What follows is the chef's account of launching his career and that of the Inn at Little Washington, taken from my notes for an earlier magazine piece:
If you have a desire to cook, all you need is an audience.
The Inn’s
an outgrowth of the home table. We bought a house in 1972 on the county line.
The mountain folk had stacks of wrecked cars. Trailers and school buses were
starter homes. The number of food stamps you received depended upon which
county your kitchen was in. I had read philosophy in college and realized that
everyone has a geographical place, and that this was where I belonged.
Cooking was something you did if
you couldn’t find a real job, by people who weren’t quite acceptable. I had
studied theater at Catholic
University and found restaurant
people stimulating. America
had no real chefs at that time, so I decided to take a year off and go to Europe. It was a revelation to see how Europeans viewed
chefs. I saw then that this was my career.
I worked for two years in Charlottesville, then at Chez Francoise near Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile I researched restaurant possibilities in Rappahannock County.
This was a country store with a junk yard, garage, and an outhouse. I rented
half of it for $200 a month, and borrowed money to build a kitchen in what had
been the garage’s grease pit. It’s now the living room. Locals all asked, “Why
are you doing this? Who’s coming?” The idea that people would drive all the way
out here from D.C. just to eat was unthinkable.
French cuisine was the only one
Americans took seriously then. Julia Childe was an inspiration for me. The
feeling of a restaurant in France
was what I wanted to convey – a sense of place reinforced by food and cooking.
But all the classic French country dishes – kidneys, sweetbreads, frogs’ legs –
were considered wildly exotic. I had one kitchen boy and two wait staff. I
didn’t think there would be enough weekday visitors, so then I would just cook
and serve. Then the first weekend night we had 75 people. The reviewer for The Star asked me if I was sure I wanted
him to write about us, and his review changed everything.
I would take reservations in the
kitchen. In the mornings I would go to the Florida Avenue market in D.C. and buy
food for the evening and pile it in the old Dodge Dart. Then I found someone to
go to the market for me. One day he was very late. People were waiting for
their food, so I served them all a demitasse of soup, to buy time, and it
became a tradition.
What we dealt with in those days
was hysterically funny. We served an awful lot of iced tea in the beginning.
One woman asked if the soft-shell crabs could be fresh way out here, and I
said, “They’re so fresh they haven’t even arrived yet.”
The kitchen helper wore a doo rag
and wouldn’t eat the food. He brought his own bologna sandwiches. One night
when we ran out of food I asked if he had anything in his car, and he said,
“Sack of plums.”
I said, “Get them,” and made a plum
sauce and served it on shrimp.
We started getting our herbs and
vegetables locally and realized they were so much better. We would trade and
barter. Everybody had an excess of something. They would bring zucchinis as big
as your arm, and I said I want them the size of your finger. “Can’t make no
money on that,” they’d say, and I said “I’ll pay for them - four times as much.”
Eventually we trained local 50
farmers to provide us. We became known for regional American cuisine, one of the
first. People were realizing how much better it was, and that they should eat
seasonally. It created a lot of interest, and we offered our own kind of French
country cooking. I’m still expanding on that idea. People want to be able to
walk through the cherry and apple orchards, and the herb garden. Americans were
learning, and they craved another experience. If they could take something back
with them, it increased their enjoyment.
Turning point came when I exercised the option to buy the
place. It led to the development of rooms, and a garden where the junkyard was.
I wanted a fantasy, something that felt like it had been here a hundred years.
It needed a patina of an authenticity. We sent the architectural drawings to
Joyce Evans. She had been a pupil of the British architect who did interiors
for the royal family, and could render a phone booth to look like a ballroom. She
sent back a watercolor that was amazing.
In the off-season every year we
traveled to the great restaurants of the world, and started to go to the great
country houses in England, Ireland, France. We made a list of the best,
and soon realized that France
had the best food and England
and Ireland
the best taste in country houses, the most charming and comfortable. So we did
an American adaptation of those. Joyce patterned our kitchen after the cheese
and dairy room at Windsor
Castle. The hallmarks are
the ceilings, too often neglected in America. They’re the last thing you
see at night and the first thing you see in the morning, and set the tone. They
must invoke an enveloping feeling.
Joyce has been
here for more than 25 years. We gave her an unlimited budget, and she exceeded
it. Initially she chose the fabrics, wall coverings, and furniture and bought
it over there. Then we became her only client.
Ours is never an
adaptation but a refurbishing of old buildings in Little Washington from the
American colonial period. She had also done a lot of stage and costume design,
and understood what a great restaurant needs – it has to both evoke drama, and
make you smile when you walk in. The eye can never absorb it all. On your tenth
visit you’re still noticing things because we strive for a layered feeling,
something that only we can bring about.
It has evolved
like that for 30 years. Joyce has the drapes put in, lined and inter-lined.
It’s so different from the way tings are done in America. When you’re dealing now as
we are with five-star inspectors you have to look hard for the flaws. The
patina is so important – for instance, a carpet must have the right amount of
wear, showing that important people have walked there. We live in an age when
the average restaurant fails in three years, and this is all part of the
strategy to keep the Inn going.
When you grow
something like this from a grease pit, you can’t shake that memory. No one
could replicate this because it has been evolving for three decades. It’s never
static – that’s the key. I think of it as a garden, always being pruned and
tweaked, elevating everything to the same level. We look daily for tangible changes.
I would have become bored years ago if it was all just about the food.
You need a point
of view that reflects the creator’s evolution. Just like you can’t serve food
you don’t want to eat, you can’t create an environment you don’t want to be in.
But as you grow your taste changes. If you’re not embarrassed by what you did a
year ago, you’re not progressing. To create this level of sophistication, so
close to that original shack, is very exciting. Even living in that old shack I
wanted dinner to be formal, as if in London.
Still, sometimes I open the frig
and something falls out, and I think, “Of course! Use it! Black-eyed peas under
fois gras!”
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