When you visit the Inn at Little Washington, Patrick O'Connell and Reinhardt Lynch's glorious pleasure dome in the lee of the Blue Ridge, sixty-seven miles west of Washington, D.C., you expect sumptuous food and sybaritic accommodations, and the inn delivers on both counts. Peerless among American country hotels, it has won unprecedented accolades from the Mobil Travel Guide, AAA and Zagat, as well as five James Beard Awards. What you may not expect is how much fun—old-fashioned, rib-tickling fun—the place is.
Seriousness about good food is welcomed in the dining room; solemnity is not. Despite its English-country-house decor, the inn, located in the village of Washington, Virginia, is more like a hotel in the French or Italian provinces, where no one expects the guests to whisper and put on their Sunday-morning-go-to-church faces. Goodness knows O'Connell and Lynch don't. Instead of deploying a silver Christofle cheese trolley, they display their fromages atop a rolling fiberglass cow that moos winningly as it arrives at your table, sometimes escorted by Lynch, who oversees the front of the house. O'Connell, a self-taught, brilliantly intuitive chef, wears a black-spotted white apron and trousers inspired by the partners' pet Dalmatians (one of whom, Pearl, wears a dainty pearl necklace). Most nights, an irreverent phrase or two creeps onto his menu, like "Pepper-Crusted Tuna Pretending to Be a Filet Mignon."
To top it off, O'Connell—who studied drama with the legendary Father Gilbert Hartke at Catholic University—is an accomplished raconteur, always ready with a lively anecdote about the inn's modest beginnings. Like the time that Lynch, who used to drive a battered Dodge Dart into "Big" Washington three nights a week to buy provisions, broke down on his way back. The first customers were already in their seats, and O'Connell was waiting nervously in the kitchen, his larder almost bare. He sent out demitasses of soup he had made that morning, then ventured out into the dining room himself to take orders for the main course.
"Young man," a woman asked, "how can I be sure your soft-shell crabs are fresh?"
"Madam," O'Connell remembers replying, "they're so fresh, they haven't arrived yet."
All of today's unalloyed excellence had unlikely beginnings in an unlikely setting. Washington, Virginia, the only one of the more than 30 Washingtons in the United States that was surveyed by George Washington himself (in 1749, when he was 17), has 192 residents. During the Civil War, Stone-wall Jackson and his troops maneuvered in the area and John S. Mosby and his irregulars harassed and confused the Federals. By the time O'Connell and Lynch opened for business, in 1978, Washington was, as it is today, a collection of clapboard and stucco buildings ranged along seven streets. The partners set up in one of the largest of these, a former garage at the main intersection that had sold Atlas tires and Standard Oil.
Lynch, now in his fifties, had come to Washington, D.C., from his native Indiana during the Vietnam War, a conscientious objector assigned to work as a hospital orderly in the nation's capital. In 1978 he was working as a waiter at the Bavarian Chef near Madison, Virginia. O'Connell grew up in Clinton, Maryland. In 1978 he was cooking at a hotel near Charlottesville whose kitchen ceiling was so low that, at six foot two, he could not stand up straight in it.
