One warm spring evening, PW met affable chef Patrick O'Connell at Restaurant Daniel on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and munched on pizza with wild mushrooms and other deeply savory snacks from his new cookbook, Patrick O'Connell's Refined American Cuisine. Chef proprietor Daniel Boulud himself prepared the recipes. Later, PW talked with O'Connell by phone.

PW: What is refined American cuisine?

Patrick O'Connell: It equates with haute cuisine, which is the term the French use to distinguish everyday cooking from cooking as art. I think we are now at the point in our culinary evolution where we are on a par with—if not eclipsing—haute cuisine.

You present the recipes in a clear and simple way. Yet the book is also surprisingly moving to read. You zero in on exactly what is most wonderful about dishes that most of us remember from childhood, and then you create better, more refined versions of them. When did you first realize that you had a particularly keen sense of smell and taste?

When you're young, you think everybody is like you, but I did have an uncanny sense of smell and I was surprised that other people didn't have it. Also, I remember being about 11, and telling someone in my family that I could tell when a cake was finished baking in the oven while I was in the shower. It was as if there was a wire running from me right into the food.

Smell is a powerful form of memory. Smelling or tasting something remembered from long ago can trigger deep feelings. Maybe this is what makes your book so moving to read. You build on remembered smells and tastes.

It also counteracts this shame or embarrassment that many of us feel about our culinary heritage.

When I started cooking, I also realized that I could taste something and replicate it. Then I could improve on it. I would create memory reference points, and I recommend that people do this. Go out and find the best food. When you experience the best, you realize that it is humanly possible to create it, and you're coming in later in evolution so you can improve on it.

I think the discipline or approach you need to take to learn to cook is the same for anything you might want to pursue. You have to give yourself to it with your whole body and your whole soul. You have to give it everything that you have. I've given cooking demonstrations to young chefs where I've brought a broom. I demonstrate how to use it. The point is that when I learn how to become one with the broom, when I learn to engage completely in what I am doing, I will sweep the floor perfectly. It is the same with cooking. I have to learn to become one with the food, to engage with what is in front of me with my whole being.

What is the source of your confidence? You are a self-taught cook working in a restaurant and inn deep in the countryside who has come to be considered one of the greatest chefs in the world. How did that happen?

Well, I've always believed in dreams. I believe we are in the process of dreaming our existence, and we have more control than we think. For me, the key was putting myself in the right environment. In The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda, the shaman teaches Castaneda the importance of finding your place in the universe, the place where you are at home. When I came to this area in my 20s [the countryside around Washington, Va.], I knew it was my place. Nothing ever felt so right. In a city, I am constantly distracted. Here, all my priorities shift to very basic things, to the goodness and importance of staying warm and dry and having something to eat. Here in the country, you realize that you want to share what you have with other people, so you have a sense of connection with others.

The way the recipes are written leads readers to the sense of being in that more basic, quiet place. It's fascinating to think that the preparation and sharing of food can lead us to a sense of finding our place in the universe, to that place of connection. But can the food itself communicate this? Can eating dishes that are prepared with that awareness, that oneness that you describe, lead us to greater awareness or a greater sense of connection?

If you make it that way, it will be received that way. People will sense it no matter how dense they are. All kinds of people come to the Inn at Little Washington. We have old people celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary who would never ordinarily go to a fancy restaurant. Jaded young chefs who want to analyze the food. If you have purity of intention, it gets through. It reaches them all.