The pair, who had met in Washington, D.C., in 1971 on a house-painting job, paid rent of $200 a month for half the garage space. Washington was in a "dry" county, so they couldn't serve wine until they had initiated and won a county referendum. The village had no sewer system, so they had to build a septic field. They bought their blue-and-white plates—"so thick no one could break them," O'Connell says—for ninety-five cents apiece at a fire sale. O'Connell taught himself to run a sewing machine and made the dining-room curtains from a surplus bolt of Laura Ashley fabric. He and Lynch made do with patisserie-style paper doilies instead of using tablecloths, but they insisted on cloth napkins, a decision that presented dire logistical problems. Eventually they arranged to drop off the dirty napkins and pick up clean ones behind a restaurant in New Baltimore, twenty-one miles to the east, at the end of the linen service's westbound route.

The kitchen went into what had been the grease pit. Early specialties ran to such items as roast chicken with tarragon from O'Connell's garden, veal scaloppine with Calvados sauce and a starter that stayed on the menu for years: crabmeat-and-spinach timbale, "served under glass," as O'Connell told me with a rueful smile. But before long the bounty of the area began shaping the menu, as O'Connell discovered sources for trout, shad roe, country ham, rabbit and, some years later, Kobe-style Wagyu beef, from a neighboring farm. The servers were mostly local country girls and boys, well drilled by Lynch.

Soon the New York Times's Craig Claiborne, Julia Child and other food gurus came running. So did Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand and many other Hollywood stars. Washington big shots took to celebrating their big events at the inn; Alan Greenspan, of the Federal Reserve Board, and Andrea Mitchell, of NBC News, were married there. Little shots have joined in the fun as well: my wife, Betsey, and I take foreign friends who are skeptical of American culinary prowess there; we went there to sample the Appalachian wild leeks, called ramps, one spring; and we celebrated Betsey's sixtieth birthday there. Our daughter, Catherine, and her husband, Grant Collins, spent a gala single-night honeymoon there pending a longer trip.

O'Connell's cooking is less tortured and less self-consciously "creative" than that of certain other leading lights of U.S. gastronomy. It represents a hardheaded amalgam of foreign and regional traditions. He braises Four Story Hill Farm rabbit, from northeastern Pennsylvania, in local cider and serves it with a grits soufflé and wild mushrooms. You can almost imagine eating something as delicious in Italy, but the cider adds a distinctive fruity acidity. Huckleberries appear with foie gras and sweetbreads. Sometimes he pulls off a three-continent bank shot, like Chesapeake Bay soft shells deep-fried tempura style and imaginatively and triumphantly combined with Italian mustard fruits—shades of the Four Seasons, which served them with crisp shrimp.

The changing seasons change the menu. Lamb in springtime, venison in fall, fruits and vegetables as they reach their best. On our last visit, as spring turned into summer, Betsey and I opted for morels and asparagus (on a crunchy miniature pizza made with Virginia ham and Fontina), as well as the first tiny Rappahannock County strawberries, with lemon verbena ice cream. We passed up—on a menu listing almost three dozen choices before dessert—fiddlehead ferns (in a risotto), sorrel jelly (with lemon cream and caviar) and rhubarb vinaigrette (on an endive salad). But O'Connell does not hesitate to introduce exotic ingredients, like Hawaiian freshwater shrimp served with charred onions and a rousing mango-mint salsa.

Our favorites were scattered through the meal: a full-flavored but miraculously light spring pea soup, the pizza, the crab, the rabbit, a pale green parsley risotto with frogs' legs (Frenched, like lamb chops) and an amazingly delicate cucumber sorbet. When we sat down, Scott Calvert, the young sommelier, asked, "Why not let me do the thinking tonight?" and we did. He chose a wine for each course, mostly French, all excellent. A Condrieu (Georges Vernay Coteau de Vernon 2002), unusually full of tropical-fruit flavors, did wonders for the freshwater shrimp, and a honeyed, amber-hued 1933 Malmsey Madeira from Michael Broadbent made an ideal dance partner for the cheeses.