Amanda Cohen Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from New York City. Today, we have part two of a miniseries we're doing called Restaurant (R)evolution. I'm talking to folks doing things differently in the restaurant space. The restaurant industry, as you know, is going through a great deal of disruption and one of the topics that comes up time and time again is tipping. Perhaps you've never thought about what you tip and why you tip, but it is a very complicated subject. To quote an Eater article by Vince Dixon, "The data is overwhelming. Tipping encourages racism, sexism, harassment, and exploitation." We will link to that story in our show notes for those who want to read it. Tipping also creates a big divide in a restaurant based on who gets tips, generally the front of house, meaning servers and who doesn't, the back of house, cooks, chefs, pastry chefs, dishwashers, et cetera.
Today, we're talking to someone who thinks a lot about tipping and how to run a restaurant that's fair to all of her employees. It's Chef Amanda Cohen, the owner of Dirt Candy, the vegetable-forward restaurant in New York City. You cannot do a series called Restaurant Revolution without Amanda Cohen. So, stay tuned for our conversation.
Our Restaurant (R)evolution miniseries is supported by OpenTable. OpenTable is proud to sponsor Cherry Bombe's dinner series, Sit with Us, which highlights amazing female chefs and restaurateurs in the Cherry Bombe Network. Our Sit with Us series this summer took us to Olamaie in Austin, AOC in Los Angeles, Zou Zou's in New York, and Foreign Cinema in San Francisco. If you live in or are visiting those cities, I highly recommend all of those places and you can book them on OpenTable.
Part two of our Sit with Us series will take place this fall. We're headed to Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Houston. Stay tuned for details. From Helping Diners find the perfect spot for any occasion to helping restaurants do what they do better OpenTable is a champion for dining around the world and works to make the experience better on both sides of the table. Visit opentable.com for more and be sure to download the OpenTable app.
Restaurant (R)evolution is also presented by FOH. If you are a chef, pastry chef, or restaurateur, passionate about what you do, you need to know about FOH. Founded in 2002 by Simone Mayer and Mayda Perez, partners in business and in life. FOH shares your passion for excellence and creativity and wants to help bring your vision to life. The FOH team designs and manufactures smart commercial grade and distinctive dinnerware and tabletop collections, serving pieces, buffet essentials, and other tabletop categories for the food service and hospitality industries. Headquartered in Miami, FOH has showrooms and distribution centers, conveniently located around the globe with items always in stock and ready to ship. You can visit frontofthehouse.com for catalogs, showroom appointments, and custom capabilities. You can also view products by category from porcelain to flatware, drinkware and unbreakables. Again, that's frontofthehouse.com.
Now, let's check in with Amanda. Amanda Cohen, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Amanda Cohen:
Thanks so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.
Kerry Diamond:
I realize there's a lot about you that I do not know. I don't even know when you became a chef. I have just always known you as the chef of Dirt Candy. So, when did you become a chef?
Amanda Cohen:
1995, 1996. I went to cooking school and then I just kept cooking afterwards. And sometime between 1996 and 2023, I became a chef.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you go to culinary school in Canada or in New York?
Amanda Cohen:
No, I went in New York after, I actually had come to New York for university. Then, I did university and then I traveled a little bit and I came back to New York and I went to the Natural Gourmet Cookery Institute, which is now a part of ICE.
Kerry Diamond:
I did not know that you started as a consultant at a lot of different places and you even were a chef at one of Moby's restaurants.
Amanda Cohen:
I was at Teany when it first opened. At that time, new vegetarian vegan restaurants, they were, I mean, they're still a big deal when they opened, but they were much far and fewer between at that time. So, when something new opened and you were a vegetarian chef, you're like, "I got to get it on the ground floor of this." And Moby and his partner in the restaurant, Kelly Tisdale had opened up Teany and I think I went in on the first day and they weren't advertising for a chef at all, and I was like, "Hi, so I think you need a chef." I was so ballsy, it's so unlike me. And they were like, "Well, we don't really need one." And I was like, "I think you do."
And then, somehow, I became the chef there for the next two years, which I mean, it was obviously a space that I liked tiny, which I liked tiny spaces, but I would go in the morning basically before anybody else would come in and make the sandwiches and salads and the tea sets.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh, you talked your way into a job that didn't exist.
Amanda Cohen:
I did. It was so random. But I had been up in Harlem working at a diner called Diner Bar, and it was cooking a lot of meat, which really wasn't my thing. And this was sort of right after 9-11 when it was, I had gotten the job and it was hard to find jobs at that time, and I really needed one. About two years into it, I was like, "I'd like to go back to cooking vegetarian food." So, it was like a much needed move.
Kerry Diamond:
When and why did you decide you wanted your own place?
Amanda Cohen:
I had nowhere else to work after a while. It's really different now if you're a vegetarian chef or vegan chef. There weren't that many places. And so, I had worked at, not all the places. There was plenty of places I hadn't worked in the city, but I had worked at most of them and they were all sort of alike. So, there wasn't a lot of, I didn't feel at the time that there was a lot more learning I could do. And I had a job consulting where I was going to be a chef, but there was opening, it didn't work out. It's what I call, I got quired. Did I quit or was I fired? I was quired.
Kerry Diamond:
Wait...
Amanda Cohen:
To this day, I think...
Kerry Diamond:
Quired, how does one even spell that?
Amanda Cohen:
Well, I would spell it Q-U-I-R-E-D. I quit. And they were like, "You're fired." And I was like, "But I quit." And they were like, "But you're fired." And I was like, "Okay." I think neither of us knew exactly what had happened. And it's actually okay, we've become good friends since then at this restaurant. But I left and I was looking around and I was like, "I don't know what I'm going to do next," because any job I'm going to take, I don't think I'm going to be learning that much more and it's going to be at the same level. And I was like, so I kind of have two choices, which is one, to open my own place, which I thought was going to be easy in this whole thing, and I was going to get the money and it was going to be no big deal.
Somehow, that seemed easier choice than going back into more mainstream kitchens and learning how to cook meat and rising up through the ranks again that way and furthering my career. So, I took the harder path in the end, but which I thought was easier.
Kerry Diamond:
That makes total sense. Knowing what the vegan vegetarian scene was back then. There wasn't anybody who had really brought that elevated sense of fun and seasonality to the vegan/vegetarian scene.
Amanda Cohen:
Yeah, I mean the only restaurant kind of at the time was Pure Food and Wine, and I had worked there, so I had done my time in that restaurant and I would have to move somewhere else.
Kerry Diamond:
Amanda, when did your ideas about things like tipping and a living wage start to come together?
Amanda Cohen:
When I had my smaller restaurant, still Dirt Candy, but it was teeny tiny. I had put out an ad for a cook and I had always gotten so many responses. There weren't that many vegetarian restaurants. We were probably one of the most high-end vegetarian restaurants in the city. We had a big name, people wanted to work for me. And I put out this ad and we literally got no responses. And I was like, so either I suck, word's gone out and everybody knows or there's something that's happening that I don't understand. And sometimes you're in the kitchen and you're running your restaurant and your head's down, and so you don't see what's happening in the outside world. And I paused and I was like, "Oh, I think there's actually not that many cooks left in the city." And there were and I eventually found a cook, but I wasn't getting hundreds of resumes for this one position.
They started trickling slowly and I had this real sort of aha moment like, "Oh, cooks have actually, they're moving to other cities because there's great jobs now. And this isn't to say that there weren't great jobs beforehand in other cities, but you really needed at a certain point, New York on your resume, that was a big deal. And in the last 20, 25 years, all these other cities have as much sort of weight on your resume as New York does. But that was pretty different. And I was like, "Oh, well, why are they moving to all these cities?" And it's like, "Well, of course it's cheaper to live and your money goes further." And it started to make a lot of sense.
And I was like, "Okay, so, this really sucks for me," because not only do I need to cook right now, but I'm in the process of opening a new restaurant where I don't just need one cook, which is what I had at Dirt Candy, the little small Dirt Candy. I'm going to need 15 cooks and if I can't find one that's pretty troublesome. I can't be a little Dirt Candy where I could cook and serve and do everything. I can't be 15 people. I'm good but not that good. And I was like, "All right, so I have to start paying people more." I have to make sure that they want to work for me and be really competitive. And I was like, "But I don't have that money." Restaurants just have a certain amount of money and we can only charge so much. And I was like, "I don't know what I'm going to do."
And then, I sort of looked around my tiny restaurant, which takes all of half a second and I said, "But there is somebody here who makes a lot of money," and this is a really extreme version of what happens in restaurants. But I had one server, they were serving 64 people a night, I don't know, like 27 tables in a night. And they were getting tipped and walking away with 500, $600 a night and they were working incredibly hard for it, but I also had my back of house who was working incredibly hard and they weren't getting the tips and I can't pay them $600 a night to work for me.
Kerry Diamond:
So, the very first Dirt Candy, how many square feet?
Amanda Cohen:
I think it was like 400, 425, I mean it was pretty tiny. It had nine tiny tables. We made the tables extra small. Our chairs can only have three legs. Everything was extra, extra tiny in the space. We would push all the tables into the middle of the dining room and we would use it as our prep space. So then, at 5:00, it'll be like, "Oh, we have to clean the dining room. People are coming in 30 minutes."
Kerry Diamond:
And then, that space became Superiority Burger 1.0, you now each have bigger restaurants. But when people heard one server for this restaurant, it was not the same size that Amanda's restaurant is now. She's not a tyrant. She was not making one server do all of that. And you also brought up something about the tips that the front of house made and the back of house. Front of house, for everybody who doesn't know this, basically, the servers, right?
Amanda Cohen:
Right.
Kerry Diamond:
Hosts, servers. Servers are the ones who are tipped.
Amanda Cohen:
Not hosts, actually. It shouldn't be hosts. It should be your servers, your server assistants or bussers, bartenders, bar backs. Those are the sort of positions that can take it. Hostess can't because as a hostess you don't interact with the customers enough to be considered front of house under tipping laws in New York City. And this is where it gets really complicated because New York City, not New York State, but New York City has its own sort of set or big rules for this that don't apply to the rest of the state or country to be either on the tip credit or be a part of the tip pool, whatever it is, you have to be interacting with the guests 80% of the time for your shift. Basically, 20% you can be polishing, but 80% you have to be dealing, doing guest interactions.
Kerry Diamond:
So, even though you are making the food that they will eat, that does not count as a guest interaction. That always made me crazy when I had my coffee shop, and probably similarly for you, your space because they were so tiny that you could practically look at the, they would hand it over to the server and the server would go like 12 inches to give it to the guest. So, it just was absurd to me that we couldn't pool tips in a tiny place like that.
Amanda Cohen:
Well, exactly. And in Dirt Candy, my dishwasher was really helping out on the floor and he was basically the buster and my cook was also really helping out on the floor and my other cook was helping to serve. And so, everybody was doing everything, but they were paid hourly and not on the tip credit. Even if you don't have the tip credit, unless you are interacting with the guests 80% of the time, you still are not entitled to part of the tips.
Kerry Diamond:
We've got two more terms we just threw out there. And one thing I want to say also is, this does not apply across the whole United States.
Amanda Cohen:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
Cities and states have their own rules, which is what makes opening restaurants very interesting. But I think all of this is important. If there's anyone out there listening who's like, "I'm never opening a restaurant." It's still important for you to understand the complexity that goes into this. It's not just like, "I want to make nice food, I'm going to open a place." There are so many rules and regulations that our chef and restaurateur friends have to deal with.
Amanda Cohen:
And you don't get a book New York City Restaurants for Dummies. And so, you figure it out as you go along and when the laws change and you're like, "I don't know, I don't have a labor or lawyer or a human resources person always on staff." And so, I'm not up-to-date. And a lot of times, people are trying to do the right thing and it's illegal.
Kerry Diamond:
So, you mentioned the tip credit. So, this is another completely confusing thing. So, minimum wage is not minimum wage when it comes to restaurants. Explain that, Amanda.
Amanda Cohen:
No, it's not because you make up minimum wage with the tips that you are supposedly getting. So, in New York it's $10 something. The minimum wage for servers, for people who are tipped. The real minimum wage is $15, right? So, if you work at, I don't know The Gap, it's $15, that's minimum wage. But if you're in the service industry and you are participating in the tip credit, you're making 10 something and the next $5 is meant to be made up in any tips that you get so that you are actually always at least hitting minimum wage. Every state has different minimum wages and every state has different tip credits, minimum wages.
The national tip credit is $2 and 13 cents, which is just mind boggling. And you're supposed to be, but the national minimum wage isn't that high yet either. It's like $78. You make that up in the tips that you make, and if you don't, let's say, I don't know, your restaurant isn't doing well, you're not even making $15 with your tips an hour, then the restaurant is supposed to make that money up and pay it for you.
Kerry Diamond:
The other term you'd use was tip pool. So, I think we've all heard of places where they pool the tips and the bartender gets some and maybe the host will get some, or whoever the money is divvied up among. It's not as easy as it sounds. You can't just hand out money that you want. Amanda can't just decide, "We're going to pool all the tips and I'm going to give some to the folks who are doing the cooking."
Amanda Cohen:
No, I absolutely cannot do that. They are not entitled to the tip pool. It belongs to the server. So, every once in a while, Dirt Candy will get tips still, people will leave some cash. And that only even with all my systems in place, that is only allowed to be distributed among the front of house. Now, I usually have a back of house person who's running the food. So, on that occasion they actually are entitled to that, but only them, nobody else who works in the back of house is entitled to part of that money. And I actually, as the owner, have nothing to do with it. I don't generally know what happens to it and who gets what, but it's not mine to count. It's not mine to touch. It's supposed to stay in the hands of the servers at all times.
Kerry Diamond:
You have so been the face of the tipping story, the chef face for so long. I assumed that you were doing it at Dirt Candy 1.0.
Amanda Cohen:
I wasn't. I wish I had. Although my servers, at that time, probably are happy, I wasn't. I didn't even know that you couldn't do it. There was never an option. It was just that you opened a restaurant and servers made tips. And so, it was only after that I've had this realization that I had to pay my back of house more that then I started really doing a lot of research into tipping and what it meant and how it worked and who was entitled to it. And I was fortunate enough that I was then opening a new restaurant. I could start fresh, which is the Dirt Candy 2.0.
Kerry Diamond:
So, explain what you were doing that enabled you to spread the wealth a little bit more.
Amanda Cohen:
Well, the Dirt Candy tipping story is a whole saga. When we first opened, we opened with something called an admin fee, which meant that you could see it on the bill. It was like this is your total food, drinks, this is the admin fee, this is tax. And at the bottom, you'd have your total. So, you could see how much was being added onto your bill through the admin fee. I think we were doing 20%. Because it was called the admin fee, all the money could go to me. So, then, I could take that extra 20% and divvy it up. And so, we were paying our waiters, servers way more than minimum wage, and I think they had started off at like 25, 26 or something. This was, I don't know, seven, eight years ago. And it allowed me to pay my back of house much more.
So, I think that they were starting off at 15 or $16 when minimum wage at the time was like 11 or 12. So, for them it was a lot more money than let's say their friends would be getting. And for my front of house, it was definitely not as much money as they'd be able to make at other restaurants. But a lot of people who we were able to hire really believed in this system and sharing the tips or the admin fee, definitely admin fee. But then, what happened, was admin fee became totally illegal. It's sort of always been in this gray area, and then it just absolutely became illegal.
So, we had to switch to, and the only other choice was to go tipped inclusive. Basically, something called the service fee, again, because it says service fee can only go then to server and we don't have any other words for this. So, then, I switched to tip inclusive. What was really interesting, and I think times have changed a little bit now, but people who really complained were just like, "Just include it. I don't need to see that there's a 20% admin fee. Just give me a bill at the end." And that was our biggest complaint about it.
Very few people were like, "Oh, I wanted to tip my server." And we would always be like, "Yeah, leave some cash, it's fine." And so, then we switched to the tip inclusive and people are like, "Great, I don't have to do any math. It's all one bill. I understand I'm paying for this whole experience." And that's that, and we've been doing that for eight years.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, you have stuck with it. Some other places that announced that they were doing the same thing, have abandoned it. Do you feel that you are sort of the lone wolf here in New York City when it comes to this topic?
Amanda Cohen:
I do. And there were times definitely in the past, sort of post pandemic, the restaurants really write it itself. And so, we make enough money now and we're able to really pay our front of house and back of house enough money. I think, both actually houses start at $29 an hour, 28, $29 an hour, and then they get periodical raises after that. Periodically, they get raises after that.
Kerry Diamond:
So, you can show up at Dirt Candy and start at 28, $29 an hour.
Amanda Cohen:
Yeah, with no experience. We are happy to have you. And I think that, while it's not the most amount of money, that is really a fair living wage in New York City for an entry level position and a somewhat skilled position as well. It's a lot of money. It's not nothing. After the pandemic, I was like, "We've got to figure out how to make this a really safe business or I don't want to do it." We're running this like a business, not like a charity anymore. I don't want to feel horrified every day that my balance isn't as high as it should be and we have no safety net. And I wanted to make sure that I had a safety net. My staff had a safety net, the restaurant had a safety net, should there ever be another disaster.
But there were times before that when I definitely thought I was going to give up the no tipping thing. We weren't making enough money. I can see the numbers, I could see how people could be making more money, how I could probably still even pay my back of house more and then let my front of house just keep tips. But I really don't believe in the tipping system, so I just couldn't. That just went against all my morals and ethics and I was too proud. Pride got in the way of me giving up the system, which it's a good thing to be proud of, but I would've just been so ashamed and curled up in a ball if I couldn't make this work.
Having said that, I absolutely understand why it's hard to make it work for other people. We have a one menu, we do a set menu, we know exactly how many guests we're going to have every night. We know what our food costs are and it makes it much easier. And we, after eight years, have figured out the right amount of money to charge, what people will pay, and how much we can pay our employees. Because in the tipping system, it's not just that, "Oh, my servers, I'm going to take their money and give it out to them." There's a lot more costs, right?
So, your taxes, your payroll taxes, they quadruple. Because all of a sudden, you are paying payroll taxes on money that previously you wouldn't have had to because you don't pay payroll taxes on tips as the owner. But now, everything is considered wages, so you have to pay payroll taxes on it and then your insurance goes up because your revenue is much higher because before your revenue wasn't considered, tips weren't included in the revenue. I think the difference for us would be somewhere between, let's say we make $3 million a year without tips. With tips inclusive, if I was a tipped restaurant, I would probably only make $2 million a year. So, my revenue that I have insurance on would be only $2 million, but with my system, it's $3 million. So, all these costs come out. It's annoying.
Kerry Diamond:
And your workers' comp, everything basically goes up.
Amanda Cohen:
Yeah, all of it way up.
Kerry Diamond:
Another decision you made, Amanda, was to have a set menu. Why did you make that decision and how has that changed things?
Amanda Cohen:
Throughout the pandemic, we actually basically just had a set menu, which we changed every two weeks, and I really watched my food costs go way down. It was a real revelation to me. I was like, "Wow, I can get my food costs down from like 25% to 12%." And then, after the pandemic I was like, "Oh, it's so much easier too, and I'm a little lazy."
Kerry Diamond:
You are not lazy. Take that back.
Amanda Cohen:
No, but we were running two tasting menus and we had a la carte at the bar and it was a lot for this restaurant to handle. It's not that big and we don't have that much kitchen space, so I just decided to stick with the set menu and our food costs really are like 12, 13% now, which is a huge difference, and I'm able to take that extra money and redistribute it.
Kerry Diamond:
Twenty-five to 12. We have to repeat that. That is shocking and significant.
Amanda Cohen:
Yeah, we're really good at ordering these days.
Kerry Diamond:
I would love to know, who are some folks you admire in the industry or who you learn from? Do you have people that you can talk to about all these different changes in the restaurant world and like-minded folks to band together with?
Amanda Cohen:
Yeah, one of the tiny little good things the pandemic was I made a lot of chef friends all over the country. We've all kept in touch and being part of the IRC, Independent Restaurant Coalition, definitely. I have a lot of people there. And then, I was part of a smaller group, a more independent chefs, independent restaurant owner chefs who are much, much smaller and we've all gone back and forth and talked a lot. And I don't know, but I'm always looking for people to learn more from because I also feel like I've kept my head down for so long and I don't know who's out there these days, who's doing new and interesting things that I can learn from, but I know there's lots of people out there.
Kerry Diamond:
It seems like it's maybe easier in places like California and Texas. We just spoke to Tracy Malechek of Birdie's in Texas and Austin, and she's doing a lot of things her own way. California, all these various surcharges you see on the restaurant bills out there. It just seems New York is a lot harder to be a creative thinker about these things.
Amanda Cohen:
Yeah. Well, I also think you're really hemmed in by the state and city laws. You can't decide what you want to do and do it. You really are beholden to the city and state laws. So, in Texas, I think you can share the tip pool with everybody. And I don't know about California. I know there's some places where you can't. In New York, you just can't. Then that would be such an easy law to change. And I think so many people, so many restaurant owners would then participate more in a different system, but you're really, the laws here are really strict and it's so hard to change them.
Kerry Diamond:
Have you ever thought of leaving between all the gorgeous produce in California and maybe it's a little easier to do these creative things, you've never thought of leaving?
Amanda Cohen:
I don't know if I could leave New York, but I mean I would definitely open a restaurant somewhere else. I don't know. I like cold weather too. I mean, I love summer.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, that's right. You're Canadian. I forgot. Do you do any other surcharges? Do you do a wellness surcharge, anything like that?
Amanda Cohen:
No, I wouldn't. I would just keep rolling it into the cost. I totally understand why people do it. I think one of the things, and this is part of what has to change, is people just also have to, customers have to get used to just paying what it costs to eat in a restaurant. And I don't know, a lot of billionaire restaurant owners most are struggling or getting by or doing well, but they're not raking it in. Customers, I think, have gotten really used to not paying enough, not for the food, but for the experience. You're really renting a table in a restaurant and for two hours, let's say, and it's going to cost this much money, and that might include paying health insurance or wellness or whatever it is, paid vacation, but the customer doesn't have to know what they're paying for.
When I buy my t-shirt at The Gap, I don't need to know that the $20, they're probably like $100 now, how that gets divvied up in the company. It is what it is. I need a white t-shirt. I want a white t-shirt. I'm going to pay $100 for it.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Are you able to offer insurance or things like parental leave or paid vacation?
Amanda Cohen:
Well, parental leave comes through the city anyways. We pay into it and if somebody needs to leave that we pay into insurance for that. Health insurance, we will pay, everybody's welcome to it here. We pay half of it if they want it. It's still hard to get people to buy into it, even though we're like, "It's health insurance, you should have it." A lot of them are still young. They're on their parents' health insurance until they're 26 and I can't fault them, but they're like, "I don't need health insurance." And we're like, "Here, have some money, use it.
Kerry Diamond:
Paid vacation?
Amanda Cohen:
Paid vacation. Yep, absolutely. Extra sick days.
Kerry Diamond:
Amanda, that's amazing. For those people who work for corporations, you might be like, "Oh, big deal that she does all these things." But for a tiny independent restaurant to do that is a big deal here in New York City. So, well done.
Amanda Cohen:
Thank you. Well, and also, I will say, the nice thing is I've been doing this for 15 years now, Dirt Candy's birthday is October 29th. I'm pretty comfortable with the restaurant. I feel very safe in the decisions I get to make. Anything can happen, but I would clearly slowly start to see the trickle, but we're still busy. We do the number of people that we need to do a night, and I'm not worried every day that I'm not going to make enough money to pay my bills. It is hard for small, independent restaurants to sometimes find the extra money to do that.
Kerry Diamond:
If you were a chef or an aspiring restaurant owner today, what would you do differently?
Amanda Cohen:
I would never open a restaurant.
Kerry Diamond:
Really?
Amanda Cohen:
Yeah. I don't think I would. It's so hard. My heart goes out to people who are starting a restaurant. I certainly wouldn't open one in New York City. I don't know if I would've gone to California, but it's incredibly expensive. It's really hard to become established. You are fighting with so many other restaurants and the laws again in New York City make it incredibly hard to run a business. It is very expensive here. I've loved my career. I wouldn't give it up, but knowing what I've had to do to get to this point and how much I've had to give up, I don't know if I could choose that again. Spent some more time seeing friends and family and not just at work.
So, let's say, I decided I was aspiring and I wanted to open another restaurant. I don't want to kill anybody's dreams. It's just something, as much as I thought I knew going into it, I knew so little. I wish I had really spent more time talking to people who had opened restaurants and learning the ins and outs of the business, which I thought I knew. And it's really hard to know any of it until you're doing it. But I think I could certainly have learned more and I would've spent more time in the cooking world learning more techniques and different cuisines. Because once you open a restaurant, it's very hard to be like, "Oh, I'm going to leave for six months," and learn how to make pizza, which sounds amazing.
I would hope that if I were to open a restaurant, I could start off with the system that I have now and not have to struggle for a lot of years to get to it. Because also in that struggle, and this is one of the really nice gifts that my restaurant has given to me over the last couple of years, is I don't panic every night when I go to bed, my staff isn't going to show up. And we talked a lot about the Great Resignation right after the pandemic, particularly in the restaurant industry. I felt like that was happening for years beforehand, and it was really hard to find staff. And I had this revolving door, and basically, my sous chefs and I would all be in the kitchen cooking at night because half the staff had decided not to show up that day. They had found another job that wasn't even necessarily a better job. It was just a different job.
I just felt every night, I didn't know what was going to happen the next day in a really bad way. And in most restaurants, you're like, "I don't know what's going to happen the next day. Is the oven going to explode?" But this was like four alarm fire every morning for a couple of years. And these days, I am pretty sure that almost all of my staff is going to show up every day, which is the nicest feeling. When you don't start getting those calls at 7:00 AM, "Bob didn't show up for work." You're like, "Bob, I had such hopes for you." I would like to have set myself up and I would like to set myself up so that I don't have to panic every single day. I think that took quite a number of years off my life.
Kerry Diamond:
So, if I can summarize that, you would spend more time talking to other folks in the industry and working in other places and learning everything you can.
Amanda Cohen:
And really working almost like an accountant's office, will have them really talk you through what all the taxes are and what it means and what you're going to pay and work with human resources so you have that background. All that stuff helps you so much because as it turns out, the bulk of my day is not spent cooking. That's the smallest part of my day. I run the restaurant, I run a business, and when I have enough time, then I get to think about the food.
Kerry Diamond:
It's hard though when you're a hot young chef and you want to be your own boss and make your own food.
Amanda Cohen:
I know.
Kerry Diamond:
You want to jump in there.
Amanda Cohen:
But you have so much time. You have many, many years. And I opened Dirt Candy when I was 35 and I thought I was really old. I thought I was going to get out of cooking school and open my restaurant the next year. It took me many more years to do it. Looking back, I could have opened it up 45 and been just as happy.
Kerry Diamond:
So, patience, people. That's what Amanda has to say. Resources. Where do we even start when you want to open a restaurant? What can you look at? What are the resources out there?
Amanda Cohen:
Well, first thing is, go talk to, if you're still friendly with your bosses, go talk to them. That's your first resource because they're also going to be able to put you in touch with the people they work with, and that really helps. When I started out, first, I had taken a class at Peter Kump on how to open a restaurant. Peter Kump is now ICE. So, this was a long time ago, and that was really helpful, and I still use those papers when I was figuring out how to open my restaurant. But then, I'd had a lot of crappy bosses, and so I couldn't talk to them, and I didn't even know where to find a lawyer. And so, I basically was flipping through the yellow pages for a restaurant lawyer and the same thing for a restaurant accountant. I think I found my great accountant on the internet, and then through her, I found my bookkeeper.
But it would've been much easier with all of that if I had just been able to talk to somebody, it can even be like, "Hey, who's your lawyer? Can I use them or can they recommend somebody who I can use? "And so, the more connections and networking you can do, it's much easier. And then, the biggest thing I can tell people about opening a restaurant is learn Excel and learn how to write a budget. I still have the basic Excel file, but that spreadsheet that I opened with little Dirt Candy and it showed me all my numbers, and the first thing it did was showed me why most restaurants fail. "Oh, I finally get it. Wow." Yeah, if you're labor, if you have this many people on staff, of course you're not going to make money. But that has been my guiding light in running this restaurant, and it still is to this day.
I'm like, I want to give somebody a raise, and I put the raise next to their name and I fix all these other things because prices are always going up, or maybe I'm not using as many linens. And so, I keep it super up to date. And then, I look at the P&L that it shoots out, and I'm like, "Oh, okay. I can give this person a raise." The last couple of months I sort of had about 10 people who were all due for raises, and I put it in and I was like, "We're going to start losing money if I do this." And I was like, "But I have to do this." And then, I have to raise prices, and we've raised prices by $10, but follow the money, that does not lie, and that is the most important thing I did for Dirt Candy.
Kerry Diamond:
So, spreadsheet life, people. Start to embrace it. If you want to open a restaurant. Let's talk about food because I cannot let you go without talking about your food. What's on the fall menu? Tell us.
Amanda Cohen:
Yeah, So I'm feeling pretty nesty. I just want warm, hot, comforting carby foods. So, what I feel like eating is sort of what goes on the menu. All of my sous chefs and my CDC, they all take a dish. We talk about the ideas and what vegetables we want to use, and then they run with them. We have some really fun things. I think the thing I'm most excited about, and either people are going to love it or they're going to hate it, but we are roasting Japanese sweet potatoes, so those super sweet, dense, creamy, sweet potatoes.
And then, we're basically treating it like a piece of chicken and dipping it in flour and deep-frying it, so it's like a deep-fried baked potato, and then it's going to have a white sauce Beurre Blanc and all this raw sweet potato salad with a little yuba, which is the skin of tofu, and it's like the most fabulous baked potato. But I can see people are going to be like, "I can't believe you fried a baked potato and it's one of the courses." Or people are going to be like, "Oh yeah, why aren't our potatos fried?"
Kerry Diamond:
It's like the world's sexiest french fry, right? That's what you got going on there. When you said Beurre Blanc, is it vegetarian or vegan, the restaurant?
Amanda Cohen:
The restaurant, it's either, whatever you want it to be-
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, okay, okay.
Amanda Cohen:
... it can be. So we'll do...
Kerry Diamond:
Do you use things like butter there?
Amanda Cohen:
Oh, yeah. Butter, cheese, or vegan butter, and vegan cheese.
Kerry Diamond:
Got it.
Amanda Cohen:
It just depends which menu you're having.
Kerry Diamond:
Got it. Any Dirt Candy classics that are on the menu that I should not miss?
Amanda Cohen:
You don't get a choice when you come here. So, you basically have to eat what I give you.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, that's right.
Amanda Cohen:
Usually, we have the portobello mousse, which has been on the menu since day one and was sort of the dish that put us on the map. I think it was one of the first times people could be like, oh, well, I think there's probably lots of other experiences, but in New York, one of them where people were like, "Oh, vegetarian food can actually be decadent." And it's not a punishment, and this is really luxurious, and it doesn't matter if it's vegan or vegetarian, but it's sinful in the best kind of way, and it still holds up, which I'm pretty impressed with. It pops in and out of the menu, so it won't be on the fall menu, but my guess it'll be back on the winter menu, which will be in January.
Kerry Diamond:
I've had that mousse many a time at the restaurant. But also, there aren't that many of those events anymore, but all the big charity events that used to happen in the city, and you'd have all the chefs and the dine rounds, you always made that for the dine rounds. It was so fun.
Amanda Cohen:
I know. Isn't it sad? Those events have sort of like stuck because that's where I met most of my chef friends and I got to try a lot of different restaurants. But yeah, post pandemic, and I think even beforehand in the last couple of years leading up to it, you just saw them sort of like dwindle, but they were fun. We should start them again.
Kerry Diamond:
They were fun. That's where we saw everybody. Amanda, you are amazing. You really, really are. You have stuck to your guns for so long, all because you just want the world to be a better place, and you want people to be treated fairly and paid fairly.
Amanda Cohen:
Thank you for your kind words. I appreciate that.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to FOH and OpenTable for supporting Radio Cherry Bombe. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Our show was recorded at City Vox in NYC. Our producer is Catherine Baker. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our editorial assistant is Londyn Crenshaw. Check back next Wednesday for another episode of Restaurant (R)evolution. Is there someone you think is a restaurant revolutionary? Leave a rating and a review and drop in their name. Thanks for listening everybody. You're the Bombe.