She’s an Iron Chef — and a pioneer of the No Tipping Movement in New York City. Now Amanda Cohen is hoping a bold food choice can transform the food industry. Special thanks to Dirt Candy.
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00:00The onus of being a female chef and a vegetable chef
00:02and combined, it's sort of this like atomic bomb of least
00:06desirability in the chef world.
00:08Today's secret ingredient is cauliflower!
00:27I am the chef owner of Dirt Candy,
00:29and we are the first all-vegetable restaurant
00:33anywhere in the world.
00:34The only thing we're going to serve is vegetables,
00:37and we're going to celebrate them.
00:38I'm a vegetable chef.
00:39I don't need meat to make my vegetables taste better.
00:47You're staying true to what you do.
00:48You're cooking only vegetable food.
00:50I'm a vegetable chef.
00:51I don't need meat to make my vegetables taste better.
00:54Vegetarian chefs really were always
00:56considered second-class citizens,
00:57because they weren't cooking what the mainstream cared
01:01about, which was meat and the protein on the plate.
01:03I cook vegetables.
01:05And still, for many years, they weren't celebrated.
01:07They weren't considered luxury ingredients.
01:09They weren't considered something
01:10that you could make an amazing meal out of
01:12and that had value.
01:14They were always the side dish.
01:15Right now, we're putting on an onion tartare dish.
01:18So nobody really likes onions.
01:20Nobody talks about onions.
01:21They don't understand how hard onions work for you.
01:28All the research I did pointed me in this direction
01:30that tipping is bad.
01:31It's morally bad.
01:33It's sexist.
01:34It's misogynistic.
01:35It's racist.
01:37Basically, I'm outsourcing part of my payroll,
01:40my human resources department, to my customers.
01:43The states and Canada are really the only two countries
01:45where people are dependent on their tips to live.
01:48And it seems like the rest of the world has moved on,
01:50so why haven't we?
01:51We're not the most sustainable industry for women.
01:54Everybody has to start paying attention to their tips.
01:56Everybody has to start paying their employees more
01:59so they have access to better health insurance.
02:03We have to figure out, as a restaurant industry,
02:05how to be able to provide maternity leave and paternity
02:08leave and real sick days and whole jobs for people
02:11who have to go home and care for a loved one.
02:13The only way I knew how to do that was to go no tipping.
02:17And I think that's just sort of like we like to celebrate.
02:19Female chefs, and I like to get more female chefs' names
02:22out there and to keep sort of pushing
02:24the boundaries of what we consider to be acceptable
02:27and progressive.
02:29The cookbook is a graphic novel cookbook.
02:37It was the first of its kind.
02:39It's really, it's the story of dirt candy.
02:41It's all drawn out.
02:42And then it's about the sort of the trials and tribulations
02:44of opening a restaurant.
02:46Why are you so expensive?
02:47This is a tiny restaurant.
02:48This is how you smoke.
02:50This is how you get flavor into food.
02:51This is how you make vegetables interesting.
02:53And I realized that's what I really wanted to do,
02:55because nobody was cooking the food that I wanted to cook.