Yesterday was my friend Noa’s birthday, so I decided I wanted to take her to dinner. In the four years we’ve known each other, I have set a precedent of thinking way too hard about how to feed her, either at restaurants or at home. Noa keeps kosher, so she tends to eat like a vegetarian in the restaurants that us laymen frequent. Although she is perfectly capable of taking care of her own food intake, I like to mother-hen her (perhaps a bit too much) by always making sure there’s something on the menu that she can eat.
Enter Dirt Candy. This vegetarian restaurant opened in the East Village in 2008, and I’d been wanting to try it for awhile – then repeatedly forgetting about it. While racking my brain for fun places to take Noa, the memory lightbulb went off. Take her to Dirt Candy! She can eat everything on the menu!
The premise of the tiny 12-seater on 9th street is simple: vegetables are delicious nuggets that come from the earth. They are “dirt candy.” Chef and owner Amanda Cohen is right there to greet you when you walk in; she seated us herself when we arrived. And apparently we were lucky – they don’t usually have room for walk-ins.
The menu is small and quirky. There was one “snack,” four starters, and four entrees to choose from. All seasonal produce, and every item was named for its key ingredient.
Noa and I ordered the Jalapeno Hush Puppies to start – the soft, fried cornmeal was served with maple butter, which melted right off and onto our fingers. My only complaint is that there were five of them for two of us. Then we decided to split two entrees. Noa wanted the Corn and the Eggplant, so that’s what we ordered. And we were delighted with her choices.
There is a definite southern flair to the menu. The Corn dish was essentially gussied up grits (not that I am complaining, I adore grits,especially with cheese). These were stone ground and tasted like they’d been cooking up all day. They were speckled with full corn kernels from the corn cream, microgreens, pickled shiitakes, and huitlacoche, which is a fungus that grows on corn also known as the “corn truffle.” Served on top was a tempura poached egg, cooked to perfection.
As delicious as these dishes were, I preferred the Eggplant. The presentation is not as beautiful as that of the Corn – there is no vibrant yellow and green to perk the eye. However, if there were to be a single dish to embody the notion of “dirt candy,” I think this would be it. Eggplant – sliced, pickled, breaded, and fried – was served a top black olive fettuccine, tossed with fresh ricotta, and served within a pool of basil broth. Eggplant jam was used as a garnish.
If this sounds like a dark, monochromatic plate of food, it’s because it was. The dirt-colored food was even further underscored by the indigo plate it was served upon. But oh my, what amazing flavor combinations. I loved that the eggplant was pickled before it was fried, because it added an element of depth and saltiness that fried eggplant tends to lack. And the basil broth mixed with the eggplant jam was to die for.
Though stuffed, it was Noa’s birthday after all, so we visited the dessert menu. We immediately nixed the popcorn pudding since we’d just consumed several heads of corn. Instead, we concentrated on the sweet potato puffs – served with sweet potato sorbet, brown sugar ice cream, and sour cream ice cream – and the ice cream nanaimo bar – sweet pea and mint ice cream and cream served between layers of chocolate. We mentioned both to the waitress and her reaction was immediate. The Nanaimo Bar. Hands down.
She brought it out with a candle on top – she’d caught onto the fact that this was a birthday date. I snapped this shot, the only one of the night, before we dug in (unfortunately, she’d already blown out the candle before I got to it).
I want to eat here when I visit NYC! Would love to share in the EARS of corn…