Vegan Living: How Not to Market a Vegetarian Restaurant

In two recent interviews, Amanda Cohen seems to think she's going to boost business at her East Village restaurant Dirt Candy by calling vegans unimaginative weirdos with terrible taste in food.

I don't like to draw lines between vegetarians and vegans. We do have our differences: vegetarians don't eat meat whereas vegans abstain from meat as well as eggs, cheese, milk or foods containing those products. Vegans also don't wear leather or wool or other animal products and most of the vegetarians I know do wear those materials. But when it comes down to it, we're all in this together. We want to help animals and do our part in protecting them from exploitation.

Cohen, however, wants to drive a wedge between the two groups, and in doing so she alienates both vegetarians and vegans, the very people who would come to her restaurant. She also shows that she has no problem throwing every other vegetarian restaurant under the bus in the pursuit of promoting her restaurant. When prompted by The Feedbag that vegetarian restaurants are terrible, Cohen agrees. "Always! They're horrible. Horrible! And you know why? Because they don't have real cooks. The people who cook there have no culinary background."

Wait, you're thinking of McDonald's, where high school students heat the food in microwaves. Vegetarian restaurants do in fact have real chefs who plan the menu and invent new dishes. Cohen should know this since she worked at Angelica's Kitchen, Teany, Pure Food and Wine and consulted for Blossom. Also, if I had just opened a vegetarian restaurant, I would not go around telling people how awful they are.

Besides having a real chef, Cohen also explains that what sets Dirt Candy apart from those other vegetarian restaurants is that she uses cream and butter, and lots of it. She says patrons react to her food with sentiments like, "'Ooh! I'm eating something that's so dense and heavy and fattening but it's so good.' And that's not something you get in a lot of vegetarian food, particularly because they don't use dairy."

There she goes again, stepping on this generic vegetarian food that she has lumped into one category to raise herself to a higher position. As Cohen gushes about her love of cooking with cream, she says other vegetarian restaurants are not "as innovative as they could be." There is nothing innovative about using ingredients that have been used before to make dishes that have been made before. Where is the challenge? An innovative recipe uses new ingredients and experiments with taste and texture, like Isa Chandra Moskowitz's broccoli quiche, which uses no eggs and, sorry, Amanda Cohen, no cream or butter.

Cohen, who eats fish, also explains that other vegetarian restaurants are "really not vegetarian: they're vegan. . . They are more or less supporting a lifestyle and a diet. I'm really not trying to do that. I'm just trying to make good vegetarian food." She adds, "Unfortunately I get a lot of weirdos. But we're not a weird restaurant."

Why does she feel the need to convince anyone that her restaurant is not weird? Vegetarians will check out a new vegetarian restaurant, but it seems she's appealing to the meat eaters here. And not just appealing to them, but begging them to give her restaurant a chance while putting down other vegetarian restaurants and vegetarians. Amanda Cohen clearly wants to distance herself from the vegetarian community, so maybe the vegetarian community should distance themselves from her.

Comments

[ElaineVigneault]

I have a beef (har har) with Ms. Cohen. I don't like being a punching bag. My vegan lifestyle doesn't give anyone permission to toss around inaccurate insults my direction. And I'm tired of being publicly mocked and privately given apologies. I guarantee that's what she's doing.

But I'm also tired of being treated like niche market. I'm more than merely a consumer. I don't want to be pandered to. I want to be respected. But mostly, I want animals and the planet to be respected.

And well, honestly, what she's doing probably works. She's becoming friends of anti-veg*ns by becoming the enemy of the enemy: she's pissing off enough vegans, that people who hate vegans will likely try vegetarian­ism/vegani­sm just to spite us. It's semi-brilliant.

If it works, I'm down with it.I just won't be eating there myself.

[Ganymede]

Wow–brilliant marketing strategy: insult the people who might actually have visited your overpriced, pretentiously named restaurant by calling them weirdoes, then chase pathetically after a clientele (”normal” people) who would still rather have their butter-and­-cream-soa­ked potatoes at a steakhouse. I have a feeling Ms. Cohen won’t have to worry about too many of those “unfortunate” vegetarians lining her wallet for much longer!

[akd262824]

meat rules

[Lionsden]

The Vegans have something good going for them: Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn (cardiologist from Cleveland Clinic).

Even some vegetarians, who are not vegan, suffer from some chronic, degenerative diseases meat eaters do. This is because some vegetarians overly rely on dairy, oil (yes, even olive), eggs, and nuts.

Dr. Esselstyn shows that, even if one abstains from meat and has a lower cholesterol count than meat eaters, they might still have (after an autopsy--eek!) coronary artery disease because of the heavy use of oil, eggs, and dairy. Even a vegan cannot get away with heavy use of vegetable oils.

A vegetarian accustomed to food with allegedly good vegetable oils and dairy fat (like menus from Moosewood) may find it hard to navigate back and forth between it and an animal-free (fat free) vegan menu. This is probably because, as Dr. Esselstyn says, it takes approximately 14 weeks to stop craving the "taste" of fats (including those in eggs and dairy).

There will be millions and millions of elderly baby-boomers out there who will soon discover that, through the (fat-free) vegan menus, they can REVERSE coronary disease.

Dr. Dean Ornish's plan can reverse coronary heart disease too but it has modest of amounts of nonfat diary,egg whites, and meat.

Esselstyn's diet was designed for those who have been given a death sentence by their cardiologist, but who, after adopting a fat free vegan diet have lived a healthy full life AND still ate delicious foods.

[Vickster]

My father is a biostatistician who worked on two of the earliest studies that tried (and failed) to find a link between meat consumption and coronary disease. The first study involved lumberjacks from Michigan's upper peninsula. The findings were inconclusive because most of the subjects were booze hounds and nicotine fiends who ate lots of Twinkies and potato chips, as well as smoke-cured and salt-cured meats. The second study involved the Maasai, cattleherders living in the Serengeti Plains whose diet, for the most part, consist of meat, milk and blood because there are very few edible plants in their habitat. After ten years, it was determined that the Maasai have no coronary diseases. My father also keeps up with the current literature. So far, a link between meat and coronary disease has yet to be established.
Also, while veganism may be a good therapeutic diet in some cases, statistics suggest that vegans and vegetarians have worse general health than the omnivorous population. There are also studies that suggest a link between vegetarianism and certain cancers. As for why most people never hear about these studies, I can only speculate. Political correctness? Maybe. The biases of mainstream media? Perhaps. A lack of investigative reporting? Most likely. There have been many times when the mainstream media reported on a study, then failed to follow up when a scientific review judged the findings to be either inconclusive or flawed.

[PhatP]

Vickster there is more than enough evidence that shows that eating a vegan diet is the healthiest diet...by far! Read the most comprehensive study on diet ever done. The conclusion is that a vegan diet is the healthiest way to eat.
Read Dr Dean Ornish..read the results of his studies.

However, going vegan for ethical reasons is the only way to prevent such horrible and miserable suffering and death.

The fact that you are better off health wise eating vegan diet than why would you choose this....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-sRLD1dtBs&feature=related

There is more suffering in one glass of milk than in one large steak.

Go vegan and NOBODY gets hurt!

[Saabisu]

Medline link or it didn't happen.

[Badbone]

The vegan lifestyle and a New York restaurant? Talk about navel gazing. And the truly awful name. I'm sure the owner figured that the greatness of the place would speak for itself. That the normal laws of commerce don't apply to such high minded folk as the vegan. Glad she's getting a slight taste of reality.

[Idytme]

I have to agree with Anthony Bourdain that if you want to taste some really messed up vegetables, go to a typical veggie restaurant rather than veggies in a high end restaurant. He has a hysterical scene in his episode in the Bay Area of eating at a vegetarian food club in Berkeley and just how nasty, tasteless, overcooked and non respecting of the natural taste of the vegetables this food was.
Many vegetarians spend a lot of time trying for recipes to get their vegetables to taste like something other than vegetables.... meat for instance. Hence all those horrible tofu burgers and nut combos trying to get the nuts to taste....meaty.
There are some good high end veggie restaurants in SF, but for the most part I agree with Mr. Bourdain. I love vegetables, and I have had some great 100% vegetarian dishes - especially Indian cuisine, but because I do add fish and chicken to my diet, I can let vegetables be vegetables and not have them try to satisfy the deep need my body has for meat/fish protein.

[kathynyc]

I agree the marketing for Dirt Candy has been off.

I had to explain to my husband what DIRT CANDY even meant.

...dirtt candy...ya know the 'candy' that comes from the dirt...like veggies....

He said, oh. I get it.

Why reference DIRT and CANDY when trying to lure health-minded customers. I don't eat dirt thank you. And I'm really not big into candy.......

[carrieanna]

Sounds like she's chosen Gordon Ramsay as her idol.

[Swerinjer2]

Vegans and vegetarians are eating wrong. Learn how humans eat from the Weston A Price Foundation.

[cduvall]

Weston A. Price says: "Quack quack!"

[Tabasco]

Try this for a more complete side-by-side look at the physiological differences between the two. It is written by an MD.

http://www.vegsource.com/veg_faq/comparative.htm

The "Myth" section is full of its own myths. Byrnes cherry-picks incomplete info and couples it with his own preconceptions.

The site should be commended for advocating organic and locally-grown foods and balanced diets, but it has a long way to go to be a well researched site.

[chariot13]

I think the more important point of this article is not what is and isn't considered "good," "authentic" food, but instead to point out how this new restaurateur is taking such a negative public relations approach. I don't care if you're vegan, vegetarian or beefatarian, alienating any part of your potential market is bad for business and in this case, done in poor taste. It sounds to me like she wants to cash in on the popularity of eating vegetarian without losing any of the high-end snobbery found at so many Manhattan eateries.

I was going to try out Dirt Candy, but now I think I may have to reconsider.

[IsaChandra]

HuffPost's Pick

God did not come from on high to name quiche. Not only is language constantly evolving, but so is food, and so is the language of food. It isn't just vegans that play with words. In fact, a simple wikipedia search of your "egg tart" will reveal that the word quiche evolved from the word "cake," not from tart. And while we're at it, "egg tart" refers to a sweet pastry tart, not to quiche.

A few hundred years ago Italy didn't even know what a tomato was, yet would we say that an Italian restaurant is inauthentic because they served marinara sauce? Gumbo can be thickened with file, with a roux, with okra or with all three. Chefs may argue about what the "right" way is, but generally they are all accepted as gumbo. There are dishes that were originally made of squirrel meat that are now made of chicken, yet the name remains the same.

It might be nice to live in a world where you can dismiss things simply because they don't match what you're seeing on the Food Network, but the fact is that things are changing, food is changing, quiche is changing and it always has been. Perhaps in a few decades we won't remember a time when quiche wasn't made with cashews. It might behoove restaurateurs to catch up, certainly insulting their potential clientèle is a deeply foolhardy and egotistical move.

[pilgrimmills]

@IsaChandra, not that anyone should hold either Wikipedia up as a standard, but when I wrote "egg tart," I meant that as a concise description. Obviously I didn't mean a Chinese dessert. But, to compare apples to "apples," so to speak, using your own source, Wikipedia defines a "quiche" as:

"In French cuisine, a quiche (IPA: [ki:ʃ]) is a baked dish that is based on a custard made from eggs and milk or cream in a pastry crust. Other ingredients such as cooked chopped meat, vegetables, or cheese are often added to the egg mixture before the quiche is baked." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiche

If you want to re-invent a time-honored dish, call it an "eggless potato tart" or a "savory cashew pie", or better yet, invent your own evocative name, as did the Italians when they started stewing tomatoes into marinara.

A rose is a rose, as long as it's still a rose.

[cduvall]

Or just call it a quiche? Considering that you're praising a restaurant that offers a Kim-Chi doughnut, that's hardly much to ask.

[Swerinjer2]

I cannot disagree more. your post absolutely does not deserve any special mention whatsoever. shame on hp for this favoritism.

[Squeakity]

Did you want state any reasons to back up your conclusions, or were you hoping that we'd come up with them for you?

[Marco]

How very odd. Cohen seems to have a chipped beef on her shoulder; I wouldn't like to eat in a restauarant with that kind of negativity going around so thanks for the heads-up. I've certainly eaten in some less-imaginative vegan/vegetarian restauarants, but in the past several years, that hasn't been the norm in my experience.

Why doesn't she just call her place The Vegetarian Contrarian and call it a day?

[vazzy13]

Excuse me Ms Molinaro - not all vegetarians or vegans follow these diets because they want to help animals. Some of us were raised that way for religious or health reasons. Mind you - I don't want animals to be tortured either, but if the majority of the population is going to raise cows and chickens to eat, well then I'll take the "throw-aways" and wear a leather coat or handbag!

And who cares about Ms Cohens restaurant? I'm no where near NYC so I'll never go there. And I suggest if she ticks you off, that you not go there either! Go have a animal-free treat and chill ok?

[pilgrimmills]

Kudos to Ms. Cohen! Vegan restaurants I've been to — not always, but by and large — are full of unimaginative faux-food exactly like the quiche recipe you present. What is "innovative" about bastardizing a dish that doesn't belong on your menu by it's very definition?

A quiche is an egg tart, pure and simple. If it contains none of key ingredients of a quiche, it's not a quiche. Ditto for the "meatball subs" and "chicken parmigiana" that dot vegetarian menus all over New York.

You wouldn't tolerate a seafood restaurant advertising "Maine Lobster" and serving surimi. If you care about food, call it what it is. If you choose to create a menu within limits, then comprise it of dishes that are honest and true to their ingredients, rather than dreadful facsimiles that insist "anything you can do, I can do with a weird texture."

Thanks for your review. I am looking forward to trying out Dirt Candy at my earliest opportunity.

[greyingbutchlesbian]

Horray for Ms. Cohen!
i just checked out the restaurant's web site and agree w/ Ms. Cohen that the best vegetarian foood is usually found in non-vegetarian restaurants.

And I'm so tired of reading meatball subs on a vegetarian menus; call it what i t is: a tofuball sub.

Looking forward to trying Dirt Candy after reading reviews on menupages and citysearch.