At some restaurants, diners leave with a palmful of mints. At others they take their leftover rolls or steak bones. At The Inn at Little Washington, the luxurious little Virginia restaurant with a big international reputation, every guest is offered a personalized memento: a menu with the guest’s name printed on it and greetings like “Happy Anniversary,” often with the logo of the guest’s college, business or whatever is appropriate. These keepsakes cost the restaurant $7 to $12 apiece.
Chef-owner Patrick O’Connell doesn’t stop there. Whether in the kitchen or at the printer, no detail is too small for him to obsess about. The menu’s size—just large enough to accommodate an 8.5-inch-by-11-inch insert—should not be so big as to endanger the wine glasses on the table, nor so small that it looks like a luncheon or party menu. It is best printed in-house, in case it needs to be revised even in the middle of the evening. It should exude luxury with a heavy stock cover. And like the restaurant itself, it needs a fresh look once in awhile: The Inn’s menu soon will be more colorful, less prone to staining from greasy fingers, and printed on only one side to make it more suitable for framing.
Of course, that’s only the wrapper. The meat of the menu—the four-course, fixed-price dinners and the eight-course tasting menu—reflects more than a quarter-century of refinement.
“My theory is that it takes one month from the time you put the dish on the menu until the staff fine-tunes it,” O’Connell says.
The chef needs to taste it every night, to sit down and try to eat it the way the guest might. He says he hasn’t forgotten the trend of julienned vegetables, when chefs never seemed to notice their customers’ struggle to fit those long strands neatly into their mouths.
Ask O’Connell about how a dish makes it onto his menu, and you’ll understand why his restaurant has won such a wide range of culinary awards. Take the rabbit, for instance. It’s raised just down the road, and in the Inn’s early days it was simply braised with prunes, cider and a sprinkling of sassafras, a good dish but one that lacked elegance.
Then came the acquisition of a circulating water bath that could maintain temperatures within one degree. Thus the experimentation began. O’Connell wrapped the rabbit in plastic and slowly cooked it at 120 degrees Fahrenheit so it wouldn’t shrink and its fibers wouldn’t tighten. It was browned at serving time. Still, the loin was tricky because of its uneven thickness.
“So I put two loins together and they made a perfect round sausage kind of thing,” he says.
Next, he discarded the plastic and wrapped the loin in house-cured pancetta. Then he highlighted how young the rabbit was by including its tiny ribs as a whole, doll-size roast. O’Connell then added “two little sauces.”
“The dish was like a little rocket launch,” O’Connell says. “The public would never believe the amount of thought and fine-tuning it involved.”
In winter the rabbit presentation includes a rutabaga purée, in spring a pea purée and morels. In all, the process of refinement can take more than half a decade.
Early in its nearly three decades, the Inn changed its menu from à la carte to fixed-price. By now it consists of the tasting menu, the fixed-price menu with seven to nine choices for each course, and a vegetarian alternative, plus canapés, a palate cleanser and other treats.
Name: The Inn at Little Washington, Washington, Va.Opened: 1978Tables: 30Menu items: 6 to 10 per courseBest seller: pan-roasted Maine lobster with baby spinach, grapefruit and citrus butter sauceNewest dishes: medallions of rabbit loin wrapped in house-cured pancetta surrounding a lilliputian rabbit rib roast resting on a pillow of English pea purée; potato-crusted tuna Wellington on chickpea tagineChef-owner: Patrick O’Connell
O’Connell has learned to predict just what his guests will order. “Lamb at Easter, beef on Sunday afternoon,” O’Connell says, proving the point. Beyond those, he says, his guests order the dishes in equal proportions, particularly since the menu reflects his mix of clientele.
The once-in-a-lifetimers order the enduring classics: tuna with foie gras or lobster with grapefruit, which are his No. 1 and No. 2 sellers, respectively. The jaded gourmets perk up at the mention of foie gras confit with brandied cherries and sauternes jelly, fennel sorbet with cucumber and celery “martini,” or steak-and-kidney pie.
The menu must balance these categories and convey that each dish is celebratory. This is, after all, a special-occasion restaurant.
“Many of our guests are coming once every five years,” O’Connell says. “If you come once a year, you are a regular. Once a month, they are all like extended family.”
To Washington Post restaurant critic Tom Sietsema, the Inn’s menu is like a playbill. He sees dinner at the restaurant as a drama. It is designed like a show in which you can move around both physically and mentally, from the lounge to the dining room and outside. Each course is its own act, and there is always something new, he says.
The Inn was the first restaurant where Sietsema saw lamb three ways and beef two ways, vegetable sushi that looked like little fish, and doll-size miniature canapés on a big silver tray. Here was his first tasting menu.
“The major advantage of the fixed-price menu with extensive choices for each course,” says the Inn’s general manager, Andrew Welch, “is that with everything the same price, people don’t have to worry abut the cost and they can just focus on what they like.”
So the Inn is enduring at the same time that it is constantly changing. The staff has grown to 110—34 of them in the kitchen—the dinner tab has escalated to a minimum of $168 on Saturday nights and $208 for the tasting menu. Ever confident of the Inn’s future, O’Connell has just taken on a bank loan of $17.5 million to buy out his ex-partner Reinhardt Lynch and expand into a presidential suite with its own dining room and kitchen, a gamekeeper’s cottage of “rustic elegance,” an outdoor dining pavilion and garden pathways.
Special Report
Thus far, the Inn’s menu has provided a personal greeting, a collectable memento, a structure for ordering, and a guide to the restaurant’s classic and innovative fare. Next, to get around the growing compound of buildings and pathways, the menu will probably need to include a map, if not a personal GPS.