Becket: Dining at the Dream Away

Arriving for the first time at the Dream Away Lodge is like discovering a room in your own house that you didn't know existed — not just a room but an attic or closet chockablock with fanciful things to explore or leaf through or try on.

You look around in wonder. How could this have been here all along and you never had discovered it?

In the case of the Dream Away, it is easy to understand. The lodge is tucked off back roads of Becket, deep in the October Mountain State Forest, several stages of separation from most of the well-traveled Berkshire destinations. You need the detailed directions that proprieter Danny Osman gives you when you call to book a table. Even with explicit directions, it is easy to think you must be lost enroute.

When we drove up, the sprawling clapboard house was hunkered down under a thick blanket of snow. Tall trees loomed darkly against a blue-black sky. Colorful Christmas lights — the big, pointy old-fashioned kind — invited us in out of the night. We felt a bit like Hansel and Gretel stumbling upon the gingerbread house and were amazed to see the parking area already

To the right as you come in is a large inviting room ringed with low, informal seating: plush cushions, old hassocks, soft rugs. This is the music room, which fills for open mike nights and professional performances.

Entertainers ranging from Bob Dylan to Liberace have held forth in this venerable, but comfy salon.

In the center downstairs is a tavern room with eclectic furniture and a grandly retro bar paneled in colorful bakelite-like blocks. It is mostly empty at 6:30 but elbow to elbow as the evening progresses.

Here Osman bid us welcome in a kitschy leopard-trimmed velvet Santa hat and directed us toward the ell-shaped dining room beyond. He warned us not to trip at the low step into the front room, but I was so busy gawking, that I promptly bumped right into it.

The place is an "I Spy"-worthy museum of tchochkes, ceramics, mobiles, doodads and memorabilia. The chairs don't match, the linens don't match — nothing even thinks of matching — but it all pulls together with a fearlessly funky logic of its own.

Candles, strings of miniature lights and a glowing fire kindle a holiday spirit, and flowers abound in pots, in vases and tucked into figurines.

One can easily picture coming for the Christmas dinner, which promises a pull-out-the-stops buffet featuring crown roast of beef stuffed with chestnuts, seafood bouillabaisse, baked ham with brown sugar glaze and pineapple, roast beef with demi-glace, the vegetable works, and cookies and desserts to please the most ardent sugarplum-dreamer. Or for the New Year's Eve bash with sit-down dinner, followed by music and dancing and champagne as '06 rolls in.

Our visit was a regular weekend night, and we ordered from the prix fixe ($27) dinner menu, which provided a very generous meal — a couple of choices of starters, five entrée selections, salad and lots of desserts.

One also can go a la carte from the bar menu, which has simpler salad-pasta-grill op-tions.

The service is comfortable and attentive, but laid back. The staff seems to take the busy room in stride, helping one another and keeping a relaxed but steady rhythm.

The pumpkin butternut squash bisque sounded like a double whammy of orange vegetable, but proved a light milky soup, pleasant, but a tad bland. Warm garlic bread arrived in the knick of time to up the flavor scale.

The other first course, farfalle (aka butterfly-shaped pasta), came with nice chunky homemade tomato sauce and plenty of grated parmesan.

The vegetarian entrée was a flaky turnover of phyllo pastry, plump with spinach, mushrooms and tofu and served with a hearty eggplant and sun-dried tomato sauce.

The pork tenderloin plate fanned thick slabs of meat with a swash of glaze against heap of savory stuffing. Bowls of vegetables came on the side, a crisp medley of steamed carrots, Brussels sprouts and squash, and oven-roasted red potatoes with wonderfully chewy skins.

Small plates of salad were ser-ved, in the European manner, af-ter the main course.

We helped ourselves to coffee at the big old chrome and lacquer wood stove.

Getting up gave us an opportunity to check out the collection of ceramic Madonnas on the mantelpiece and a glass-fronted case full of porcelain teacups.

For dessert we had a peach cobbler and a chocolate satin pie. The first was an oozy concoction with peaches and granola-like crumble and a small scoop of vanilla ice cream; the second, a cookie crumb crust with sweet chocolate pudding and whipped topping.

As the dining room filled, it got noisy, but in a happy, laughter-filled way. There were quite a few parties of six or seven, eating family-style and obviously much at home. The food tips more to comfort than to haute cuisine, but it is plentiful and good and amplified by the whole experience of the place.

Osman has clearly succeeded in bringing the Dream Away back to a grand incarnation of the off-beat hospitality that has made it a favorite haunt for decades.

He had been a devotee of the place since back in his theater days —he was an actor with Berkshire Public Theater and then with Shakespeare & Co.

When he bought the property from the Frasca family 10 years ago, his vision was "Not to change it. It was perfect," but he has broadened its food horizons, has added award-winning gardens, and would like one day to provide lodgings again, perhaps an artists' retreat.

In any event, it is not the kind of place that you visit just once. Unless you are completely impervious to its spell — there may be slickers who are — it'll keep tugging you back, if only in your dreams.

» Restaurant Review

Dream Away Lodge 1342 County Road Becket, 01223 (413) 623-8725 Style: Happy, hippie hideaway, hosting live music Dress: Casual Open: (Seasonal — Best to call ahead) Closed Jan. 1 to Feb. 14; then weekends only until Mother's Day; then Wednesday through Sunday through to Halloween; then Wednesday, Friday and Saturday through to New Year's Hours: Dinner usually 6 to 9:30; bar 5 to whenever music ends; Sun.(in season) Brunch noon to 3. Prices: Four-course dinner $27; bar menu $7 to $15 range Liquor: Full bar Credit Cards: Cash and local checks only Accessibility: Not totally accessible, but the staff accommodates special needs Reservations: Highly recommended for dinner Noise: Convivial din Live music: (9 to about midnight) Wednesday — open mike; Friday and Saturday guest performers. Specials: Christmas dinner, New Year's Eve celebration, and holidays celebrations throughout the year; private and semiprivate parties