Amanda Cohen is the chef-owner of New York City’s Dirt Candy and the author of Dirt Candy: A Cookbook: Flavor-Forward Food from the Upstart New York City Vegetarian Restaurant.

Alicia: Hi, Amanda, thanks so much for coming on.

Amanda: Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Amanda: Sure.

So I grew up in Ottawa and Toronto in the ’70s and ’80s. And certainly, Ottawa was a winter city. It's funny, because I look back on it and we didn't have a huge amount of produce at all times. It's cold in Ottawa, in Canada, so the winter—vegetables were pretty pathetic. But my mother would always try as hard as she could. 

At the same time though, both cities were pretty international cities. Toronto is the capital of Canada, super cosmopolitan. Sorry, Ottawa’s the capital of Canada; Toronto's the capital of Ontario. And because Ottawa was the capital, it's filled with diplomats. So we had all different kinds of restaurants that we constantly were sort of going to. My dad was in government. We were meeting other families. 

And so I had this sort of really varied variety of cuisines. And I have this memory of going to the supermarkets when I was younger, and particularly in Toronto, which again is a much more cosmopolitan city filled with all different ethnicities and nationalities, where the — it's pretty exciting if I look back on it now. But the grocery store was filled with products from all over the world. 

And so if you were an adventurous cook, which my mother sometimes was — she wasn't always — we'd have really random fun ingredients in our kitchen cupboard. I think we ate all over the map. But also, it was a family of five kids. So we had a lot of pasta and pasta salads.

Alicia: And so, what got you into food actually?

Amanda: Well, I think there was a variety of things that got me into it. I am the youngest of five kids. And there's about a five-year difference between me and my — the next sibling who's closest in age to me, but all my — all those other siblings are about two years apart. So my brother's 12 years older. And then there's three sisters in between. This is a whole family history. 

But by the time I became a teenager, my mother had been cooking for about 25 years for her family. And kudos to her, she just sort of like, ‘I'm not doing it anymore.’ I swear, she looked at me and she was like, ‘You look pretty capable. You seem to know your way around the kitchen. You want to have dinner? Figure it out yourself.’ 

I mean, it wasn't quite that blunt. She didn't have to cook for a family of seven anymore, every single night. It was just sort of me and her and my dad. And I think she was kind of done with it, which I think we all understand now having cooked through the pandemic, how hard it is to cook every night. 

And I liked it. I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun, I get to figure out what I want to eat. And I get to play around.’ And I loved cooking magazines. And so I would cook recipes from them. I'm sure they were all terrible. My parents were certainly nice enough to suffer through some awful meals. 

But I liked it. I liked the challenge of it. I liked reading the recipe and figuring things out and seeing it come to life. I was a kid that was always so disappointed that I could never get what was in my imagination to come through on a piece of paper. Or I'd write a story and be like, ‘Oh, I imagined it so different.’ I’d paint a picture. I'm like, ‘I'm a terrible artist.’ But in my head, I'm an amazing artist. But something with — like a recipe, you get the ingredients together, you sort of have this idea of what it's going to turn out like, and it turns out like that. And so, that was so just satisfying to me. 

And I liked it. And it was always sort of my backup plan of what I would do if I couldn't figure anything else out. And as it turned out, when I was in my early twenties I really couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. And I was like, ‘Well, I've always liked to cook, so maybe I can just get that as a skill. If I can hold on to that as a skill, I can go anywhere in the world and I can travel and it'll just — it'll at least sort of be a lifeline for a moment while I figure out what I want to do.’ And the reality is it's what I wanted to do. I just didn't know it at the time.

Alicia: And you decided to go to the Natural Gourmet Institute?

Amanda: Yeah.

I'd been actually living in Hong Kong right after university, and I wanted more than anything to keep traveling. And so I was like, ‘Well, I have to figure out how to get this skill.’ And I lived in Los Angeles for a while and hated it. 

And I was starting to look at cooking schools, and at the time I was a pretty hardcore vegetarian. I think I’d just left my vegan stage, and I — there was no way I was going to a real cooking school. 

One of the reasons I don't eat — I mean, I eat a little bit of meat now, and fish, but particularly at the time why I didn't is I really — bones really freak me out. And so even as a kid, I didn’t like bones in my food. And so the idea that I was going to have to learn how to butcher something was really, really traumatizing. 

And fortunately, at the Natural Gourmet, you really didn't have to learn how to do that. They did actually have meat classes at the time, and I think there was a chicken butchering class and a fish class. But you were also allowed to miss two days. And so those were the two days I missed. 

But it was a great program, actually. And I look back on it now. And it's funny, because so much of the time it was like, people didn't think it was a real school. And they were like, ‘Oh, it's just a school with funny ingredients.’ And all those funny ingredients, and all the sort of recipes that we were using then, and all the courses that we were getting taught are actually now considered really cool and trendy. And it's so amazing how that's changed.

Alicia: You said you had a vegan phase. What made you stop eating meat?

Amanda: Well, I had stopped eating meat when I was 15 because, really, all my friends were. I mean, it was 32 years ago and becoming a vegetarian was super rebellious at the time. Very different now, where it's almost mainstream. But then really, it was super rebellious. And all my friends were rebelling against their parents. And I was like, ‘Oh, that seems like a good idea. I'll do that too.’ And certainly annoyed my parents enough. They're like, ‘You're not gonna have enough to eat, and what's gonna happen to you?’

But the reality is it actually — my diet didn't change. I had never eaten that much meat anyways, to begin with, and I didn't really like it. So when we started sort of having meals after I made the decision that I was a vegetarian, as it turned out there — I was just eating the exact same thing I was before and I just hadn't labeled myself as a vegetarian. And so it's not like it was a grand change in my life. 

And then when I moved to Hong Kong, and I'd probably — moving maybe a little bit beforehand, it just sort of — I had become, I think, vegan. And I think a lot of my friends and colleagues were vegan, so it was easier. I don't know now, but certainly at the time when I was living there, there wasn't a lot of dairy in the food I was eating in Hong Kong. And so it just all of a sudden, again, happenstance, I was a vegan.

Alicia: Right. 

Since your time at the Natural Gourmet Institute, you worked at so many vegetarian restaurants in New York. How have you kind of seen vegetarianism shift in this time, as a cuisine?

Amanda: You answered your own question. You called it cuisine. So I don't think that it had ever been considered really a cuisine beforehand. It was so disregarded and considered a second-class cuisine, I think, what, by most foodies and food writers and certainly the mainstream press. 

And nowadays, well, I'm not sure it's held at the top level. It's certainly in the playing field. We're seeing getting a lot more coverage. We're seeing vegetarian chefs being treated a lot more seriously. 

And what we're seeing, which I think is pretty fascinating and has been a huge shift is — and it's slow. We're not where I'd like to see us yet. But we're actually considering vegetarian chefs who started off in the vegetarian world as serious chefs, versus what was happening for numerous years, which was that you'd have a mainstream chat or an omnivore chef all of a sudden be like, ‘Oh, well, now I'm going to cook vegetables!’ or ‘I'm going to become a vegetarian for a while!’ And they got all the press. And it was you'd be a vegetarian chef next to them. And you'd be like, ‘Hello. Hello. I've been doing this for a really long time, too.’ And you were just totally disregarded because of your background. Who you did or didn't know. And I think that's a huge, huge shift and an important one.

Alicia: Right.

And I mean, when you opened Dirt Candy — for this reason, it was considered extremely radical. And how have you changed your approach to cooking, being as you're kind of on your own wavelength? You have to challenge yourself, it seems, because you're kind of in a league of your own in terms of what you're doing. Has your approach changed?

Amanda: Well, one, I'm a much more confident cook than I was. 

I think one of the things that I'll always find sad, and I'll find this sad for the rest of my career is, I'll never know actually what it was like to be a customer at little Dirt Candy when it opened, and what my food was like then. And I think it's changed so much now in this restaurant, because I have so much less to prove. But I'll also never get to really sit down and eat my food here as an outside observer. And maybe I'd hate it. Who knows? I'm pretty picky. 

But I felt like I had so much to prove at the beginning. And I think my dishes were so much more complicated. And then they had to be, but I also think they — it was a time of cooking where it was a lot more like that. And now I look at what I'm serving now. And it's a lot less pretentious and complicated. And I think I'd always wanted to serve fun food. My sort of what I didn't know I was covering up when served with microgreens. I was like, ‘Oh, well, all this fucking stuff.’

And now I am a better chef than I was, since I opened little Dirt Candy. It's ten years later. I don't have as much to prove. And so I can let the vegetables really speak for themselves a lot more. I'm still only competing against myself, I think. And so it still allows me to kind of do whatever I want to do, ’cause there are no rules for this kind of cuisine still, which is great.

Alicia: Well, as you noted, vegetable-forward dining kind of became a thing for which mostly men have been given credit, when I go through my cookbooks, my vegetarian cookbooks from the ’70s through now, it's mostly women who have always been doing vegetarian food and who have always been pushing the cuisine forward, who made it a cuisine. And you've been so outspoken about this. 

And so I wanted to kind of ask, have you seen or would you like to see food media change its approach to how it talks about vegetarian cooking? How have you understood how gender kind of manifests in this specific approach to how people talk about vegetarian cuisine?

Amanda: Well, I think it goes back a little bit to my answer about the mainstream chefs, which is really just a coded word for male chefs getting a lot of attention for entering this field. And I think what happens is they become considered the experts much faster than the people who actually have been doing it. They come with all the credentials, like, ‘Ooh, this is my press, these are my awards. These are my restaurants.’ Versus people who've spent their entire life doing this, and probably actually are the experts in it, they don't come with all the whistles and bells. They just come with knowledge. 

And fanfare seems to have a lot more weight than actual in-depth knowledge about a subject, I think, in the food media. I'd like to see that change. I'm not sure we are there yet. It would be very nice. 

And I thought this for a while with a lot of food coverage, if we could start talking about the history of the food and how we got to covering this particular aspect of it. Because I think once you go back through the history, it’s exactly what you see on your cookbook shelves if we're talking just about vegetarian food. ‘Oh, wow. There's so many women who were writing these cookbooks and were at the forefront of this movement.’ And then you can't deny that existence. It has to become much more sort of holistic when we report on food, and not just this narrow idea of ‘Ooo, what's cool?’