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…