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What is dirt candy? Vegetables, of course. When you eat a vegetable you’re eating little more than dirt that’s been transformed by plenty of sunshine and rain into something that’s full of flavor: Dirt Candy. It’s also the name of my restaurant, which opened in October, 2008.

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First off, I just want to deliver an important message to Oliver Schwaner-Albright, the fellow who wrote the mini-review of Dirt Candy in the New York Times this past Wednesday: you’re not ugly, but you may want to get new friends. Here you are, presumably paying for dinner, and you write in your review that your friend gets a little tipsy on Pete’s Organic beer and turns to you and says, “You don’t look so hot.” You can blame the lighting, but Dirt Candy blasts the dining room with amber light so that a) you can see your food and b) you look your best. Hitting someone hard with amber or pink light is known as the “drag queen’s face lift” because the amber gives you a golden glow and the pink gives you a rosy blush both of which remove wrinkles and make you look ten years younger. Plus, I’d say on a scale of 1 to 10 I’d definitely give you at least an 8 and probably a 9, and so I think your dining companion really crossed the line with their comment. It’s things like this that cause low self-esteem!

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The New York Times is the Godzilla of restaurant reviewers. Although they don’t wield as much power as they once did, they can drive crowds to a restaurant by giving it stars and  they can drive a chef to despair by taking stars away. In the past, their Dining Briefs were the first, rough assessment of a restaurant before it got its full-length review, an early warning shot fired over the bow that told a place what they were doing right, and what needed to be fixed, before the reviewer weighed in and passed official New York Times Judgment. These days there’s no longer that close connection between the Dining Briefs and the official reviews, but it’s still nice to be noticed.

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It’s been a crazy week, but check back on Friday to read the post reviewing the short review Dirt Candy got in the New York Times this Wednesday.

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You can read the review-lette here.

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By the way, out of curiosity, what do you think of it? Is it good? Is it bad? Is there a slight patronizing tone wafting through it, or is that just my imagination? I mean, it’s nice to be reviewed by the New York Times and all, but still… Maybe I’m just exhausted from working all the time? Please, gentle readers, set me straight by sending your thoughts on the mini-review to info at dirtcandynyc dot com.

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UPDATE: It wasn’t until I saw the print edition of the paper that I learned how to get a rave from the New York Times: I either need to be a chain restaurant or I need a giant bee mascot. Yes, I was paired in “Dining Briefs” with a review of Filipino chain restaurant Jollibee (627 outlets and counting).

I knew someone from the New York Press had come to the restaurant, and it’s always a dead giveaway that you’re about to get a review when they call make an appointment for their photographer to come by, but I didn’t have a clue this review would be such a rave. From start to finish, they loved everything they had, they loved the room, they liked the atmosphere, they even went nuts for the carrot risotto that was panned by the New Yorker last week.

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A few things I wanted to mention, in no particular order:

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Online reviews are the devil: there are so many of them, the opinions they express are so wildly divergent and they pop up so fast that you can go insane reading them all. What I’ve found most amazing is how people can have such wildly divergent experiences. Case in point: these two reviews, one from the Epoch Times and one from a blog called Soft Rice.

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Both people were here on the same night and, in fact, the Soft Rice folks didn’t have a reservation and I initially had to turn them away. But the woman from the Epoch Times leapt up and said, “You have to eat here. I’ll give you my table.” A few minutes later the Soft Rice folks were seated at the table still warm from the Epoch Times folks. So: same night, same table, same everything. Here are the excerpts:

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Back when newspapers and magazines were more relevant, your restaurant lived and died based on its reviews. A review in the New York Times can still make or break your restaurant, and you always want to get a good review no matter what the publication, but with message boards, blogs, email and basically the whole entire internets, reviews in mainstream publications are no longer one-way, top-down proclamations and are instead parts of a two-way conversation. Don’t worry, this isn’t some misguided attempt to criticize restaurant reviewers (I like most of the food writers I’ve met), but I thought people who read this blog might be interested in how a review winds up on their plate.

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We just got our first mainstream print review in the New Yorker’s “Tables for Two” section in the front of the magazine. My husband got written up in the New Yorker a few years ago in which they wrote, “Grady Hendrix…doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would enjoy watching a man bite through his arm while masturbating inside a burlap sack, but he is.” After having my husband called out as a demented pervert (which he is, but still…) in the New Yorker I knew the stakes were high and I prepared myself accordingly, instantly purging Dirt Candy of all burlap sacks and banning my employees from any masturbating – either inside a sack or otherwise – while on the premises.

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Reviewers will not find ANY burlap sacks at Dirt Candy.

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