restaurant at Patowmack Farms in Lovettsville, Va. “If Patrick sold the Inn, there’s no way it would survive. For anyone who would go there afterward, it would just be something completely different. It would be like a dead star, kind of just be this hole where Patrick was.”

King worked at the Inn from 2002 to 2003. He was in his early 20s at the time and served as what the French call a tournant: a utility chef. He says he kept notebooks of what he learned at the Inn, ensuring that O’Connell’s wisdom could be of future use.

“It was like being in some weird, theatrical circus every day,” King says. “But it was serious and there was a lot that went into it and a lot of eyes on you, and you had to do things exactly right.”

O’Connell is known to take wayward cooks into the Inn’s elevator—said to be the only elevator in Rappahannock County, it’s decorated like a country grandma’s dining room—to correct them in private. The one-on-one chats are often conducted at volumes exceeding Standard Indoor Voice. The vocabulary is as direct as it is creative.

On a busy Saturday night when King did not satisfactorily plate a pistachio-crusted lamb dish, O’Connell didn’t bother with the elevator.

“He just comes up to me and he’s like, ‘What the **** are you doing?!” King says. “Then he starts screaming at me and then he was like, ‘You’re not just smashing it down! You don’t just throw it on the plate! It should look like elves leaning their treasures against a tree!’”

King did not ask O’Connell to specify the type of elf.

“I’m saying it calmly now; he was yelling that at me—‘It should be like elves leaning their treasures against a tree!’” King says, laughing. “And I just did not know what the heck he was talking about. … It was terrifying and scary and all that kind of stuff, but it really gave me an insight into what he wanted.”

Act V

Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema has eaten at the Inn at Little Washington nearly 30 times, at first keeping a tranche for finer eating in the grim days before his expense account.

In 2017, he eschewed basic geography not for the first time and named the Inn at Little Washington the best restaurant “in” Washington, D.C.

Typically, Sietsema dines anonymously. He doesn’t want his status, which involves a certain amount of kingmaking, to influence food or service. But he’s known Patrick O’Connell for years and he, like O’Connell’s sous chefs current and gone, has trouble squaring an Inn at Little Washington sans its sovereign.

Would an O’Connell successor redo a room in a racecar theme for a hot rod-enthusiast guest? Try to rent elephants for a lawn party? Make Caesar salad ice cream? Help guests drive a rented Rolls Royce around town? Put a chandelier in the chicken coop?

“Who does that?” Sietsema says. “Who sees this?”

O’Connell purveys a funky theology. The five-time James Beard Award winner is as avant-garde as he is a classicist.

An audition to cook at the Inn involves creating a multicourse meal and finishing with an omelet, rolled, not folded. It is a French technique that’s washed out of fashion. Presenting an “envelope of scrambled eggs” takes time and requires a dexterity uncommon to common cooks.

“Eighteen years of doing this professionally and that’s the only job interview where I ever had to make an omelet,” says Kristin Butterworth, a sous chef at the Inn from 2009 to 2010. She’s now the executive chef at Lautrec at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Farmington, Pa. “That’s one of the things that’s going back to the classics and his appreciation of the classic technique. Julia Child and a lot of French chefs swore by the fact that if you couldn’t make an omelet, you probably couldn’t make most things right.”

Butterworth’s tryout version was, alas, not rolled.

“It was summertime,” she says, “and I did just a cheese omelet with a ratatouille over the top of it and he did not like the way I folded it.”

O’Connell is known for helixing a fidelity to the hallowed tenets of French cuisine with subversion and good fun. He likes oxymoronic ingredients, compound flavors and dabbling in whacked alchemies.

“I remember one dish when I started was a scallop ceviche with local blueberries,” says David Shannon, an Inn sous chef from 1987 to 1995, who in 2014 founded L’Opossum in Richmond, Va. “And at first I was like, ‘Oh my god, you’re crazy, you’re putting blueberries with scallops’—and it was fantastic. It not only completed the scallops, but the scallops also brought out a spiciness in the blueberries that you would not notice otherwise.”

O’Connell, in what might be some brand and myth-building, describes his feel for flavor pairing as an “innate intuition” and something akin to synesthesia. He also speaks of his sense of taste in algebraic terms.

He goes on about solving for X and finding variables and says he’s cursed himself to taste only flaws. Essentially, he doesn’t believe he eats like everyone else.

“It sounds cliché, but everything he just touched turned to gold,” Shannon says. “You could be struggling with a presentation of a plate, not being able to get it right, and he would come and just touch a few things, shift things here and there and say, ‘Oh, you need to add this, take this off,’ and it was just improved a thousand percent. He could do the same thing when you were tasting something and couldn’t get the flavor quite right or needed something else but didn’t know what it was. And he would say, ‘Oh, well, try this,’ and that was it.”

O’Connell, largely, is a self-taught cook, but he also spent nearly 20 years as a restaurant itinerant. He moved through kitchens and dining rooms around the United States while also exploring France, where, starting around the opulent time of Louis XIV, they codified cooking.

Brian Patterson, a former culinary instructor who now is chef at the Glenstone modern art museum in Potomac, Md., says the French way champions technique over ingredients, but ingredients helped move France toward culinary supremacy. The country’s climate and soil, he says, befitted good agriculture and provided the French the necessary software.

High-class French food started as royal fare. The French Revolution in 1789 helped democratize it. The people, in part, used food to establish a new national identity, Patterson says.

In the late 19th century, the aforementioned Auguste Escoffier made it all academic, standardizing cooking techniques and even devising the brigade de cuisine, a military-inspired kitchen organization delineating jobs and ranks. It is still followed today.

“It’s the precision and it’s the history, and it’s always been a benchmark for serious cooks,” Sietsema says of French cooking. “There’s a structure and history and this romance attached to France and the French way of cooking and living.”

Its influence on O’Connell is obvious.

“His food is always very precise—there’s a hominess to it, which seems like a contradiction,” Sietsema says. “I like that his flavors are never jarring. They’re always flattering. He does the best version of X, Y and Z, with a touch of whimsy.

“Take one dish. It’s a classic on the menu. It’s lamb carpaccio—rosy, sheer slices of lamb crusted in herbs with a scoop of Caesar salad ice cream. In anyone else’s hands this would be a mess, but in this case the lamb is perfectly cooked. It’s got that little crackle, that little brightness from the herbs, and the Caesar salad ice cream melts into the lamb and becomes a room-temperature sauce—and even before it becomes a room-temperature sauce, the chill against the warm lamb is delicious and you see where it totally makes sense.”

Sometime in his 20s, O’Connell ended up in a commune where, as a birthday present, a friend gave him Julia Child’s seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking. (Child would later celebrate many birthdays at the Inn at Little Washington, including her 90th when O’Connell told her she could order anything on or off the menu, and she asked for a cheeseburger and fries.)

O’Connell says he made every recipe in the 700-page bible exactly as written three times before permitting himself to fool about with Child’s sacred dictums. O’Connell was succumbing to Francophilia. By the time he opened the Inn, it had spread to his heart.

Act VI

The Michelin Guide, this year, is 118 years old. To some, the exalted and French-lensed fine-dining manual is more fusty than fresh, especially when assessing American restaurants. To many, many others—Patrick O’Connell among them—this little red book started by a tire company trying to move product remains inviolate and the standard of haute cuisine, despite any shortcoming, real or leveled.

“There’s an international playing field, which is so much needed,” O’Connell says. We’re having dessert. He’s got a creamsicle and I have six sorbets. He’s opened a door because it’s a nice day. “In the U.S., you have The New York Times, you have The Washington Post. You have, usually, the dictates of one individual. A lot of trust is placed in that individual. They have oftentimes earned it and gone to great lengths to be fair, but they’re seeing and evaluating through one prism. The Michelin model is a group of inspectors who pool. It’s a committee. It’s not based on one inspector’s perspective solely.”

Initially, the guide focused on France and featured car-maintenance tips, maps and gas station recommendations. By 1920, resembled the modern guides, and in 1931, Michelin introduced its three-star rating system.

The most recent guides cover more than 40,000 restaurants in 24 countries, including the United States. Four American cities—Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.—are in the purview of Michelin inspectors, who operate so anonymously they’re, reportedly, forbidden from telling their families what they do.

Michelin is oft assailed for that secrecy. Even former inspectors have betrayed company omertà to criticize the organization. In these screeds—one defrocked inspector, Pascal Remy, wrote a book about it—the guide-makers are usually portrayed as understaffed, biased to celebrity and tradition, and not opposed to payola.

Those are the extreme grievances.

O’Connell acknowledges the guide is probably more accurate in France on its home field, while American restaurants, on the strength of U.S. multiculturalism, have evolved well outside the French model enforced by Michelin. However, the Inn at Little Washington, with O’Connell as its steward, lord and lobbyist, has that Michelin allure.

He also worked the appropriate parties for years to lure Michelin to the D.C., area and have it rule on the Inn.

Michelin did so in 2016, awarding the Inn two stars in the first edition of its D.C. guide. The Inn picked up its third star in September, becoming the first Washington, D.C., area restaurant to do so. Currently, 14 American restaurants hold Michelin’s highest rating. Michelin’s first U.S. guide, which covered only New York, came out in 2005.

“Why are you so enamored with this model?” I say.

“It was a broader plane,” O’Connell says. “I fell in love with true hospitality—not the American idea of making money in a restaurant. There are so many ways to exemplify true hospitality, but one that a journalist wrote about once was: There is a great country house and hotel where a guest is having such a glorious time that he feels that he’s at a house party. And as he departs, kissing everyone and shaking hands, he forgets to ask for the bill. And the host—the proprietor—is flummoxed but wants to keep the illusion going so badly that he never presents him with one. No one wants to break the spell.”

Act VII

In early September, the Inn at Little Washington threw a 40th anniversary party dubbed “Innstock.” It was modeled off Woodstock, which O’Connell attended and vaguely remembers.

Innstock attracted two dozen former Inn sous chefs and a thousand or so guests to eat, drink and sweat on a Sunday night. O’Connell tried to rent elephants, but no-fun insurance companies frowned, so the chef, emceeing the ruby to-do in traditional hippie regalia, settled for his cheesemonger doing a Jimi Hendrix impression (the guy even learned to play his Strat left-handed), a classic rock cover band, three performances by a Cher-impersonating drag queen and 25 minutes of fireworks that left the lawn party smoky.

It was a clear night in the middle of nowhere.

Behind the usual stars, you could almost see the Milky Way, its brightest dust dully sheening, and off in the dark grass there was some fey sense that hidden in the hills is a forgotten door to Faerie and the last talking caterpillar.

When the sun went orangey down at 7:37, Little Washington felt like somewhere else.

“It is clear to me that the Inn has a life of its own and identity of its own,” O’Connell says. “It not only deserves to continue to evolve and flourish, but definitely will. We have a second and third generation here now, which is committed to carrying that on.”

I asked about what happens to the Inn at Little Washington after Patrick O’Connell.

“Bob Fasce, who I believe has returned twice, began as a young apprentice and later became the executive sous chef, is our acting general manager and is committed to the Inn’s continuance.”

O’Connell veers, fittingly, into a food analogy.

“I baked a cake. Now we’re depending on you to frost it. The key isn’t so much a building or a compound of buildings. It’s a culture. It’s an international legend that isn’t just dependent on any one person. It definitely stands on its own.”

Others disagree.

“Now, does it need constant attention and is it a bear to operate? Yes. I’m certainly not naïve enough to believe that it will not change and evolve in some fashion—and I would not want it to be a shrine to me or a museum. I wouldn’t want to impose on it. It changes every day and it evolves. I liken it to a garden that needs to be weeded and fertilized. It’s growing. So what I take confidence from is what it has deep in its DNA and its track record a history of evolution and growth and adaptability. It’s never been frozen in time.

“In the early days, people would leave and they always said, ‘That was so good! Don’t ever change a thing!’ And the minute the door closes, we’re changing everything as fast as we possibly can to keep pace with everything that’s changing around us. Change is inevitable, but what cannot ever disappear is the collective memories of such a vast number of people and generations that this place has had meaning for and has been a symbol of something.”

Would you name an heir?

“I think that I would not choose a successor unless I thought they were as passionate as I have been about the Inn’s continuance and evolution. The world is changing pretty rapidly. Tastes are changing pretty rapidly. No one should think that I feel that this is static. Each year, I play a slightly different role. Other people have been able to rise to the occasion and do some of the things that we used to be totally dependent on me for. So I remain a presence and a visionary and sort of a driving force, but it’s a very simple philosophy and it’s one that everyone here understands. When something is done, we have to ask ourselves: Is that the best we can do or is there any way it could be better? And how can it be better tomorrow, even when you think it’s perfect today?”

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