Dirt Candy chef Amanda Cohen (photo by Stephen Elledge)
Interview by Megan Cole
Vegetarian food, like most of the food we enjoy, has changed a lot over the years. Whether it’s the change in attitude or the technique and vegetables available that’s caused it, the shift has led to open minds that have welcomed restaurants like Amanda Cohen’s Dirt Candy in New York City. As a former vegetarian and chef of a restaurant that only serves vegetables, Cohen, who will be part of the More Girls! Girls! Girls! Dinner Series at Feast Portland in September, talks to us about how the attitudes around vegetarian food and vegetables have (or haven’t) changed, and what it was like to open a vegetable-focused restaurant in New York.
How long have you been a vegetarian for?
Amanda Cohen: Actually, I’m not a vegetarian.
Oh, really?
I was one for 15 years, but I started eating I started eating fish about 10 years ago.
Had you been a vegetarian as a child, or was it something you took on later in life?
I sort of became one when I was 15, when it was sort of the cool thing to do.
Where did you grow up in Canada? I read that you are Canadian.
I grew up in Toronto.
It was probably easier to be vegetarian in Toronto when you were 15 than in places like Calgary.
It was 25 years ago, so being vegetarian wasn’t really mainstream. Now I think you could be vegetarian anywhere and it’s much easier, but 25 years ago even in Vancouver it was probably hard; we’re talking the ’90s and we were still coming out of when our parents grew up in the war, and our grandparents growing up in the depression, and meat was so important. Just eating vegetables to them, or not eating meat, was the worst thing ever. If you had the ability to eat meat, why wouldn’t you?
Yeah, and at that point where we were culturally, we focused so much of our food around meat, and vegetables were just there as a side dish.
Exactly. It was that sort of American way of eating that wasn’t conducive to eating vegetarian food, even though all around the rest of the world being vegetarian isn’t such a big deal. But apparently in North America it is, and was.
There has also been a change in the way that people view vegetarian food from the hippy option of tofu and steamed vegetables, to more elegant dishes that really highlight vegetables.
I don’t think it’s how people feel about vegetarian food, I think it’s more how people feel about vegetables and eating a sort of a massive amount of protein in every meal. I don’t think most people would consider themselves vegetarian, and if you asked someone if they wanted to go to a vegetarian restaurant for dinner, they would say, “Ehhh, not really,” because that word still has a lot of brown rice, baked tofu connotations with it. But if you say, “Do you want to go a restaurant that does a lot of really interesting things with vegetables?” They are more likely to say, “Yeah, totally!”
When you started your culinary career, were you focused on vegetables from the beginning, or did you find yourself dealing with proteins as well?
I am very lucky. I went to pretty much the only culinary school that is vegetarian. It’s called the Natural Gourmet Institute, and it was more vegetarian and health-focused, so those were the first couple of restaurants I worked in. But I’ve been doing this for 20 years and in the interim I have worked in all kinds of restaurants.
A beautiful cauliflower dish featured at Dirt Candy (photo: Evan Sung)
When you opened Dirt Candy was there anyone else doing anything like that in New York at the time?
No, not at all, and there still isn’t’ really. There are some restaurants doing some more vegetable-focused plates and they have tasting menus that are vegetable-focused, but we are still the only restaurant that is 100 percent dedicated to vegetables, and that is all that we serve.
Were you nervous when you opened about how the response was going to be?
Terrified. That’s why we originally opened such a small restaurant. The original Dirt Candy was only 18 seats and 400 square feet and we weren’t sure what the response was going to be, so we went with a really small place so that just in case we failed and nobody liked us we would still be able to survive.
Obviously, things have progressed and you’ve gotten a lot of recognition. How does that feel, and are you surprised that it’s turned out this way?
I’m not sure that I’m surprised as much as excited and happy. It’s really nice to have the validation that people like what I’m doing and what my crew has set out to do. Obviously, that is the end goal, so it’s nice to reach one of our goals and say, “Hey, we’re doing a good job.”
You also have an exciting cookbook that’s a bit outside the ordinary. Can you tell me a bit about your graphic-novel cookbook?
We were approached to do a cookbook, and it was something that I was interested in doing, but I didn’t want to do something that everybody else has done before. Something that was really special about little Dirt Candy is that it was really high energy and it was really different from anything else in the city at that time. I really wanted a restaurant cookbook that put that all together and really captured the soul of little Dirt Candy. After many discussions, we stumbled upon this idea of a graphic novel where we could really capture little Dirt Candy in all the panels and tell the story of the restaurant in a really different way that had been done before in other cookbooks. And visually it would be really exciting to cook that way and see the recipe unfold on the page as you read it.
Who did you have do the art for it?
This amazing artist by the name of Ryan Dunlavey.
It reminds me of these Japanese manga about different styles of Japanese food that are done in a similar style.
Yeah, we definitely took inspiration from that kind of book.
Have you participated in Feast Portland before or is this your first year?
This is my first year.
How are you feeling about participating in an event like that? Have you done anything like that before?
Yeah, we’ve done a bunch of events, but I’m excited for Feast Portland. It is always fun to go and cook in somebody else’s kitchen and see what they do, and meeting a whole new bunch of chefs. That’s awesome.
Dirt Candy is located at 86 Allen St in New York. Amanda Cohen will be featured at the More Girls! Girls! Girls! Dinner Series at Feast Portland on Thursday, September 17.
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