Not every small town in America is accustomed to a regular stream of black S.U.V.s, secret service agents and the thrum of helicopters. But for Washington, Va., with a population of fewer than 100 people, it’s a regular part of life. The village, just over an hour from a more famous Washington — Washington, D.C. — is home to the Inn at Little Washington, a restaurant and hotel that in more than 40 years of existence has hosted presidents and first ladies, Supreme Court justices and senators, and maybe even your aunt who drove in from Pittsburgh just for dinner.
Almost immediately after it opened in 1978, the Inn at Little Washington drew rave reviews. One, two and then three Michelin stars followed. Its tables have been kept full by diners from the next town over and as far away as China, and most notably, from Washington and its inner circle. For some in the capital, dinner at the Inn, all eight courses of its $388 prix fixe French-influenced menu, has become more than a cause for bragging rights at a cocktail party. It’s become a place to dine off the record.
On any given night, Supreme Court justices might be dining within earshot of a senator or lobbyists in open opposition to a case they are hearing. Among them might be a couple who drove up from Florida for a significant wedding anniversary, and another starting a trip to the United States not in the nation’s capital but with a meal at the Inn. In the next room, the governor of Virginia might be celebrating his birthday with a meal and a bottle of local wine. A cabinet member, or a general, or an ambassador or a secretary of state could be a few chairs away.
The highly orchestrated production of seating D.C.’s movers and shakers for dinner is a task undertaken with practiced diplomacy by the Inn’s chef and founder, Patrick O’Connell. A self-taught cook who studied Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” with monastic devotion, Mr. O’Connell has been a Washington darling since he catered the wedding reception of Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner, the future senator of Virginia, in 1976.
Mr. O’Connell and his then partner, Reinhardt Lynch, opened the Inn in the deep-red countryside of 1970s Virginia, transforming an abandoned car garage into a restaurant serving a European style of food that had previously been unavailable in a rural area not far from Shenandoah National Park. The men parted ways in 2007, and today the area is largely dotted with Trump-Vance signs, with the occasional Harris-Walz banner popping up in a field or along the side of the road.
“I still remember the first time I went there to have dinner,” says José Andrés, the chef, restaurateur and founder of World Central Kitchen, who has been dining at the Inn since the 1990s. “I’m one hour and a half from Washington, D.C., in an oasis of good food and good wine. I realized that there was this chef in the middle of nowhere, in a little town far away from everywhere.”
The precision of the dining room’s seating arrangements, and the choreography of continuously attracting big-name diners from both sides of increasingly combative parties, is not taken lightly. Yet anyone looking to decipher which way Mr. O’Connell’s dining room might lean — red or blue — will probably come up empty. Aside from its cuisine, its accolades and its stars, the Inn has maintained a veneer of political neutrality. A place where guest lists are for Mr. O’Connell’s eyes only, and where, roughly 70 miles from the capital’s contentious political climate, diners seemingly put politics aside, at least until the cheese course is finished.
Chef Rob Rubba, himself no stranger to political diners and Michelin ratings (his D.C. restaurant, Oyster Oyster, has one star), credits the sense of remove from the capital for the restaurant’s bipartisan appeal: “To go all the way out to Little Washington and this magical little town where the Inn is. I think that’s extremely powerful. You can just be transported there and kind of escape for, for an hour or two.”
For many in big Washington, the allure in dining in little Washington is the Inn’s tight-lipped codex. Names of candidates and senators who ate here decades ago might slip through the cracks, yet look for information on anyone who had dined here in the last two presidential administrations and the reservation book is guarded with a secrecy usually reserved for an Intelligence agency.
“In the early days, many notables started coming who we didn’t recognize,” Mr. O’Connell says of the Inn’s first years, before the ease of a quick Google search.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that she had been dining at the Inn with her husband for 30 years before anyone noticed. Laura Bush, the former first lady, slipped in for her 60th birthday party. Edward M. Kennedy, the longtime Massachusetts senator, was a regular, as was the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Alan Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell were married here with guests including Barbara Walters, Katharine Graham and Colin Powell.
Not everyone could slip into little Washington without notice. When Al Gore, then a presidential candidate, came to the Inn, he brought with him a large security team complete with slobbering K-9 dogs. Welcoming the Reagans for lunch by helicopter proved to be too much of a logistical nightmare, so Mr. O’Connell prepared a picnic for them at a nearby farm. Likewise, when efforts to bring Queen Elizabeth II to the Inn fell through, Mr. O’Connell presented a meal at the Governor’s Mansion in Richmond instead. And for Michelle Obama, Mr. O’Connell served lunch at the White House.
Inevitably, each new administration brings in a fresh crowd of new diners, whether conservative or liberal. “Democrats and Republicans like good food, either way,” Mr. Andrés said.
But in today’s charged political climate, can a restaurant be just about the food? As David Shannon, the chef behind L’Opossum in Richmond and a former executive sous chef at the Inn said, “It’s a little bit about trying to win hearts and minds.”
And stomachs, too, perhaps.
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