Photo courtesy of publisher
Patrick O'Connell has published his life story in "Main, Middle & Gay."
Patrick O'Connell got the best advice of his writing life from an old-timer in Washington, Virginia, years before there was a book to write.
"He said, 'You know the best revenge?'" O'Connell recalled. "I said, 'No, what?' He said, 'Outlive them.'"
He took it to heart. "I did procrastinate on ever allowing the book out into the world until at least a third of the characters were dead," O'Connell said in an interview Sunday with Alexandria Living Magazine.
The result is "Main, Middle & Gay: A Chef Finds His Place in the World Against All Odds", published Sept. 15 by Celadon Books and named for the three streets that meet in the Rappahannock County town where O'Connell opened a restaurant in a former garage in 1978. The Inn at Little Washington is now a Michelin-starred, Relais & Châteaux destination about 70 miles west of Alexandria, and the book is O'Connell's first memoir after three previous cookbooks.
It started as therapy, not a book
The project began more than 11 years ago, when a friend suggested O'Connell call a memoir consultant. He did, and immediately started listing everyone he was worried about offending — the town, the guests, the staff.
"He said, 'Stop right there. You will never develop the kind of story that you need to tell if, at the very outset, you're constricted by worrying about how it's going to be received,'" O'Connell said. "'It's your story, and it doesn't ever have to be published. That's not the point. The point is to think of it as a therapeutic exercise and write it entirely and totally for yourself.'"
That reframing, he said, was "completely freeing." He assumed for years that the manuscript might never see print — or might be published posthumously, so the narrative wouldn't be lost. Meanwhile, the nudging never stopped.
"Not a night goes by that somebody doesn't say, 'My God, this is such an improbable story,'" he said — countryside to half a gas station at $200 a month to what the Inn is now. "'Write a book. Write a book. Write a book.'"
What he wrote, he said, were the stories he couldn't tell at the table. "The uncensored versions, for the most part," he said. "Of course, there's two other layers down of more uncensored."
The part he didn't want to write
The consultant stayed on as a coach, and O'Connell said he had a knack for spotting what was being left out — including the long personal and business partnership that built the Inn and eventually fell apart.
O'Connell opened the restaurant in 1978 with his partner in both life and business, the Inn's co-founder. They ran it together for nearly three decades. In 2007, O'Connell bought him out and became sole owner, borrowing $17.5 million to do it — by his own account in the memoir, taking on all of the risk months before the 2008 recession.
"Moving headlong into that was very disturbing, to say the least," O'Connell said. "It required reliving it. You kind of hoped you could put it behind you, and you did, and thought you had. But in unburying it, you felt you were reliving it."
At the time, he said, the drama in the community and the deteriorating relationship were happening too fast to process, all while he kept "this ship afloat and intact" and the expectations kept climbing. He didn't see the shape of it until the pages were assembled: "I didn't realize that it had sort of a dramatic thread until it was all put together."
Asked if writing it was cathartic, O'Connell paused. "Of course," he said. "I don't recommend it."
What did change was his sense of his own story. "I always felt that I had a good handle on it, and that I was insightful," he said, "but I had never stepped back far enough to look at it in any way objectively."
Now he sees why, as a young reader, he gravitated to books that spanned an entire lifetime. "So it's more than a book about me," he said. "It's a book about life, the human condition and this idea of the most improbable things happen."
Humans and superhumans
O'Connell's first jobs were a paper route and a hamburger joint, and he says the hamburger joint fixed something in place permanently.
"I think anybody's first job leaves an indelible impression, and I immediately felt at home," he said. "I felt I could be myself around these people."
He also noticed the architecture of a restaurant — the guest side, and what's actually happening behind it. "It's a world of illusion," he said. For a young man in the 1950s growing up gay, being careful about who he was, the double life was familiar: "Having to walk a tightrope and be so extremely cautious about my own identity, I felt I already walked in two worlds."
A trace of that survives in the Inn's house language. Staff don't count covers or tops; they count humans. "I say, 'How many humans do we have tonight?' And I say, '93 humans,'" O'Connell said. "I was doing that completely unconsciously, because I don't like numbers."
Then one night a new kid in the kitchen asked the obvious question.
"He said, 'Chef, if they're the humans, what are we?'" O'Connell said. "I realized, holy crap, what are we? I said, 'We are superhumans, you idiot.'"
Paris, and a lid slammed back on
The turn came in France, when O'Connell was still a young man.
"It was as if I entered a different world, a different universe," he said. "I had never seen food so beautiful or so delicious, or seen a culture that revered food, restaurant people and chefs as much as France did."
The contrast with home was stark. "In the '50s and '60s, we were frankly very backward as a nation when it came to food," he said. "Restaurant work was something you did if you couldn't find a real job." In Paris he watched people elbow each other aside to get closer to a pastry shop window. "When I saw that, I realized that was my calling."
He went back repeatedly, and turned the trips into an education: pick a region famous for a dish, eat the dish where it was invented, learn the history behind it. That led him to Caen, in Normandy, in search of tripes à la mode de Caen — a dish he'd never eaten. He was told the best version came from a woman who cooked it herself while her husband worked the room.
"I remember it came in a little casserole, and it was steaming hot," he said. "I took the lid off, and I inhaled the vapors, and I was like, wow."
He set the lid aside. The cook came out of the kitchen and smacked it back onto the casserole.
Back in Virginia, he tried to import the sensibility. "It's a challenge to get Americans to eat certain foods — brains, tripe, kidneys," he said. "But in the early days, I played with all of them and put them all on the menu. I had to create dishes that made them approachable." One solution was a reimagined steak and kidney pie, which worked, he said, because "you got the steak in there with it."
"We have some very preconceived ideas about certain foods as a culture," he said. "Still."
Still playing the finger game
Two women shaped him early: a mother who never left the house without her makeup on — "I think I learned from her how to be bulletproof" — and a Wisconsin grandmother he describes as the most resourceful person he ever met.
"As a tiny kid, when I didn't know what cooking was, I thoroughly believed that she was a magician," he said, "because she could transform things." She painted the house, sewed the curtains and cooked every meal. The parlor held a piano nobody was allowed to sit with, kept ready in case the minister came. She had no staff, but she kept a small blown-glass bell for summoning help, like something out of "Downton Abbey." It's the one thing O'Connell has as a remembrance of her.
He notes that his mother's armor wasn't unusual for her generation. "Many women developed that as a protective device out of necessity," he said, "and I think it's overlooked by the males of the species."
Another childhood habit stuck, too. As a boy he would hold up a finger in the car window to blot out things he didn't want to look at. Writing the book, he realized it was a practice he had continued — standing in the back meadow behind the Inn, trying to erase a building on the horizon.
"I'm still doing everything I did when I was 6," he said. "People are fully formed, I think, by 6 or 8, and they just do an adult version of their childhood self."
When he first saw the property in Washington, a town he puts at 97 residents, he said, he saw "the most beautiful place in the world" — but not a blank canvas. "It was much worse than that. It was obscured by hideous garbage." He has been erasing it ever since.
The town, famously, was not thrilled. Asked about the early opposition, O'Connell allowed that "roadblocks is a good way of putting it." He said he never expected people to be "so sensitive and opposed to change in any form."
Giving up wasn't really available to him. "I was very worried that perhaps my life would — my tombstone would just say 'failure,'" he said. Cooking was the first thing that had ever clicked. "It was a gift being revealed that I did not yet know I had," he said — and a craft that pulled in everything else he loved: people, theater, landscaping, design. "All of this is weaved together into this thread that each element enhances the other."
Casting a spell at the door
That braiding is most obvious in how a guest is received. O'Connell has a sequence in mind, and it starts before anyone sits down.
"The first thing when you walk through the door of any restaurant is the temperature has to alter from the outside world, even if it's just by a few degrees," he said. Then a fragrance, "but ever so subtle" — fresh flowers will do. Then sound, very soft.
"We realized a few years back that we had to cast a spell," he said, "so we want to suggest to people that they're entering a different geographical place and a different time period."
The soundtrack, assembled with a colleague who stays up all night listening to music, leans on old country — Patsy Cline among them — with Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday feathered in. It is not, he stressed, a playlist anyone could buy. "It's essentially my favorite music in the world from growing up," he said. "So it's very personal to me."
The compliment he treasures came from a guest who told him she felt she was listening to the soundtrack of her life. "She got it," he said.
He got a more immediate verdict one night looking into the lounge, where he saw a young couple who almost certainly had never heard the music before.
"Suddenly the young man's hand was on his lady friend's knee," O'Connell said. "I said to my colleague, 'I think it's working.'"
Why the Inn stays independent
O'Connell writes in the memoir about nearly selling the Inn to two different companies before the financing for the 2007 buyout came through at the last minute. He has "a very healthy dread" of the corporate approach, he said, and believes the opposite approach is now so rare that it's a competitive advantage.
"I try to keep money out of my decision-making processes here," he said. "I mean, it can always re-enter" — but not first. "It's the long game here, and so it takes 10 years for an investment to make any sense."
That means guests find something new each visit rather than a bigger operation: a new swimming pool now, a spa coming, a lake he built and more property that has "magically come available."
"It isn't that we want to get larger as much as we want to enhance everything that's already here," he said.
Four actors, one life
Long before it was a book, O'Connell saw the story on a screen. He and the consultant pitched it as a feature film first, he said, but Hollywood was in the middle of its own upheaval; the advice came back to finish the book and revisit the idea later.
Asked for comparable films, he landed on "Fried Green Tomatoes." "All stories about the South are so colorful because of the accents, the characters," he said — though he's quick to say Rappahannock County isn't simply the South. "These were people from the hills and the mountains, some of whom were displaced by Shenandoah National Park in the '40s. They were utterly fascinating."
And who plays O'Connell?
"Well, it requires four different actors," he said. From child to now.
The lightning round
We asked Patrick O'Connell to answer fast. He mostly complied.
Favorite flower: Hydrangeas — soft pink, in an arrangement, "because they're like clouds." Though he notes that everything is context: "Each flower, like each person, has an identity."
Favorite color: "Life for me is about finding everything's place. Every color has a place. Every person has a place."
Guilty pleasure: "I really don't think I've had enough guilt in my life." He did once frequent a Burger King near his gym, where the staff knew his car and his order — proof, he says, of James Beard's line that the best restaurant is the one where you're known. His advice: pick a place you like, become a regular, "and it's amazing what they'll do for you."
Drink of choice: All of them, simultaneously. He orders an iced tea, a glass of white wine and a beer at once and rotates. Current favorite: a shandy, half beer and half lemonade — which he's been told Dutch mothers pour for their children after school.
Three dinner guests, living or dead: Janis Joplin, Barbra Streisand and Hillary Clinton. He's been fascinated by Streisand's story and thinks it still isn't fully understood. The through line for the table: "You've got some pretty great examples of bulletproofness."
Recent viewing: "Ozark" — largely for the young actress, Julia Garner, in it, who reminded him of the tough mountain girls who worked for him in the early days.
Early bird or night owl: "My mother used to say I woke up at midnight." Midnight is still his peak hour — convenient, since that's when he's saying goodnight to guests.
One word for his mother: "Fabulous."
One word for the book: "Haunting."
