Why don't more people live on Martha's Vineyard?

Martha's Vineyard is a food lover's heaven.

It's wrought with specialty stores, sprawling farms and blessed with beautiful seafood. I just spent the most wonderful weekend being reminded that cooking is a celebration of what's around you- and on the Vineyard, that's a lot of amazing food!

Living in New York makes it easy to forget how difficult it is to make a simple meal. Granted in New York we have access to sort-of-locally grown produce at Union Square and fantastic seafood at the Chelsea Market, but to gather them becomes an all day event. On the Vineyard, there really isn't another choice than to drive to the water, buy fish caught that day and then head to a farmstead to pick up accoutrements grown in the backyard farm.

Browsing the Vineyard's offerings was absolutely invigorating. I'd never cooked or eaten bluefish but at Larson's Fish Market- that was the only whole fish they had.

I came at the perfect time. When I asked for whole fish, the butcher in the back was mid-breakdown of a bunch bluefish caught that day and had a few stunning bluefish untouched. He warned me that a lot of people don't like this fish because it tasted...like fish. That's perplexing, but I was a little nervous that my eaters would prefer a more mild fish but when I arrived carrying a black garbage back filled with bluefish, they went wild- bluefish is their favorite!

While he gutted them for me, I picked up a few of the lobsters they pulled in from traps that morning and reveled in how cool it was that these weren't flown in from Nova Scotia like the ones I schlep in and out of a boiling vat of water every day at work. I know that our fish is in the restaurant is fresh, we get it literally hours from being caught and it's probably the nicest in the city...but standing a few hundred yards from where your purchase was caught makes fresh feel a little fresher.

I spotted some tuna steaks and asked if they had any offcuts. With that beautiful of a fish, I hardly wanted to put heat to it. A nice thick piece would be much more suitable to give a quick sear to than these steaks. The butcher pulled out a bunch of scraps and let me have my pick! I landed the perfect scrap!

Seared tuna with the coveted avocado puree that the group is still torturing my amazing "sous-chef" for. Luckily, he's pretty loyal.

Before I knew it, my bag was so heavy that I couldn't carry it and I'd forgotten what I even planned on making for dinner. Now I had scallops, mussels, tuna, and two bluefish. Woops. Now what?

We pulled over the car at the first farm stand we saw- Fiddlehead. I walked out with everything I needed, including San Marzano tomatoes! The freshest ingredients spurred the simplest dinner and one of the most memorable meals I've ever cooked.

There's got to be a way to bring that level of simplicity to a restaurant without it getting muddled in yelp.com reviews and michelin stars. What if your dream restaurant included a ban on feeding anyone that worked for Michelin? That dream is most likely the exact opposite of every fellow line cook in NYC but I wonder if people sat down to a meal without critiquing it and instead took each bite with appreciation for where it came from then eating might become more of a celebration than a judgement of a cooking competition. Call me crazy but if I got to cook meals like the one on Martha's Vineyard every night to people that really just appreciated good ingredients...I'd stand by that dream.

FISHIES!