Photograph by Scott Suchman.
Patrick O’Connell is the lord of a Virginia hospitality fiefdom that’s extraordinarily high-end. The Inn at Little Washington, the Michelin-starred restaurant he founded 48 years ago out of a former garage, is now the anchor of a whimsical snow-globe town that boasts such amenities as a “garden of scents,” a manicured walking loop resplendent with llamas and sheep, a sprawling organic garden, and a cupolaed chicken coop with a crystal chandelier. Recently, he referred to Little Washington as a “very happy Never-Never Land” that’s “not Disney and not Hollywood—it’s just life as it ought to be.”
But in his new memoir, Main, Middle & Gay, O’Connell reveals the underbelly of his storybook life. He grew up in Clinton, Maryland—a rural tobacco-farming community south of Oxon Hill, which he says was “kind of primitive, lost in time, and not what I’d call very enlightened.” He describes a ’50s childhood that was ribboned with beauty and terror (sinister nuns, a wrathful father, scrums of bullies who targeted him for being obviously gay), and a ’60s young adulthood cavorting among the DC area’s gurus and criminals and vagabonds and outcasts while working in local restaurants and clubs. The memoir is eccentric. It’s literary and image-heavy, the product of an odd and artistic mind. I talked to O’Connell about some of his early memories—ones that he hasn’t discussed much before but that laid the foundation for his life in food.
The Basket of Goodies
For spans of his childhood, O’Connell writes, he “woke up the entire household just before dawn in a screaming panic night after night,” convinced that the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood was after him. But despite his fear, it was also his favorite fairy tale. He was obsessed. For Halloween, he’d dress as Little Red in a “red crepe paper dress with a flouncy cream-colored ruffle and matching top.” Once, he was physically attacked while wearing it—just like Little Red herself—presumably for the costume’s effeminacy.
To O’Connell, this fairy tale was an early lesson in the protective power of food. He fixated on Little Red’s basket of goodies, which she uses to distract and fend off the wolf. At that time, he felt practically surrounded by wolves, but food was a great source of solace.
“I just loved food in a very different way than the people around me did,” he told me. “I think it was the sensuality and the swoon-worthy factor of food. One can sometimes retreat into beauty for healing from any variety of haunting things, terror being one of them.” His childhood was difficult and frightening—but when he ate, “it made me feel good all over. I didn’t think about anything unpleasant.”
The Spiritual Sausage
O’Connell grew up in the Catholic Church, where he said “the nuns were full of wicked stories” and “talked a lot about the soul.” He became quite eager to visualize his soul, to know what it looked and felt like. Then on a trip to the supermarket, he saw something. “There it was,” he writes, “glowing at me under the fluorescent lights in the refrigerated meat case.” This object was “the diameter of a beer can, about six inches long, in a slick, shiny white wrapper with tight little twists at each end.” The label said gwaltney’s bulk country sausage, and he immediately knew that this was exactly what a human soul looked like.
“The size would fit neatly into your chest,” O’Connell explained to me, “and it just had a sensual allure that made you want to squeeze it.” The tactile aspect was crucial. The soul, he said, could not be made from concrete—it had to be “almost the texture of an organ, like the heart or the liver or the kidneys, because it had to live in the body.” From the nuns, O’Connell had gotten the idea that whenever he sinned, God would mark a black X on his soul, which would remain there until he repented. One side of the sausage wrapper was pure white, and he could imagine the X’s appearing there every time he sinned and the relief of confessing and then seeing them erased. On each trip to the store, he’d stare at the sausage, doing his best not to touch it or slip it into his pocket.
The Phallic Dessert
O’Connell writes that his mother was not an excellent cook, but she did like to host. Her signature dish—the one she would make for important company—was called “Little Nancy Etticoat in Her White Petticoat.” He describes the dish this way in the book: “It was a banana coming straight up through a Dole pineapple ring, surrounded by a chiffonade of iceberg lettuce, with a dollop of Hellman’s mayonnaise dripping down the sides—capped off by a Maraschino cherry.” This was apparently a reference to an obscure nursery rhyme about a burning candle, but the erect, mayonnaisey banana perhaps most resembled something else. “For a small child whose chin barely reached the table,” he writes, that salad had “a rather haunting, larger-than-life aspect to it.”
From the book, I assumed that everyone was in on the joke—that the banana was a winking and irreverent allusion. “No, definitely not,” O’Connell told me. “Absolutely not. It was pure innocence.” The salad, he explained, reflected a dynamic from that era “between people who were unconscious and people who were conscious.” In the 1950s, “you only saw what you allowed yourself to see. We were living a dream, the great American fairy tale; we had swallowed Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and many other myths along the way. Things weren’t questioned.” To some degree, O’Connell could see that the Little Nancy salad was funny—but apparently, his whole family and their guests did not. “Nobody ever said, ‘You have got to be kidding! This is hysterical,’ ” he told me. “They just endeavored to look good while they ate it.”
The Succulent Pear
After high school, O’Connell earned a drama scholarship to Catholic University. College did not go well. He was an outcast among the tie-wearing masses, an impish and rebellious force. In his freshman English class—the only course he enjoyed—he penned these lines: “Leaves are beginning to make scratchy noises in the gutter as another fall comes to the American college campus. But this one is not quite like all the rest because I’m here and I hate it.”
O’Connell, who ultimately dropped out, insists that he has just one happy memory from his short time at Catholic. It was October, and he was walking across a Brookland railroad bridge with a pear that he’d bought at a corner store. “So I was eating this pear,” he told me, “and I had become lost and carried away in its incredible succulence, and the juices started to spurt from the pear, and the warm sun was at my back—and then a train came shooting out of nowhere, rumbling, and everything started to shake all at once, and the pear juices were running down my arms to my elbows, and that bridge was vibrating and shaking. Then, unexpectedly, without my doing anything or thinking about it, a memorable incident occurred”: He spontaneously ejaculated. This moment, he said, “proved to me, once and for all, that food and sex were all one.”
O’Connell once had a memorable experience with a pear that “proved to me, once and for all, that food and sex are all one.” Years later, he served this pear-shaped dessert at the Inn at Little Washington. Photograph by Scott Suchman.
In the dining room at the Inn, O’Connell will often hear a “big macho guy” remarking that his meal is better than sex. He bristles at that. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” he told me. Puritanism “has done so much damage to American culture, and we have a hard time, I think, allowing ourselves to fully appreciate food.” But the pear experience was totally uninhibited, and he wants that for all of his guests.
Finding Bliss
When O’Connell left college, he went to work at a brand-new high-end restaurant called the Three Thieves. It was on Wisconsin Avenue just north of Georgetown, and it was “like nothing I had ever seen before,” he said. “It had a tiered dining room and beautiful bronze sculptures set around on the tables. It was tasteful, and the goal was to create an American-feeling grand dining experience.” He took to it immediately, reveling in this “living theater” of wealthy and powerful DC. “The high rollers were coming there in droves,” he recalled, “and Jimmy Hoffa was one of them. He would often say to me, ‘Look, I’ll give you $50 if you can tell me how to be as skinny as you are.’ ”
Previously, O’Connell had worked at a hamburger counter in his hometown—but restaurant work, no matter how elevated the food, “felt like it was a homecoming or something.” He loved the outcasts and eccentrics who populated the kitchens, and the wafting aromas of the food. “There was a big separation between the world of the guest and what was going on behind the scenes, and moving in both realms seemed to draw from me all of my interests and talents.” Still today, he loves moving between private and public, between underbelly and facade. Finding restaurants, he said, reoriented his life. “I was in a state of complete bliss.”
Dining and Cooking