Grilled breast of young pigeon with seared foie gras, sour cherries (Photo courtesy The Inn at Little Washington)
Drive about two hours north of Richmond toward Rappahannock County, and point your GPS toward Washington, Virginia, a hamlet whose population hovers just over 100.
Its nickname is “Little Washington,” to distinguish it from the nation’s capital, about 70 miles away, bearing northeast.
For decades, travelers have been drawn to this community by the food at The Inn at Little Washington, prepared under the hand of an acclaimed chef — Patrick O’Connell.
The Inn was named the No. 1 restaurant in the Washington Post 2017 Fall Dining Guide, and also last year, the American Automobile Association bestowed its highest rating — The Five Diamond Award — on the Inn for the 29th consecutive year, making it the longest-tenured restaurant in the history of the program.
Then, in September, the celebrated Michelin Guide announced that The Inn at Little Washington would be awarded a coveted third star, earning it the culinary guide’s highest rating during a year in which the Inn is already celebrating its 40th anniversary.
“Patrick O’Connell came to this town with nothing and built it into a world-class enterprise,” says Washington Mayor John Fox Sullivan, who adds that the Inn, which rose from the confines of a $200-a-month rented garage, now generates 80 percent of the town’s revenues through meals and lodging taxes.
“Restaurant people are their own special breed, like theater people or circus people. They’re colorful, they’re bullet-proofed with hearts of gold.” —Patrick O’Connell, chef-owner at the Inn at Little Washington
O’Connell, a self-taught chef, pored over cookbooks from a local library to acquire a grounding in French cuisine before he launched his cooking career, first working as a caterer and later opening his own restaurant.
Earlier, he was an eager learner at the feet of his grandmother when he spent summers in Wisconsin.
His mother, he says, had a talent for presentation and arrangement as she raised a large Catholic family in Washington, D.C., where O’Connell grew up.
His mother also had a penchant for small details and orderliness, putting down newspapers for her children to walk on weeks in advance of the arrival of houseguests.
“My mother always cooked in high heels,” O’Connell recalls, with a nod. “I think you take all the influences of your life, put them in a big pot and stir, and the best rises to the top,” he says.
David Shannon of Richmond’s L’Opossum (left) with Patrick O'Connell in the early ’90s (Photo courtesy David Shannon)
David Shannon, chef and owner of the highly acclaimed L’Opossum restaurant in Richmond’s Oregon Hill neighborhood, worked at The Inn at Little Washington for eight years. His mind is imprinted with the memory of his arrival at the Inn in 1987, following a delayed plane trip from Vermont, where he had just completed two years of training at a culinary institute.
“Patrick grabbed my suitcase and said he had a table for me in the garden,” Shannon says. “Then they proceeded to send out course after course of the most beautiful food I’d seen only in magazines.”
Shannon says O’Connell was not only interested in how the food was prepared, but also in how it was served and how it was received by patrons. “I used what I learned from Patrick,” he says.
Alumni from The Inn at Little Washington are scattered nationwide, and many of them have opened prominent restaurants, including David Dunlap, chef at Maple & Pine Restaurant at the Quirk Hotel in downtown Richmond.
While The Inn at Little Washington sources much of its food from local farmers who grow to the restaurant’s requirements, the Inn’s own farm operations — including a quarter-acre specialty cherry orchard and two farm gardens — also provide an abundance of just-picked vegetables and fruits.
“For instance, we grow French beans, and we pick them very tiny, which you can’t buy from other local farmers,” says Joneve Murphy, the Inn’s farmer-in-residence, who also tends the chicken, sheep, llamas and goats on the Inn’s property.
Asparagus, blackberries, ginger and turmeric are some of the other products that emerge from the Inn’s gardens. Last year, the Inn also harvested 500 pounds of specialty cherries from its orchard of dwarf cherry trees.
O’Connell, 72, who began his restaurant career in a mom-and-pop restaurant on a busy highway, says that what first drew him to the restaurant business is what has kept him in it.
“I loved the duality of the restaurant people behind the scenes and the illusion they maintained in what is now called the front of the house,” O’Connell says. “It gave me the feeling of possessing a faculty that normal people didn’t have — that you could live in two worlds. You could enter the world of illusion and step back into the blood and guts zone.”
