Dinner at the Inn at Little Washington — chef Patrick O’Connell’s famous three-star Michelin restaurant in Washington, Virginia — is no ordinary feast.
The night could begin with an eggshell filled with roasted garlic custard, chanterelle mushrooms, and Parmesan foam. Midway, you might be served a chartreuse of savoy cabbage and lobster with a caviar beurre blanc. And for dessert? A cheesecake disguised as a perfect pear, complete with a single drop of water rolling down its curve.
It’s a menu full of technical finesse and prowess, but earning a spot to cook in O’Connell’s kitchen begins with a far more basic dish: a simple omelet.
Courtesy of the Inn at Little Washington
If you’re imagining the kind you’d find at your local Waffle House or Denny’s — massive, floppy, bulging with cheese and veggies — you’ve already failed the interview. O’Connell expects the classic French version.
“Americans have a very different sense of what an omelet is because they eat it in a diner on a griddle, and it’s a sponge with one texture,” O’Connell told Business Insider. “The French prize the egg cookery.”
O’Connell taught himself how to cook with Julia Child’s seminal cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which includes a recipe for the perfect French omelet. Decades later, her technique still resonates.
“Julia’s description for it was the best scrambled eggs encased in an envelope of egg, rolled and turned out onto the plate,” O’Connell said. “It’s luscious and absolutely wonderful, even without a filling.”
And, according to O’Connell, an omelet can reveal a lot about a person’s cooking background.
Anneta Konstantinides/Business Insider
“Sometimes, they will give you a mess in the pan or a hard-cooked, floppy, one-dimensional kind of thing,” he said. “But a proper French omelet takes a certain dexterity and skill. You can’t think about anything else when those eggs are in the pan. It requires complete focus, illustrating that the simplest things are often the hardest.”
A great omelet isn’t the only test. The aspiring chefs also need to make a salad, which O’Connell believes isn’t as easy as it seems.
“I think we’ve been corrupted by the concept of the salad bar,” O’Connell said. “The role of a salad in the context of a meal is often as a sort of palate cleanser and a refreshing interlude. It’s about choosing the greens very carefully, the crunch of the greens, the freshness of the greens. When made correctly, a salad can be intoxicating.”
“Rarely do you have somebody who gets it right off the bat,” he added. “So then you begin to teach it.”
Anneta Konstantinides/Business Insider
Once you’ve earned a spot in O’Connell’s kitchen, you’ll help feed some of the most powerful people in Washington, DC. Over the past four decades, the Inn at Little Washington has become a destination for the political elite — attracting presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices. Among its famed fans were the Reagan, Kennedy, and Bush families.
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Still, O’Connell, who turned an abandoned gas station into the three-star Michelin restaurant, isn’t fazed by his star-studded clientele.
“This part of the world is very at ease with celebrities,” he said. “They need to get away, and they want to go to a place where people aren’t jumping up to either congratulate them or insult them. There’s a certain invisibility here.”
Plus, it’s hard to beat the Inn at Little Washington’s breakfast menu, which, of course, includes a perfect French omelet.
