\n Photograph by Scott Suchman. <\/p>\n
Patrick O\u2019Connell is the lord of a Virginia hospitality fiefdom that\u2019s 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 \u201cgarden of scents,\u201d 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 \u201cvery happy Never-Never Land\u201d that\u2019s \u201cnot Disney and not Hollywood\u2014it\u2019s just life as it ought to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in his new memoir, Main, Middle & Gay, O\u2019Connell reveals the underbelly of his storybook life. He grew up in Clinton, Maryland\u2014a rural tobacco-farming community south of Oxon Hill, which he says was \u201ckind of primitive, lost in time, and not what I\u2019d call very enlightened.\u201d He describes a \u201950s 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 \u201960s young adulthood cavorting among the DC area\u2019s gurus and criminals and vagabonds and outcasts while working in local restaurants and clubs. The memoir is eccentric. It\u2019s literary and image-heavy, the product of an odd and artistic mind. I talked to O\u2019Connell about some of his early memories\u2014ones that he hasn\u2019t discussed much before but that laid the foundation for his life in food.<\/p>\n
The Basket of Goodies<\/p>\n
For spans of his childhood, O\u2019Connell writes, he \u201cwoke up the entire household just before dawn in a screaming panic night after night,\u201d 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\u2019d dress as Little Red in a \u201cred crepe paper dress with a flouncy cream-colored ruffle and matching top.\u201d Once, he was physically attacked while wearing it\u2014just like Little Red herself\u2014presumably for the costume\u2019s effeminacy.<\/p>\n
To O\u2019Connell, this fairy tale was an early lesson in the protective power of food. He fixated on Little Red\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just loved food in a very different way than the people around me did,\u201d he told me. \u201cI 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.\u201d His childhood was difficult and frightening\u2014but when he ate, \u201cit made me feel good all over. I didn\u2019t think about anything unpleasant.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Spiritual Sausage<\/p>\n
O\u2019Connell grew up in the Catholic Church, where he said \u201cthe nuns were full of wicked stories\u201d and \u201ctalked a lot about the soul.\u201d 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. \u201cThere it was,\u201d he writes, \u201cglowing at me under the fluorescent lights in the refrigerated meat case.\u201d This object was \u201cthe diameter of a beer can, about six inches long, in a slick, shiny white wrapper with tight little twists at each end.\u201d The label said gwaltney\u2019s bulk country sausage, and he immediately knew that this was exactly what a human soul looked like.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe size would fit neatly into your chest,\u201d O\u2019Connell explained to me, \u201cand it just had a sensual allure that made you want to squeeze it.\u201d The tactile aspect was crucial. The soul, he said, could not be made from concrete\u2014it had to be \u201calmost the texture of an organ, like the heart or the liver or the kidneys, because it had to live in the body.\u201d From the nuns, O\u2019Connell 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\u2019s appearing there every time he sinned and the relief of confessing and then seeing them erased. On each trip to the store, he\u2019d stare at the sausage, doing his best not to touch it or slip it into his pocket.<\/p>\n
The Phallic Dessert<\/p>\n
O\u2019Connell writes that his mother was not an excellent cook, but she did like to host. Her signature dish\u2014the one she would make for important company\u2014was called \u201cLittle Nancy Etticoat in Her White Petticoat.\u201d He describes the dish this way in the book: \u201cIt was a banana coming straight up through a Dole pineapple ring, surrounded by a chiffonade of iceberg lettuce, with a dollop of Hellman\u2019s mayonnaise dripping down the sides\u2014capped off by a Maraschino cherry.\u201d This was apparently a reference to an obscure nursery rhyme about a burning candle, but the erect, mayonnaisey banana perhaps most resembled something else. \u201cFor a small child whose chin barely reached the table,\u201d he writes, that salad had \u201ca rather haunting, larger-than-life aspect to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
From the book, I assumed that everyone was in on the joke\u2014that the banana was a winking and irreverent allusion. \u201cNo, definitely not,\u201d O\u2019Connell told me. \u201cAbsolutely not. It was pure innocence.\u201d The salad, he explained, reflected a dynamic from that era \u201cbetween people who were unconscious and people who were conscious.\u201d In the 1950s, \u201cyou 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\u2019t questioned.\u201d To some degree, O\u2019Connell could see that the Little Nancy salad was funny\u2014but apparently, his whole family and their guests did not. \u201cNobody ever said, \u2018You have got to be kidding! This is hysterical,\u2019 \u201d he told me. \u201cThey just endeavored to look good while they ate it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Succulent Pear<\/p>\n
After high school, O\u2019Connell 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\u2014the only course he enjoyed\u2014he penned these lines: \u201cLeaves 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\u2019m here and I hate it.\u201d<\/p>\n
O\u2019Connell, 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\u2019d bought at a corner store. \u201cSo I was eating this pear,\u201d he told me, \u201cand 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\u2014and 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\u201d: He spontaneously ejaculated. This moment, he said, \u201cproved to me, once and for all, that food and sex were all one.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/INNATLITTLEWASH_0017-1.jpg\" "\\"INNATLITTLEWASH_0017")
O\u2019Connell once had a memorable experience with a pear that \u201cproved to me, once and for all, that food and sex are all one.\u201d Years later, he served this pear-shaped dessert at the Inn at Little Washington. Photograph by Scott Suchman.<\/p>\n
In the dining room at the Inn, O\u2019Connell will often hear a \u201cbig macho guy\u201d remarking that his meal is better than sex. He bristles at that. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be one or the other,\u201d he told me. Puritanism \u201chas done so much damage to American culture, and we have a hard time, I think, allowing ourselves to fully appreciate food.\u201d But the pear experience was totally uninhibited, and he wants that for all of his guests.<\/p>\n
Finding Bliss<\/p>\n
When O\u2019Connell 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 \u201clike nothing I had ever seen before,\u201d he said. \u201cIt 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.\u201d He took to it immediately, reveling in this \u201cliving theater\u201d of wealthy and powerful DC. \u201cThe high rollers were coming there in droves,\u201d he recalled, \u201cand Jimmy Hoffa was one of them. He would often say to me, \u2018Look, I\u2019ll give you $50 if you can tell me how to be as skinny as you are.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Previously, O\u2019Connell had worked at a hamburger counter in his hometown\u2014but restaurant work, no matter how elevated the food, \u201cfelt like it was a homecoming or something.\u201d He loved the outcasts and eccentrics who populated the kitchens, and the wafting aromas of the food. \u201cThere 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.\u201d Still today, he loves moving between private and public, between underbelly and facade. Finding restaurants, he said, reoriented his life. \u201cI was in a state of complete bliss.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Sylvie](\"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/4c72247b23dd4efd3a37c5de916b7bf0b47621cef68c9bd7e6c4f86a8522a1c3.jpeg\")
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Photograph by Scott Suchman. Patrick O\u2019Connell is the lord of a Virginia hospitality fiefdom that\u2019s 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 \u201cgarden of scents,\u201d a manicured<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[6807,6804,6805,6802,6806,6803,3259],"class_list":["post-11268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-district-of-columbia","tag-d-c","tag-d-c-dining","tag-d-c-fine-dining","tag-d-c-food","tag-d-c-grocery-stores","tag-d-c-restaurants","tag-washington"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@dc\/117275012882350790","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}