“Dirt Candy” Amanda Cohen Talks Cookbook With New York Times
Written by Vegetarian Star on August 16th, 2012 in Books, Chefs, Food & Drink.
Amanda Cohen of NYC’s popular vegetable restaurant Dirt Candy sat down with the New York Times to discuss her upcoming cookbook with the same title as the restaurant.
Dirt Candy: A Cookbook: Flavor-Forward Food from the Upstart New York City Vegetarian Restaurant, due for release next week, is a combination of recipes, cool comics and the answers to some of your most burning restaurant questions like, “why a salad cost $14?”
The following are a few excerpts from her telephone interview.
Q: How did you arrive at the decision to do a cookbook this way, as a graphic novel?
A: I never really wanted to write a cookbook. I just felt like there are so many cookbooks out there and so many are done well. I wasn’t sure if I had something to add, and I didn’t want to do Vegetarian Cooking 101; that book was already out there. About a year into the restaurant, people started coming in and saying, “You should write a cookbook.” And I kept saying, “No, what we’re not ready.” And then finally, my husband and I were talking about ways to do it, because it was getting embarrassing, and he suggested we do it as a graphic novel. It was just this moment where I actually saw the cookbook, for the first time.
Q: What about the fact that you call Dirt Candy a “vegetable restaurant,” instead of a “vegetarian” one?
A: We haven’t gotten so much grief about that, but when we started out with Dirt Candy, we really wanted to prove ourselves to a bigger market. And it was important that people understood that we’re not a lifestyle restaurant; we’re not trying to convert you to our way of eating. It’s not up to me to care what they had beforehand or what they ate the day before or what they ate for lunch. My goal is to have people come once a month and eat a meal that’s all vegetables and leave feeling satisfied. Tomorrow I may have some pork belly, but right now I’m just going to be satisfied with my vegetables.
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