NYC’s green-averse can develop sweet tooth for seasonal Dirt Candy

I remember when I used to think that eating my vegetables meant eating peas and carrots from the freezer section. When I was 15, the first thing I learned how to cook was sautéed zucchini. And vegetables haven’t meant the same thing to me since.

It is difficult to find people who share such a love for vegetables. However, Amanda Cohen, the chef and owner of Dirt Candy in the East Village (430 E. Ninth St., between First Avenue and Avenue A), is one of them.

“At Dirt Candy, we don’t care about your health,” says the restaurant’s blog. “And we don’t care about your politics either... Dirt Candy is dedicated to one thing: cooking vegetables.”

Though it has somewhat of a crunchy-granola reputation, vegetarianism doesn’t have to be about being healthy, or even about not wanting to kill animals. Vegetarianism can also be about reducing resource usage and being environmentally friendly.

Think about how much a cow eats in its lifetime before being slaughtered. Most of its feed, no matter if the cow is pasture- or grain-fed, needs to be irrigated and in some cases, processed and shipped. An animal eating grain uses twice as much water as would be used if the grain were consumed directly by humans.

The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization attributes up to 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world to those coming from livestock. Part of this is from the production of feed, but it is also attributed to cows’ flatulence, which produce methane and damage the environment (insert chuckle here).

Dirt Candy, whether it means to or not, protects the environment from detrimental animal flatulence. Comfort-wise, it is even smaller than your average New York restaurant. Resource-wise, it is hard to imagine where they have space for waste.

It’s a tiny restaurant, about twice the size of my dorm room. The kitchen is of the open variety, which is understandable since it is no bigger than a closet. The tables are squeezed so tightly that by the end of the night you know more about the guy next to you than the person you are dining with.

The menu is sparse in quantity, but not quality. There are around a dozen wines to choose from—by the half glass, the glass, or the bottle—as well as one beer (Hitachino Nest White Ale, $9). Bottled water is not an option. The food is separated into four choices of appetizer and four entrées, each named for a specific vegetable, along with the restaurant’s signature snack: jalapeño hush puppies with maple butter ($6).

A limited menu usually means that the chef really concentrates on each dish and is probably making it several times per night. The pumpkin ($12)—a salad of four types of squash topping greens and covered in pepitas coated in chickpea flour and a French curry powder—was a mixture of textures and flavors that was smoky enough to have had bacon in it (it doesn’t).

Highlighting the vegetables leaves room to play around with flavors. A dish of parsnip gnocchi ($19) came topped with carrot cake crumbles and dehydrated cheddar cheese. Carrot cake and cheddar cheese—it sounds puzzling, but it turns out to be a combination that should be used more often.

Dirt Candy makes use of vegetables as they are available. The squash salad is a recent addition to the menu, replacing a more summer-like dish. But certain things, like the hush puppies, will never disappear.

“It’s really hard to say ‘I’m local and seasonal,’” Cohen said of restaurants in general. “The reality is that vegetables don’t grow like that. They don’t spring up and say, ‘Whoa, we’re here, it’s spring.’”