It’s super-cool to be included in New York Magazine’s list of “The Vegetable Movement’s Must-Visit Restaurants” along with places like Per Se, Dovetail, the Spotted Pig and a bunch more. It’s also nice to be included since Dirt Candy is one of only 3 completely vegetarian spots in this list of 14 restaurants (the other two are Kajitsu, which has two Michelin stars, and Le Verdure which is part of Mario Batali’s Eataly empire).

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It’s a little bit weird to be on this prestigious list with Thomas Keller, John Fraser, Alain Ducasse, April Bloomfield, Dan Barber and Jean-Georges Vongerichten when I haven’t even been reviewed by a lot of the major weeklies (including New York Magazine!), but I’m also really happy to be lumped in with all of these amazing chefs. So I’m not knocking it! The only bummer is that their photographer, Danny Kim, took a ton of beautiful photos of my food (I felt like a stage mother prepping her little darlings at his studio – wiping some sauce off the side of a plate here, straightening some cucumber there – getting them photo ready) and I wish I could see more of them.

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New York Magazine augments the list with a nice long article about the new trend for vegetables in restaurants called “Why Vegetables are the New Meat,” and a photo-piece about six vegetables that are hot right now. They also take a stab at coining the word “vegivore” instead of vegetarian.

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I totally get the urge – the word “vegetarian” has come to carry a lot of unfortunate (and in some cases, undeserved) connotations, and using the “v” word sometimes causes potential customers to conjure up a bunch of unsavory images and associations. It’s not fair, but that’s just the way it is. When I worked at Heirloom, Matthew Kenney was desperate to get people to call the food “vegetable cuisine” instead of vegetarian, but “vegetable cuisine” was just way too clunky to ever catch on. I tried “vegetable cooking” when I opened Dirt Candy, and that’s let me steer a middle ground: vegetarians know I run a vegetarian restaurant, but omnivores are willing to give my food a try, too, because they don’t think of it as vegetarian, even though it is. However, a label for Dirt Candy never really caught on, and for that I’m grateful. I cook vegetables, and I think of Dirt Candy as my lab for trying to do new things with vegetables. I don’t think a label would make that better or easier, and I seem to have carved out a tiny niche without one.

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I admire NY Mag’s efforts to find a new word, but I wonder if vegivore will stick?

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“The Vegetable Movement’s Must-Visit Restaurants” (New York Magazine)

“Why Vegetables are the New Meat” (New York Magazine)

“The Six Staples of Vegivorism” (New York Magazine)

“How a Vegivore Meal Compares with a Traditional One” (New York Magazine)

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