FOR ANY FOODIE, dinner at the Inn at Little Washington amounts to both a pilgrimage and a feast. The seminal locavore restaurant, 90 miles from D.C. in Virginia, turns 30 this month. Chef Patrick O’Connell will be feted by Alice Waters, Gary Danko and other gourmet types with a downtown gala Wednesday.
» EXPRESS: You were championing local food before it was hip.
» O’CONNELL: We developed a regional cuisine out of necessity, not because it was cool. Nothing was delivered here — you could only use what you could scrounge or grow. But after a couple of years, you started seeing D.C. menus with “Virginia tomatoes” and this and that. Before that, people thought we didn’t grow anything except tobacco.
» EXPRESS: What is Virginia cuisine?
» O’CONNELL: It’s a fascinating juxtaposition. You’ve got settlers from England and Germany, and African influences because of the slaves. It’s a food very tied to the seasons.
» EXPRESS: Which foods represent the state?
» O’CONNELL: The morel mushroom, which some mountain people pronounce “miracle.” And definitely ham. My belief is that no one should come to Virginia without tasting the ham. You see very sophisticated French people coming here wanting to do that.
» EXPRESS: What’s so great about Virginia ham?
» O’CONNELL: It’s got all these nuances — there’s nothing quite like it. I think it got a bad rep because people cooked it with all that red-eye gravy. At the Inn, we use it as a tiny accent, like the Chinese would.
» EXPRESS: How about the wines in the state — are they getting better?
» O’CONNELL: It was an industry that came from nothing, except that the whole idea came from Thomas Jefferson. Now it has a real sense of place. You can give a Californian or a Frenchman something that grew within a stone’s throw of the restaurant.

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