I had first noticed Dirt Candy when it made it into Zagat's 2010 New York restaurant guide as a Key Newcomer. The review earned it a spot in my "To Be Visited" spreadsheet (yes, I have a spreadsheet), but what really turned the tables was when one of my good (carnivorous) friends, JW, who seeks out great food and restaurants with as much enthusiasm as I do, recommended it as a must try. (A little side note here - a lot of these experiences are enhanced and made ever more enjoyable by the presence of the people I experience them with, often necessitating the need to mention them in these posts. To prevent way more hits than they are expecting when they google their names, however, I will only refer to them by their initials). My meat eating friends don't tend to suggest all-vegetarian restaurants, so there must have been something there.
My friend BL and I had plans to go to dinner this past week, and since she was open to the idea of trying it out, we made our way down to the East Village. The restaurant itself is very small - the hostess actually warned me of this fact when confirming my reservation - and they seat everyone in fixed, 2 hour time slots. True to form, we showed up half an hour late, but the staff were very friendly and accommodating and made sure we were able to eat all our courses (and drink all our wine) with plenty of time to spare.
On to those courses. The menu at Dirt Candy is amazingly creative. There is a snack course (jalapeno hush puppies - as good as they sound), followed by a selection of appetizers and entrees, each of which is centred around a single ingredient. Even though the focus is on that single ingredient, none of the dishes got lost so much in it that the ingredient was the only thing you tasted. I had a particularly unpleasant experience around the use of rhubarb once that
illustrates this point perfectly, but that for another day.
We could have ordered everything on the menu, but went with the server's suggestion of the hush puppies, two appetizers (mushroom and carrot) and two entrees (corn and tomato). We debated a little between the zucchini and the corn, but am I glad we made the choice we did. Both the appetizers were very good, with the creativity of the portobello mousse's play on foie gras definitely making the mushroom dish stand out (although the crostini that came with the mushroom lacked the truffle essence it was claimed to have). The carrot buns and the salad they came with were also excellent as was the entree of fried green tomatoes in a coconut and yellow tomato sauce.
Yet, the highlight of my dinner, by far, was the corn dish. Just on the face of it, the dish was poached eggs over grits, and didn't sound all that interesting. In fact, through all my dozens of meals, I don't think I had ever eaten grits before. The closest I probably even came to wondering what grits were was in that scene from My Cousin Vinny, where Joe Pesci's character uses the pride Southerners place in cooking their grits to perfection to discredit the witness' own account of the timeline. The grits at Dirt Candy made me wonder why I had never eaten them before. Simply put, they were just out of this world.
We left Dirt Candy very satisfied with our meal, knowing I would be recommending it to a whole bunch of people. More than anything, the creativity of the restaurant really shone through and showed what is possible to do with just vegetables when a chef puts their mind to it. Even though dessert was a little disappointing (the ice cream bar we tried was frozen too solid for it to be enjoyable), every other course had almost nothing wrong with it. As for that corn dish - I ended up ordering grits for breakfast the next day. My Southern friend, WH, was very impressed.
Dirt Candy is in New York's East Village, on 430 E. 9th Street. Moderately Expensive. All-Vegetarian. Highly Recommended.
Photo Credit: Dirt Candy
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