Celebrity chef turns a garage into world-class dining destination

Patrick O’Connell got his first job in a restaurant when he was just 15, and still thought he wanted to be an actor when he grew up. His middle-class parents weren’t thrilled by his work at Mr. H’s Hamburgers, “but I loved it,” he says, because the takeout joint’s owners were “real and gritty.”

He was also drawn to the kitchen’s pulsing energy. Yet the seeds that helped O’Connell grow into one of America’s most celebrated chefs and luxury Innkeepers were actually sown much earlier, when he was a little boy at the side of his maternal grandmother, Nora.

A resourceful, Depression-era cook, she would step into her Wisconsin kitchen during his summer vacations carrying an apron full of apples, “and then there would be a wonderful pie in the oven,” the chef recalls in a quiet, pillowed nook overlooking a koi pond in the Inn’s luxurious dining room.

“She was always finding things that had been discarded and turning them into something healthy. ... Her self-sufficiency was so alluring. ... I regarded her as a magician.”

Cameron Smith is both the maítre du fromage and first-ever water sommelier at The Inn at Little Washington.

Born on South Capitol Street in Washington, D.C., and raised in suburban Clinton, Md., O’Connell studied theatre at Catholic University while waiting tables in the late 1960s.

“I liked the idea of inhabiting someone else’s reality, and being someone other than yourself,” he says.

Growing up in Prince George’s County, he knew there was a big, bold world out there. So “as soon as I could, I ran” after college to Europe. His year abroad both deepened his love of food and his appreciation for the art of the table.

“The food was so glorious,” especially in France. “And the reverence the culture had for chefs and restaurants was amazing. It was an art form.”

A friend had advised him to buy property in rural Virginia before he left on his European adventure in 1967 so he’d have somewhere to come home to. It was nothing more than a small mountain shack in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he says, but when he returned a year later to ponder his future, it afforded him a place in which to cook, garden and devour cookbooks from the local library.

Along the way, he fell in love with cooking his way through Julia Child’s cookbooks. Friends were so amazed by the results that eventually he moved to a larger farmhouse and opened a catering business with former partner Reinhardt Lynch, using only an electric frying pan they bought at a yard sale for $1.59, a wood-burning cookstove and a business card typed on an $8 typewriter.

Soon after opening the catering business in 1972, O’Connell got to meet Child herself at an event put on by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. Starstruck, he blurted out that he was catering events with her recipes, “but not making any money.” To which she responded, “Oh, but you will. Surely you will!”

“And it was like a voice from on high,” he says.

He never looked back. Eventually the couple’s fabulous parties and dinners found an eager audience in the horsey set around Middleburg (he catered the wedding reception of Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner in 1976).

By 1978, O’Connell and Lynch had saved enough money to not only rent half of an 1895 garage in the tiny village of Washington (population: 150), but also to build a proper kitchen. O’Connell was just 33 then, and a self-taught cook.

The spot wasn’t completely new; he had driven by the gas station as a child with his four brothers and parents on family vacations in the Shenandoah Valley. The town itself is named for our first president, who is said to have danced in a building that’s now part of the Inn. (The “Little” in its name distinguishes it from the nation’s capital.)

Over the years, O’Connell has grown his restaurant into a 25-building complex on 17 acres that employs nearly 300 people, making it Rappahannock County’s largest employer.

Tribune News Service