Dirt Candy’s menu is exclusively veg, presented in remarkably simple & creative ways.
Amanda Cohen’s passion is vegetables, so it’s no surprise to find her in the open kitchen of her popular restaurant, Dirt Candy, spending an hour each day husking baby corn, one small piece at a time.
The corn is destined for her latest hit dish, a corn boil, her take on the Southern speciality usually built around fish. Cohen wants to prove vegetables can play a starring role. “It’s sort of an unexplored world, so I kind of feel like a pioneer, and this is my lab,” she said. “We get to do whatever we want.”
Cohen found herself in unexplored territory when she hit the restaurant scene in New York more than a decade ago.
Vegetable Monkey Bread
Born in Ottawa and raised in Toronto, she moved to New York for university and never left. She studied the top chefs at the time, who were working with fish and meat, but she kept being drawn back to unlocking the potential of vegetables.
“When you go to a cookbook, they’re like, ‘Saute it, roast it,’ and we are like, ‘Saute and roast it? That’s boring. Let’s dehydrate it, let’s make it into noodles, let’s make it into fruit leather, let’s see what we can really do with this vegetable.’ No one is really doing that.”
Tomato cake with smoked feta & tomato leather.
That philosophy has resulted in dishes like sizzling brussels sprouts tacos served in lettuce wrap, and broccoli hot dogs that she says can win over even the most ardent carnivore. “People are like, ‘Wow! I didn’t know I could feel so satisfied and so full, and vegetables really can be amazing,'” she said.
Cohen started with a small, 18-seat restaurant and soon was so busy she once turned away Leonardo DiCaprio. In February, she moved to a new space five times larger, and the crowd has followed.
But while vegetables are the stars of her plates, she doesn’t want Dirt Candy labelled a vegetarian restaurant. “Vegetarian restaurants, I think, tend to be a little bit more healthier, maybe a little bit more political, or a little bit more environmental. We just really want to serve good food.”
