Notes from Northeast: Oasis, Fantasy for Sale

  |  March 9, 2012

Every week we hear from Suko, a former downstater now living in Dutchess County, about life upstate. This week: the inside scoop on some fantasy business property for sale.

In Woody Allen’s Sleeper, his character Miles Munroe wakes 200 years in the future from his Happy Carrot health food restaurant.  Sleeper was my first Woody Allen, and still one of my favorites, but maybe because I have a total love of 70’s health food.

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.”
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or… hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy… precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.

Since I first saw it, I’ve had a fantasy that Oasis- International Bistro, on Route 22 between Amenia and Millerton, was a 70’s style health food restaurant. Maybe it’s the bubble windows, or the golden pine furniture, more simple than modern, but in my dreams plates are piled with brown rice, steamed greens, sweet potatoes, and hijiki, with a side of miso-tahini dressing.

Girls with long braids, calico dresses and freckled noses serve grilled tempeh and hemp milk green tea lattes sweetened with local maple syrup. There’s a garden of medicinal herbs, lettuce and kale for tisanes and ginger, apple, fennel, green juice. A flower labyrinth a la Kripalu or Shoving Leopard Farm invites post-meal contemplation.

In reality the space has limited parking, and the building is a victim of weather and neglect. There isn’t a university or other enclave of idealism nearby so customers and employees might be hard to come by. The price has been reduced to $154k and it sits on 2 acres of a busy thoroughfare, so if you want to build my dream, I’ll grow the veggies at the farm up the road.

more photos on the jump.

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