New England

Restaurants aren’t supposed to be real. Real you can get at home. Restaurants are for fantasy of one kind or another. A shot-and-beer bar with sawdust on the floor can fulfill a fantasy or bolster an ego as well as an elegant French dinner with all the trimmings. It just depends on who you want to pretend to be at the moment.

All this comes to mind because Jill and I went to a restaurant that belies everything I just said. There’s not a drop of fantasy in the package.  It’s simply what it is and it does what it does and it’s been doing it at the same location for thirty-six years.

Bloodroot is a self described vegan/vegetarian/feminist restaurant that was created all those years ago by Selma Miriam and Noel Furie. Selma runs the kitchen and Noel holds down the front of the house. They’ve perfected their act and they do it exactly the way they want to do it. Your fantasies are not the issue.

When you walk in, Noel instructs you to look at the menu listed on the wall. You tell her your choices and pay up front.

“They’ll call out your name when your food is ready and then you get yourself a tray and carry it to your table.”

Martha’s Vineyard in the Fall is the secret treasure of Vineyarders. The “summer people (some are not)” have returned to their sophisticated rat races, leaving perfect weather and fabulous restaurants to the people who really love the Vineyard – those whose families have been living in Martha’s Vineyard since, well, the 17th Century.

It is a time of weddings, fishing tournaments, sunny days and starry nights.

My favorite Vineyard restaurant, Atria, centers its activities, neither in its elegant upstairs restaurant nor its garden pavilion, but in the basement pub with its naked Marilyn Monroe photo by the bar. Now we know winter is nearby and the robust clam chowders and slow braised potpies begin to appear on the menu.

While this restaurant is local, its owner chef isn’t! Trained by our wonderful Wolfie – Wolfgang Puck, Chef Christian Thornton and his gorgeous wife, Greer Thornton have made Christian’s gourmet training and the Vineyards fresh local flavors and organic produce a marriage of perfection.

However, in the basement pub with its cool jazz on the weekends, “gourmet” is hidden among what at first glance seems ordinary comfort food – The Burger!

Living in Los Angeles, we know it's Fall by looking at our calendars not by the weather. October is usually one of our hottest months with no colorful, falling leaves, frost or crisp, cool days to be found. While I don't miss Winter, after two decades of living in the California sun, I still desperately yearn for the sights and smells of Autumn.

Since traveling is rarely an option, I have begun to enjoy the season by living vicariously through pictures and blogs I find on the Internet. The current crop is all about apples. The visions of pies, tarts and cakes, as well as piles of this fresh fall fruit have left me craving one of my childhood's sweetest and simplest joys: the Atkins Farms Cider Donut.

My grandmother was obsessed with them and subsequently, so were we. It was her way of treating us, without breaking her bank. (They cost a quarter a piece then, now still a steal for 50 cents.) Once harvest season began, we'd head out to Atkins to indulge in their – now famous – baked goods...and fresh-pressed apple cider. Heated to take the chill off the morning.

They bake the donuts fresh every day, infusing them with the cider and liberally dusting them with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar.  The recipe hasn't changed in over 35 years with good reason.  In 2008, they were rated by Saveur Magazine as one of the 12 best donuts in the country. Something I – and most of Western Massachusetts – have known since 1972. Well, 1976 for me.

Why did I love our dinner at this place so much? Could it be that The Dream Away Lodge is rumored to have been a brothel during the Depression years, which speaks of a rich history of satisfying and unburdening the cares of its clientele? Could it be that it’s so tucked away in the woods around Becket, Massachusetts that your GPS will not get you there — so that its current owner, Daniel Osman, refers to it as “Brigadoon” – a place that may exist only in a dream?

Jill and I dined there the other evening with three young and exuberantly attractive actors, who if you added up all their ages together would still be younger than me. And it didn’t matter — not at The Dream Away, where time has no sway.

Chef Amy Loveless’s menu is delightfully all over the place — as is the table setting — no plate, no fork, no spoon is like another. Thai Beef Salad; Korean Short Ribs; Moroccan Chicken; Armenian Grilled Lamb; Black Pepper Tofu and Sticky Rice; Grilled Vegetable Terrine with Quinoa Tabouleh and Olives; their self-proclaimed Famous Meat Loaf.