How a revered vegetarian restaurant barely avoided disaster to do better than ever, despite everything

Dirt Candy’s pandemic survival story

- Joshua Brustein

The outdoor dining shed in front of Dirt Candy, one of New York City’s best vegetarian restaurants, has been mostly empty since November. After relying on the structure to get through the pandemic to that point, Amanda Cohen, the restaurant’s chef and owner, decided to stop serving food outside. She briefly entertained the idea of continuing to use the shed to serve drinks. Then the weather got cold, and nobody seemed interested in shivering over a $17 mezcal with cucumber. “Outside bar is not a thing,” she texted me a week into the experiment. She noted that a passerby carrying his own beer had sat and made himself at home. Here, at least, was a satisfied guest—even if he wasn’t, in the formal sense, a customer.

Even so, Cohen couldn’t bring herself to tear the shed down. “What if we get a fourth, fifth wave? I’ve lost count,” she said. In December, as if on cue, omicron appeared, and a few people started taking those drinks outside after all.

Alfresco dining had never been in Cohen’s long-term plan. “This is not as nice as our dining room, and I can never make it as nice,” she’d told me in early June, as we sat at an outdoor table during a lunch rush. I’d just completed my vaccination regimen and was planning a summer-long restaurant binge. I also wanted to understand what recovery in the restaurant industry might look like, especially for someone such as Cohen, a chef with an extensive history of making unique food and speaking her mind on business matters.