We enjoyed a great vegetarian tasting at Dirt Candy in NYC. A really strong value with a 7 course dinner for $105 and one of my favorite wine pairings I’ve ever had for $55.
1. Carrots in a sambal sauce. Technically a snack from the kitchen rather than an official course, but a great start. Light and acidic. A food palate prep.
2. Onion chawanmushi. This is the only course we didn’t like. The creamy sweet custard didn’t play as well with the savory flavors as it should have on paper.
3. Mushroom croissant. Perfectly flaky pastry stuffed with mushrooms and served with a “mushroom coffee” that was a great dipping liquid for the croissant.
4. Flash fried collard greens with buffalo seasoning. Very fun and very tasty! The scissors were to cut the leaf from the stem.
5. Butternut squash noodles with butternut squash. The texture difference between the noodles and squash was fun, but this wasn’t the most memorable dish.
6. Deep fried pickled cabbage. This was awesome and completely unlike anything I’ve ever had in my life.
7. Flourless chocolate cake with apricot. I think this is my favorite dessert I’ve ever had. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just a flawlessly executed piece of cake. The dessert wine it was paired with sent it to the moon.
The Good: Wonderfully creative dishes that, even as a meat eater, did not make me miss meat at all. The wine pairings were also exceptional and a very good value. For the money, this was a great experience.
The Bad: Service felt a bit rushed. I didn’t feel that we got an adequate explanation of every course and it felt like the servers were just trying to get to the next guest.
Overall a very good meal that was well worth our time.
by parker472
6 Comments
Their cocktail program is soooooo underrated! One of the cocktails we had was a California Roll …. Which tasted so similar to its namesake but was completely vegan. I started sending local bartender friends after our visit. Cool spot.
Flavors might be good but the plating and tableware make this look a bit like a dinner party by an ambitious home cook
I want to check this place out next time I’m in nyc! Thanks
If u want to pony up more money at $195, try Eleven Madison Park’s bar tasting menu. I know EMP gets hate these day but they still blew Dirt Candy out of the water for me personally.
Slightly tangential but I really like the format of your post! I can swipe through the photos while seeing your full text below. Which reddit app did you use to make this post?
I went to Dirt Candy back in 2016 and it was a weird experience. They were training a guy from BOH on FOH service and when delivering one of our dishes on a multi-tiered server he dropped half of the items on the floor. He then picked them up, put them back on the server, dropped it on our table, and then ran away. My partner and I just looked shocked until someone else ran over and replaced it all. Then our next course included fresh bread balls in a ramekin but it was covered in little bits of fabric from the towel they used for proofing. The new server noticed right away and brought a new one without us saying anything. Things happen so whatever we didn’t mind, but when the manager came out to apologize she asked the table beside us if it was their table who had the incidents and when they said no she just went to the back and never came to see us. It was super, super weird. The food was fine but all we can do is laugh at the situation when we look back. Truly bizarre for ‘fine’ dining.