Amanda Cohen celebrates the humble vegetable
Dirt Candy chef avoids pretentious ingredients, focuses on technique
Amanda Cohen is one of the only high-profile chefs in the United States who doesn’t even pay lip service to the idea of sourcing local, seasonal produce.
“Eh. I get ’em where I can get ’em, and what I can afford,” she says — a pretty relaxed statement for any chef, especially one in highly competitive New York City. But what’s really striking about Cohen’s comment is that she’s the chef and owner of the vegetarian restaurant Dirt Candy.
She did recently buy some ramps when they were in season, for the first time in the history of the restaurant, which turns nine years old in October.
“They’ve never been exciting enough for me,” she says of the highly prized wild onions, “and I feel like the worship at the altar of ramps is a little excessive these days.
“But I work with a forager and she was like, ‘I don’t want to pick the whole ramp. If I just pick the leaves,’ which are the sustainable part [because the leaves will regrow if you don’t harvest the bulbs], ‘will you take them?’ And I said ‘yes’.”
Dirt Candy's veggie dishes include a pepper dish (left) and broccoli dogs.
Ah, so although local and seasonal is not Cohen’s thing, sustainability is, right?
She shakes her head. “That’s not the focus of the restaurant,” she says. “That’s not my job. That’s not my place.”
Is it vegetarianism then?
Nope.
“The restaurant’s vegetarian, but that’s happenstance,” says Cohen, who’s not a vegetarian herself.
“If I liked meat, then I would cook meat. I don’t. I have yet to find a piece of meat that makes a vegetable taste better.”
And that’s her mission. She named the restaurant Dirt Candy because she thinks of vegetables as treats that grow in the ground.
“We’re trying to show that basic vegetables can be delicious in all different ways,” she says. “It’s not necessarily the luxury ingredient or the hard-to-find ingredient. That’s great when you can put it on a dish, but that doesn’t always make the dish.”
And when Cohen first opened Dirt Candy at its old, tiny location — what she now calls “little Dirt Candy” since she relocated the restaurant two and a half years ago — purveyors wouldn’t sell her the good stuff anyway.
“We had no storage and so I could get what I could get from a couple of my purveyors, and I was like, ‘Hey, I hear there’s a really fancy carrot out there. Can you get it for me?’ and they’d be like, ‘No. I’m gonna get you carrots and you only want five, so take it or leave it’.”
New York’s Dirt Candy relocated to a larger space a couple of years ago, allowing Cohen to store more product and gain access to new purveyors with unique ingredients.
As for the ramps, Cohen bought 100 pounds of them — leaves only — and pickled them by pouring a hot brine of olive oil, white vinegar and garlic over them and storing them in her walk-in. They’re finely chopped, mixed with ricotta and used in an onion-themed dish: She purées red onions, skin and all, and mixes that with flour to make pink tortellini (“It’s never quite as red as I want it to be,” Cohen says), which she stuffs with the ramps and ricotta.
They’re served in a broth made from burnt onions — charred whole on the grill so they’re black on the outside and “juicy and brown” on the inside — and garnished with dehydrated grapefruit.
Cohen says that’s not a dish that would have gone over with her customers nine years ago, not because of the onion theme — all of the dishes on her dinner menu are based on one vegetable in several iterations — but because of the pasta in broth.