Celebrity chef turns a garage into world-class dining destination

Patrick O'Connell got his first job in a restaurant when he was just 15, and still thought he wanted to be an actor when he grew up.

- Tribune News Service

His middle-class parents weren't thrilled by his work at Mr. H’s Hamburgers, “but I loved it,” he says, because the takeout joint’s owners were “real and gritty.” He was also drawn to the kitchen’s pulsing energy. Yet the seeds that helped O'Connell grow into one of America’s most celebrated chefs and luxury Innkeepers were actually sown much earlier, when he was a little boy at the side of his maternal grandmother, Nora.

A resourceful, Depression-era cook, she would step into her Wisconsin kitchen during his summer vacations carrying an apron full of apples, “and then there would be a wonderful pie in the oven,” the chef recalls in a quiet, pillowed nook overlooking a koi pond in the Inn’s luxurious dining room.

“She was always finding things that had been discarded and turning them into something healthy. ... Her self-sufficiency was so alluring. ... I regarded her as a magician.”

Cameron Smith is both the maitre du fromage and first-ever water sommelier at The Inn at Little Washington.