The Inn at Little Washington

Washington, Virginia, was laid out in 1749, with a young George Washington among its surveyors, and it has hardly grown since. In 1978 Patrick O'Connell and his partner Reinhardt Lynch rented a former garage at its crossroads and opened a restaurant there with little money and no professional training. The Inn at Little Washington, as it became, now spreads across several buildings in the village and holds three Michelin stars.

History

O'Connell and Lynch had been running a small catering business in the Virginia countryside before they took the building. The first dining room was furnished on a shoestring, and they had to build the kitchen themselves. The cooking drew critics from Washington, DC, some sixty-odd miles away, within the first few years, and guests began to drive out for dinner and ask to stay the night. Bedrooms followed upstairs, and the inn later joined Relais & Châteaux. Lynch eventually stepped away from the partnership, leaving O'Connell as proprietor and chef. When the Michelin Guide first covered Washington, DC, in 2016, it reached out into the countryside to include the inn and gave it two stars. A third followed in 2018. O'Connell, who taught himself to cook, has run this kitchen for more than four decades.

Architecture and design

Joyce Conway-Evans, a London designer who had worked in the theatre, dressed the interiors, and the rooms read like a stage set for an English country house: fringed silk lampshades, patterned wallpapers, layered fabrics and portraits in gilt frames. The effect is deliberate and theatrical, which suits a place where dinner is a performance. Behind the inn lies a walled garden. The village around it, a handful of streets of old frame and brick houses, sits under the line of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Rooms and suites

The bedrooms are in the main inn and in several houses nearby that the inn has bought and restored over the years. They are few in number, and each is decorated in the same layered English manner. Some have balconies over the garden, others views of the mountains. A stay here is built around dinner, and most guests book a room so that they do not have to drive back to the city afterwards.

Dining

Dinner is the reason to come. O'Connell's cooking is refined American food built on French technique, with a strong loyalty to the farms of Rappahannock County. The menus change with the seasons. A table set inside the kitchen lets guests watch the brigade at work, and the kitchen staff wear Dalmatian-print trousers, a nod to O'Connell's dogs. The cheese course arrives on a trolley in the shape of a cow, called Faira, that moos. The service has the precision of a grand hotel dining room. Across the street, Patty O's Cafe and Bakery serves a simpler menu.

Weddings and events

The inn is small, and its events are scaled to match. Private dinners and small celebrations are held in its dining rooms, and the kitchen table can be reserved for a party. It is a setting for an anniversary or an intimate wedding dinner rather than a large reception.

Location

The village lies in Rappahannock County, at the foot of the Blue Ridge, around an hour and a half by car west of Washington, DC. Washington Dulles International Airport is about an hour away. Shenandoah National Park and the Skyline Drive are close, and the surrounding hills are covered with farms, orchards and vineyards. Few people pass through by chance; the roads in are country lanes, and most guests arrive having driven out for the evening. A luxury hotel in Washington, Virginia, is an unlikely thing in a village this size, and that is much of the appeal.