Chef Patrick O’Connell is talking a lot about kissing. The chef behind The Inn at Little Washington and its three Michelin stars puts this unorthodox metaphor in a culinary context, but it’s flowery all the same. He’s specifically talking about mentoring young chefs and sommeliers on the ideal relationship between patron and provisions. When eating, he doesn’t want to feel as if he’s “been hit in the head with a baseball bat.” Instead, he prefers something more loving.
“I want to swoon,” O’Connell tells InsideHook. “For a brief instant, there’s no separation between your body and the food. It sometimes can be likened to a kiss. You’re aware of nothing — unless it’s not a good kiss.”
The latest culinary journey at The Inn is bound to make patrons swoon, as O’Connell launched a nine-course caviar menu earlier this year. Staged at the restaurant’s kitchen table for up to six people, the ongoing $2,500-per-person meal is presented in partnership with Petrossian and includes a paired wine or Champagne. The idea evolved out of collaboration last year when The Inn hosted a black-tie centennial party for the caviar brand, which was attended by Alexandre Petrossian, grandson of the founder. During the exclusive event, O’Connell himself gained a better understanding of and appreciation for their specific caviar offerings.
“So we thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to share that with more people?”
From there, the experience continued to grow and shift, with O’Connell deciding to enhance an already ritzy dinner by placing patrons inside the kitchen — “In the winter months, there’s a cozy fire,” he adds — that begins with an offering of a bump of caviar right on your hand as the purest expression of the food. From there, diners progress through the various courses, working through new interpretations to get to that deeper understanding that O’Connell himself experienced.
“There’s no fishy taste in great caviar,” he says. “I think that’s something that may have turned people away from it early in their life. When we taste or eat it, generally, we’re not given enough…so it takes a little while to attune your tastes to and discern the subtleties — but that’s part of the fun.”
Can Caviar Ever Truly Be Sustainable?
It’s synonymous with luxury, but the production of caviar is a complex and ethically challenging businessAcross various sizes, colors and regions, diners will experience caviar the Inn at Little Washington way. Part of that includes what’s bound to be a showstopper dish: a caviar cheesecake. While it’s meant to evoke the feeling of a traditional cheesecake, it’s a savory approach made with crème fraiche, cream cheese, a bit of lemon, caviar purée, a slow-cooked egg yolk and a bit of chive oil.
“What you have is a beautiful little stunning visual composition of the shape contrast of a cheesecake coated with black caviar, then white underneath, and then black sauce,” O’Connell says. “You are able to enjoy caviar in two different forms. It’s sort of a [way] to fool the eye and play with the palate.”
The cheekiness of this speaks to how O’Connell wants patrons to approach the entire meal, infusing something seen as very luxe and stuffy as joyous and demystified. “If you could bring a 10-year-old along — if you saw fit [laughs] — they would thoroughly enjoy it,” he says. “It’s playful.”
While O’Connell realizes that each person who books the meal will take something different way from it, whether that’s someone who comes in for a big wedding anniversary or a honeymoon, he hopes there’s both fun and education to it. But above all else, he believes it to be a defining experience. “That’s what we saw at the 100th anniversary,” he says. “[Diners] wanted to be part of something that was singularly unique, and they wanted to learn something. Which I believe every diner deserves and craves — to not only leave with a beautiful memory, but a tangible educational component.”
The entire process is an education for The Inn, too. O’Connell sees the whole concept as both a refinement and an evolution of the superlative experience they’ve long cultivated. He mentions they’ve done a lot of testing to get it right, but admits there’s a level of nervous excitement.
“We will be on pins and needles and very thrilled to really collaborate with the guests and see what their reactions are,” he says. “We go through these phases sometimes where I feel like we have to push our guests, and then I go through these other phases where I think, good God, the guests are pushing us! This is the guests pushing us and us pushing the guests to go into somewhat uncharted waters.”
At the end of the day, caviar is deceptively simple in its construction. It’s just eggs. But to O’Connell, it has the potential to be so much more. It’s an opportunity to have an experience, to have a sensation that evokes something distinctive. In short, it should come with the excitement one may experience in a kiss.
“To allow someone to have an undiluted, sensual feeling of swallowing the caviar off the top of the hand forces them into a swoon effect,” he says. “That there’s nothing in the world except their palate and this caviar on their own hand. There’s nothing more sensual than that.”
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