Dirt Candy
Amanda Cohen cooks nothing but vegetables at 86 Allen Street, and the MICHELIN Guide carries the room at one Star with a Green Star beside it. Dinner is a single tasting menu, rebuilt every season. Cohen's stated aim is to make people
crave vegetables the way they crave fried chicken and pizza.2
Why go
Cohen calls her kitchen a laboratory and means it as a working description: the menu changes because she is pushing at what a vegetable will do, and the MICHELIN inspector reads the same thing on the plate as raw, cooked, pickled and preserved elements built for contrast.1 The restaurant's own account of dinner runs to roaring fire, tableside grilling and strange broths.2 They stopped running two tasting menus because two menus wasted food. The room takes no tips at all, starts its staff at $29 an hour and adds no surcharge to the check, so the number on the menu is the number you pay.
Cohen opened the first Dirt Candy in 2008 in a 420-square-foot storefront on East 9th Street, eighteen seats, cooking on electricity because the gas was not on yet.3 She had studied cultural anthropology at NYU and spent two years in Hong Kong, which is where the idea came from: the vegetarian cooking she found there was bright and playful, and the North American version she knew was neither. She cooked at Angelica Kitchen and Pure Food and Wine before she went out on her own, and she calls this a vegetable restaurant.
Order this / avoid
- Order: whatever is running now, and ask at booking what that is. The season sets it.
- Avoid: arriving with a dish in mind. There is nothing to substitute into.
What locals & experts say
- The MICHELIN inspector, on what the meal is like:
a perspective on vegetable cooking that is distinctive and continually changing
, with desserts that blur the line between savory and sweet.1 - The kitchen's own reason for buying the way it does: it supports a meat-free supply chain, takes its dairy from a group of local small farms, and builds the wine list around women winemakers working biodynamically.1
- Amanda Cohen on the two years that changed her mind, in the guide's own 2018 interview:
in North America vegetarian food was very sincere and very bland and smelled like hippies. Hong Kong had dozens of vegetarian restaurants where the food was bright, playful and fun.
3 - Adam Platt reviewed the second Dirt Candy at one star for New York Magazine in August 2015, and Eater reported it: he called the food the best of the neo-veggie comfort-food cooking and said he would not order the corn boil again.7
Good to know
- Booking: the room is small and it fills, so book. There is counter dining if you are on your own.
- Price: the five-course tasting menu started at $110 at the 2025 selection.5
- One door: the city's register carries a single permit under this name, at 86 Allen Street, and nothing live at the East 9th Street original.
- The Green Star: Dirt Candy is one of four New York rooms that held one in the 2025 selection, alongside Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Family Meal at Blue Hill and One White Street.4 Eater counted the same four out of the ceremony.6
- Access: the guide lists wheelchair access.
Verdict
must-visit — Book early and go hungry. Cohen will put a vegetable somewhere you have not seen one before, and if you are bringing somebody who thinks vegetarian cooking is a compromise, this is the room that settles the argument for good.