Main, Middle & Gay: A Chef Finds His Place in the World Against All Odds

Main, Middle, and Gay are the three streets in tiny Washington, Virginia, where Patrick O’Connell has spent nearly half a century building the Inn at Little Washington. They also provide an apt title for a memoir in which the celebrated self-taught chef looks back at the unlikely route that brought him there and at being gay during decades of enormous social change. 

O’Connell begins with his childhood in the 1950s and early jobs as a paperboy and short-order cook, followed by college, communal farm life, travels in Europe, and an increasingly consuming interest in food. He taught himself to cook from books including Mastering the Art of French Cooking before he and his romantic and business partner, Reinhardt Lynch, opened a restaurant in a converted garage in rural Virginia in 1978. 

Their ambitious restaurant initially baffled and sometimes antagonized the surrounding community, but quickly began drawing diners from Washington, D.C., and eventually much farther afield. O’Connell recounts the creation of the Inn’s elaborate world, his growing prominence as a chef, the couple’s experience of prejudice, and the eventual collapse of both their personal relationship and business partnership. 

Nearly fifty years of the Inn provide the memoir’s larger arc, from its improvised beginnings through awards, expansion, financial crises, and occasions including cooking for Queen Elizabeth II. But Main, Middle & Gay is primarily O’Connell’s account of finding a place where his appetites, theatrical instincts, sexuality, and fascination with hospitality could coexist, and then constructing an entire world around them.