The Dirt Candy restaurateur believes vegetables don’t need to be good for you; they just need to be good
November 8, 2024
For James Beard-nominated chef Amanda Cohen, cooking vegetables doesn’t mean they have to be healthy, but they do have to be delicious. At her Michelin-starred vegetarian restaurant, Dirt Candy, she focuses on serving veggies in unique ways that highlight the ingredients and flavor, and not just their health attributes.
“I think it's unfair that if you're a vegetarian chef, you're also supposed to be a healthy chef. The two things are separate, and they're not necessarily at all similar,” she said. “[Dirt Candy] got this label that it was going to be healthy, but there's no reason that it has to be healthier than the hamburger restaurant, except it just is because it's vegetables.”
Dirt Candy was the first vegetable-focused restaurant in New York City, has been featured on the Michelin Guide five times, won two stars from The New York Times, and has gained many fans who fly from across the country to taste her seasonal menus.
To her, the dishes are not just about health benefits but rather making meat-free courses as tasty as they can be.
"I play with food because I love creating new dishes," said Cohen. Pictured here are the Brussels sprouts tacos, one of the classic dishes served at the restaurant's 16th anniversary party on Oct. 31. Photo credit: Evan Sung
Cohen said that her philosophy wasn’t accepted by the vegetarian community at first, especially when most vegetarian restaurants were actually vegan. “We used to get a lot of flack for having fried food. People were like, ‘I wish it was just a salad,’ or it was healthier, or there wasn't so much dairy or soy dairy, whatever it was we were using. I was like, ‘Okay, but that's our restaurant. You read the menu,’” she said.
“I am not a nutritionist, so I can put what I think is good food on the plate, and hopefully, it's a little healthy. But I'm not your medicine cabinet — I'm a chef. That's a totally respectable but different job than I have. And there are some restaurants that do a great job with that.
“Meat is obviously probably not as good for you as vegetables, but there's no reason you can't have just as much fun [with vegetables] as you would if you were having meat at a restaurant,” she added. “We really wanted to celebrate vegetables, and— I believed it then, and I believe it now — meat doesn't make a vegetable taste better.”
This philosophy led her to think of these ingredients in different ways, and to see how she could make something different with common vegetables that don’t typically get the chance to shine. These unique methods mean that even picky eaters can view veggies they dislike in a different light after the meal.
“People will come in and say, ‘I hate broccoli,’ or something, and I'd be like, ‘well, probably at every other restaurant, but you're not going to hate my broccoli,” she said. “But if you do hate my broccoli, that really means you hate broccoli.’”
These Broccoli Dogs aren't the only broccoli dish at Dirt Candy — the Korean Fried Broccoli is also a huge hit. Photo credit: Evan Sung
Although Cohen specializes in vegetarian food, she herself is not one — but she used to be. “The reason I stopped being vegetarian was not because I didn't want to be; it's because I wanted to be a better chef, and I felt I really needed to eat and try what omnivores cared about eating and loved eating and what chefs cared about cooking if I wanted to compete on their level.”
Dirt Candy, which recently celebrated its 16th year of being open, was the first restaurant in New York City to change its format to no-tipping when it moved to its current location at 86 Allen St. in 2015. Instead of tipped wages, Cohen pays her staff a living wage with benefits and PTO, and she has a higher retention rate among employees as a result. Although it’s difficult, she argues that it’s worth it. Servers make an average between $200-275 a night, she said, which is a high average for waitstaff and bartenders in the city.
And, Cohen said, customers love the no-tipping practice. “For them, it's like, ‘Great, I'm drunk. I don't have to do math at the end of the meal.’ But, actually, what we really have to do is remind them to take their credit card. That's what they forget, because they don't have to see it again, really.”
On top of that, the price is comparable to a meal at a tipped restaurant, including the tip. “You don't pay more as a customer when you come to my restaurant because I don't have tipping. You pay the same. You just pay it slightly differently.”
She argued that customers appreciate the straightforward nature of the check, but what keeps them coming back is the constant innovation. She has four menus a year, one per season, with each menu taking months to create. Each menu follows the same formula, along the lines of a traditional tasting menu.
“We always have something that's raw, like a ceviche or a crudo,” she said. “Then we always try to have a pasta dish because we want to make sure that there's something filling, like flour, gluten. And then, we always want to have a couple of dishes that make people laugh and think, ‘Oh, I never would have thought of doing this with vegetables.’”
"I think I was supposed to be a chef in a dollhouse. I love making mini food," like the Carrot Sliders seen here, said Cohen. Photo credit: Evan Sung.
While each menu might have a similar format, the ingredients vary greatly by season, with a hesitancy to use similar ingredients too close together. “Then we go into the seasons,” she said. “So we're like, ‘Well, it's squash season, so I guess we're using squash now,’ or we're starting to think about the winter dishes, and we're like, ‘Well, we haven't used celery in 3 menus or 2 seasons. So, it's time for celery to reappear.’”
From carrot sliders to pumpkin pad thai, Cohen and her staff find a way to elevate typical vegetables to fine dining, serving them not just as a side but as a fully thought-out, complex dish. And it’s not just the savory but also the sweet — a recent menu featured a potato and chocolate ice cream, and the spring menu featured a flourless chocolate olive oil cake topped with orange confit turnips.
Right now, the end of the tasting menu is a tiny carrot pepperoni pizza, which is split into four tiny slices. “When we put it down, we're like, ‘Hey, we know you're probably thinking of getting a slice of pizza after this, so we just brought it to you anyways.’”
To her, food should be fun, and she hopes the customers agree. “They laugh, and then we laugh — and if they don't laugh, then I know they didn't like it, so then we're like, ‘What was wrong? What did you like about the meal?’ But if they laugh, then we know everything's right. They got our humor throughout the night.
“And so I play with food because I love creating new dishes. To me, that's really fun, and that keeps me interested. It keeps my cooks interested. It keeps my customers interested. I want the dining room to feel really fun — I want it to feel like a party, and I want people to come in and laugh, and I want my staff to laugh,” she added.
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