Vegetable-centric cooking is all the rage these days, and chef Amanda Cohen deserves a fair share of our gratitude for that. Way back in 2008, when the hottest restaurants in New York City seemed to cater to voracious carnivores, Cohen opened a tiny oasis of vegetarian aspiration in the East Village. That pocket of a restaurant, which she dubbed Dirt Candy, wound up catapulting Cohen to fame. (Demand for seats became so intense that Cohen once had to turn away Leonardo DiCaprio.) The chef has since moved Dirt Candy to a larger space on the Lower East Side; the global impact of her cooking has expanded, as well.
She has paved the way for plant-based gastronomy that manages to be both ambitious and accessible. Her cooking celebrates plants, sure, but it also emphasizes whimsy, wonder, and surprise. (Dirt Candy’s pizza with carrot pepperoni is a revelation.) As the New York Times wrote in 2015, “For those diners who hear the word ‘vegetarian’ and experience a cascade of mental images, anxieties and scents (grassy clumps of alfalfa sprouts, the musky odor of tempeh, stern lectures on the fate of the planet), a conversation with Ms. Cohen, like dinner at Dirt Candy, can quickly strip them of the old stereotypes.”
Raised in Canada, Cohen is known as a passionate advocate for restaurant workers and female chefs, and she has no qualms about skewering media coverage when she finds it lacking. Her path through the American culinary scene has been a unique one. She doesn’t have an ever-growing “empire” of restaurants. Along with Dirt Candy she owns a Manhattan veggie-burger spot called Lekka Burger, but that’s it. Her 2012 cookbook, Dirt Candy, resembles no other cookbook on the market — she and her collaborators created it in the form of a graphic novel. And you will hear no farm-to-table pieties from her. Cohen wants to inspire home cooks to use whatever produce they find at the grocery store, because she does that, too. As she told the Times, “I don’t need the world’s best carrots. I just need carrots. If I used the world’s best carrots, your dish would be twice as expensive. We really try to stick with food that you can get in the vegetable aisle at the supermarket.”
