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Amanda Cohen may be a vegetarian chef, but you would be sorely mistaken if you think the cuisine at her New York City restaurant, Dirt Candy, falls into the patchouli-laden, cooked-by-the-lunar-cycles, steamed-brown-rice variety of vegetarian fare.
To Cohen, herbivorous cooking isn’t a political slap in the face against meat-eating (she eats fish) or even a movement rooted in health consciousness (rest assured, there will be butter and cream aplenty). Her food simply celebrates vegetables, elevating them from an afterthought side dish into a high-end entrée. One of her greatest hits is a portobello mushroom mousse — her spin on foie gras, which won first place and $10,000 in PETA’s Fine Faux Gras Challenge. (You can peep the recipe here.) Cohen’s other accolades: She’s the first vegetarian chef in 17 years to earn two stars from The New York Times, the first vegetarian chef to compete on Iron Chef, and she operates one of the few Michelin-recommended vegetarian restaurants in the country.
Cohen’s an outspoken voice in the restaurant industry, too. She eliminated tipping at her restaurant’s new Lower East Side location, opting instead for a 20 percent administrative fee that gets distributed evenly amongst her entire staff. Cohen is also vocal about the discrepancies between female chefs and their male counterparts. Men are still more likely than women to hold head chef positions, and the median pay for female chefs is about 83 percent of what male head chefs make. All in all Cohen would like to help create a more equitable food system.
Grist spoke to Cohen about keeping women in the kitchen and why vegetables are the new bacon. Here’s what we learned from the rising star:
Vegetarian cuisine isn’t the black sheep of the culinary world anymore.
As chefs keep swapping tenderloins for turnips, vegetables are on their way to becoming the next big food trend — and we’re not just talking kale salads. “In the past with vegetarian restaurants, you only went there if you had to, not because you wanted to,” says Cohen. “[I]t’s only been until recently that chefs have really started caring about vegetables on the plate. For years, you went out and if you were a vegetarian and went to a more mainstream restaurant, you’d get a bunch of sides that in general weren’t really interesting. Vegetables are something you can have a lot of fun with. It really is like we’re in the Wild West. There are no rules — and if there are rules, we’re breaking them down.”
