Main, Middle & Gay: A Chef Finds His Place in the World Against All Odds by Patrick O’Connell · Celadon Books · 304 pages · $30 · Order a copy from Friendly City Books
There’s an eye-popping scene less than 70 pages into Main, Middle & Gay, the new memoir by Patrick O’Connell, chef and founder of The Inn at Little Washington in Virginia’s Rappahannock County, bordering Shenandoah National Park. (The book’s title drops a pin at the 48-year-old restaurant’s literal street location, corner of Main and Middle in teensy Washington, Virginia—a.k.a. Little Washington—with its backside facing Gay, though it’s also a declaration of O’Connell’s sexuality.)
Years before he touched his first French cocotte, O’Connell is a young man studying drama at Catholic University in Washington D.C. He’s not really feeling it (“I went to college to pacify my parents,” he admits), and in his all-male dorm, the jocks, who have a peculiar habit of kicking back together in their underpants every night, sneered at O’Connell for being obviously queer.
His first year at school is dismal, O’Connell says—except for an encounter on a campus bridge with a memorably juicy pear. “I leaned over the rail and took a first bite of the fruit while a warm beam of golden light bathed my face… All at once the juices of the perfectly ripe pear came squirting all over my face while at the same moment a freight train went roaring beneath the bridge… This confluence of events precipitated a spontaneous ejaculation, making me realize once and for all the food and sex were all one and would both play a significant role in my future.”
O that the rest of O’Connell’s memoir was as outlandish or as sticky. Forget sex. As a story of food, of how O’Connell taught himself to cook and ended up making The Inn, which opened in 1978, one of a handful of restaurants that articulated a new voice of American cooking in the paradigm-shifting 1980s, Main, Middle & Gay just doesn’t have the juice.
O’Connell paints The Inn’s story as a hero’s journey—his own, of course, from backcountry caterer mining Mastering the Art of French Cooking to master of the $400-a-person tasting menu. Main, Middle & Gay’s subtitle has the ring of Homeric epic: “A Chef Finds His Place in the World Against All Odds.” Like kindred gay chef Jeremiah Tower in his 2017 memoir Start the Fire: How I Began a Food Revolution in America, O’Connell salts Main, Middle & Gay with a heavy hand of narcissism. Yes, every chef’s memoir is in part a vanity project, but where Tower weaves his culinary creativity into a narrative of one man’s surpassing genius—how in the ‘80s he led the movement of chefs to grill over mesquite and seek out hyper-local ingredients—O’Connell says little about the iconic dishes he created, and even less about the chefs he must have inspired and mentored over 50 years. The former drama student has mastered the art of hogging the spotlight.
He makes a bit of room for Reinhardt Lynch, whom he refers to “Ryan Lang” for inexplicable reasons, since Lynch has been extensively reported on as O’Connell’s business and romantic partner, a co-founder and longtime manager of The Inn. O’Connell recounts their euphoric early days in the ‘70s, on a rustic farm nestled up against Shenandoah National Park. He describes how, together, they remade The Inn into a kind of fantasy realm, an American chateau created out of William Morris wallpapers and Scalamandré fabrics, realized by a designer who decorated the residences of the British Royal Family.
By the early ‘90s, O’Connell’s relationship with Lynch/Lang is crumbling, in part, O’Connell suggests, from the stress of being a gay couple at a time and in a part of the country where queerness wears a heavy cloak of stigma. He recalls Lynch/Lang’s hurt in 1992, when O’Connell receives his first James Beard Award and in his acceptance speech thanks those who inspired him, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, and Washington Post restaurant critic Phyllis Richman. Lynch/Lang, the partner and co-architect of O’Connell’s achievement, goes unmentioned.
“It was an era,” O’Connell writes, “when it seemed wise not to draw attention to a gay relationship for fear of arousing prejudice or making someone uncomfortable.” Still, given The Inn’s aesthetic (a friend of mine in D.C. describes it as “gay Goth”), only the most obtuse or indifferent diner would fail to assume O’Connell and Lynch/Lang’s shared vision was informed by anything other than the gay gaze. Would a Beard Awards audience in New York City really have squirmed in its seats if O’Connell had thanked his partner?
This disavowal by omission—it seems to me that this is the heart of O’Connell’s book, a memoir that reveals its author’s majestic aspirations and at the same time his utter lack of authenticity. You come away not knowing the specific flavors of the dishes O’Connell has built his great edifice on, only the scale of the ego behind them. He is the antithesis of that other celebrated chef from Old Dominion, Edna Lewis, who seemed to know exactly who she was and tells us in every recipe she published. She bequeathed us a culinary language rooted in the experience of a place, Freetown, Virginia. In Main, Middle & Gay, O’Connell gives us merely the street coordinates of an ambition that feels ultimately soulless.
John Birdsall is the author of What Is Queer Food? and the James Beard biography The Man Who Ate Too Much. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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