Iron Chef Amanda Cohen Roots for Vegetables and Fair Wages

Brut America

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.

Transcript

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.

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