Dirt Candy

430 E. 9th Street, East Village, NY

8.3

map & more

Neighborhood
East Village

Cuisine
Vegetarian

Nearby
Mercury Lounge
Rockwood Music Hall
Webster Hall

212-228-7732

Official Website

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By Andrew Steinthal
June 2, 2011

Although we’re as far from vegetarian as a Tyrannosaurus Rex, we’ve got ultimate respect for chefs who have the ability to impress without the use of meat. Especially when the the food is as satisfying as what Amanda Cohen has got going on at Dirt Candy. The creativity displayed here is through the roof, and if I was vegetarian, I’d be eating here literally every day. Sh*t, we’re pretty much straight up carnivores and I still can’t wait to come back to eat this stuff.

Eating at Dirt Candy is like being a guest judge on your own personal episode of Iron Chef. Secret ingredient: Vegetables! Each dish is crafted around a single vegetable and listed on the menu with authority. Corn! Carrots! Cucumber! The tiny restaurant is all of 18 seats deep, so it really does feel like you’re getting VIP treatment. Since the kitchen is 10 feet from your table, it gives off the impression that each dish was specially prepared just for you.

Unbeknownst to us, Dirt Candy is generally booked solid three weeks out, so it’s in your best interest to lock a reservation far in advance. We rolled in early on a Friday and were lucky enough to snag a table, but only because we agreed to be in and out within 30 minutes. A half-hour was all we needed to crown Dirt Candy our new, and pretty much only, go-to vegetarian spot.

Food Rundown:

Jalapeno Hush Puppies
These fried balls of sweet, fluffy and appropriately spicy cornbread are reason enough to come to Dirt Candy. Good lord, they taste like delicious shots of funnel cake. And the maple butter that comes for dunking? Perfection.

Carrots!
Steamed buns made of carrots. Interesting. On a blind taste test, there’s no chance I’d be able to tell that the main ingredient in these buns is indeed carrots. It tastes too damn sweet and too damn good! She somehow pulls off plump, Cantonese-style steamed buns with garlic and ginger-seasoned barbecued carrot in a way that makes you forget about pork. The secret? She uses fresh carrot juice to replace water in her dough.

Corn!
Aside from the puppies, Corn! Was our favorite dish on the menu. Grits, corn cream, pickled shiitakes, huitlacoche, and a tempura poached egg on top. After each bite, you needed another one immediately. This plate was clean in under five minutes, tops. Well done Amanda, well done.

Cauliflower!
Cauliflower the size of fried chicken, hells yes. The only problem with this buttermilk battered smoked cauliflower dish was that the smoke on the flower was so intense that it completely dominated the surrounding flavors. We loved the waffles, horseradish and arugula base, but that smoke was just too much. That didn’t stop us from eating around it, but a little less smoke and this thing would have been perfect.