Dirt Candy
Started: 2024-11-19 20:34:59
Submitted: 2024-11-20 20:43:36
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Visiting a famous vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan
Sometime in the previous decade we found the graphic novel/cookbook Dirt Candy, possibly at a trip to Powells for Thanksgiving in 2012, if I can trust the "date acquired" label in LibraryThing. This put the vegetable-forward New York City restaurant with the same name on my radar. I finally had the chance to eat there with my sister Bethany on my weekend trip to New York this year, on Saturday evening after taking a hard-hat tour of the Ellis Island hospitals.
The two other times that I've visited New York as an adult I had my children with me, which was not precisely the right audience to eat at Dirt Candy. (Calvin is now old enough that he'll try anything, and eats almost everything. He probably would have appreciated Dirt Candy, but he decided to visit his grandparents in Washington State instead of come to New York.)
Dirt Candy had recently introduced its fall menu, featuring five small fixed courses. Each course was centered around a specific vegetable, though the specific vegetable was often unrecognizable. It was introduced with an elevator pitch explaining the inspiration or motivation behind the course. We started with a tiny tin of caviar made from seaweed, just enough to get a couple of small spoonfuls of briny balls of seaweed on a creamy base. The "cauliflower" course was thin, unrecognizable slices of cauliflower that had been pickled served as a salad. If I looked at each slice I could kind of get the idea that it was a section of a head of cauliflower. The "mushroom" course was served in a small croissant topped with an assortment of tiny mushrooms served with a small glass of what they called a "mushroom cappuccino" that tasted like an exquisitely-frothed mushroom soup.
I did not exhaustively photograph each of my plates, because I'm not normally a post-food-on-Instagram person (despite the number of other pictures I post, like the 64 pictures from the day I ate at Dirt Candy, mostly of the Ellis Island hospitals). The one course I did take a picture of was the "beet" course, which was a soup dumpling. This was new to me; it turned out to be a dumpling with a tiny pouch of soup carefully embedded in a sealed pouch in the middle of the filling. I got the whole dumpling in my mouth and then bit down and got a delightful explosion of savory broth in my mouth.
The last savory course featured a slice of squash, shaped to look like a rib, that had been fried and was covered in barbecue sauce.
In between the main courses the restaurant served us "gifts from the kitchen" in the form of even-smaller plates with tiny servings of whatever they happened to be working on. I did not take notes (though I probably should have) so I do not remember most of the tiny inter-course dishes, except that they were all delicious. The only plate I remember was served right before the dessert course, consisting of a tiny, almost-bite-sized slice of slice of pizza topped with slices of purple carrot to represent pepperoni; which was amusing because Bethany had just mentioned eating at Eleven Madison's even-more-expensive vegan tasting menu and wondering if she should get pizza after that meal.
The fifth and final course was dessert, which was still vegetable-based, which is what we should expect from a restaurant that features candy that grows in dirt. This course was based on potatoes, and was apparently inspired by the idea that French fries and chocolate milkshakes go well together. The dessert involved sweet mashed potato and ice cream and caramel with two crispy freeze-dried French-cut potato pieces sticking out the top. It was delicious, and a perfect finish for a great meal.
I left feeling like I'd had an experience, which was just what I was hoping for when I put Dirt Candy on my list to visit in New York City.
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