Dirt Candy

About The Company

New York City has hundreds of steak restaurants, seafood restaurants, barbecue restaurants, and tapas restaurants, but Dirt Candy is the city’s only vegetable restaurant. We serve nothing but vegetables, and our goal is to make them taste better than anything you’ve ever had before. Our kitchen is essentially a laboratory for our award-winning chef, Amanda Cohen, and every day she pushes vegetables further than anyone else in the world. Our menu changes regularly, because we’re on a journey to the furthest reaches of vegetables and we want to take you with us.

We don’t take tips because we believe our staff are professionals who should receive a living wage, and our starting hourly wage begins at $25/hour. We also offer paid time off, paid sick leave beyond what’s mandated by law, health insurance, continuing education, and a whole lot more. We don’t need to trick our guests with a hidden 20% surcharge tacked onto the end of their bill and disguised as a “tip” to cover our labor costs. All of us spent 2020 referring to food service workers as “heroes” and “essential.” Now it’s time to put our money where our mouth is and treat them that way.

We serve a single tasting menu for dinner in our dining room and on our patio that changes seasonally because that gives us the freedom to present the results of our explorations into the wild world of vegetables in the best way possible. We only offer one because 2020 taught us how much food we were wasting by offering two tasting menus. (We serve an a la carte menu on the patio for lunch.) At Dirt Candy, dinner is an experience of the raw and the cooked, the bold and the beautiful, full of roaring fire, tableside grilling, strange broths, and dishes that are both deceptively simple and staggeringly complex.

Dirt Candy doesn’t care about your politics. We aren’t saying “no” to meat, but saying “yes” to vegetables. We don’t care about your health. Our food won’t make your skin glow, it won’t make you live longer, it won’t super-charge your free radicals with antioxidants. We simply want to make vegetables as delicious as possible.

If there’s an underlying philosophy to what we do, it’s that we want people to crave vegetables the way they crave fried chicken and pizza. So every day our chefs roll up their sleeves and try to do something with vegetables no one’s ever done before. We’re on a journey into the unknown. Come with us. We promise that you’ll taste things you’ve never tasted before. You may love some of it, you may hate some of it, but we promise: it’ll be unlike anything you’ve ever tried before.