Amanda Cohen

Chef-owner, Dirt Candy
New York, New York

On the floor of her New York City restaurant, Dirt Candy, chef

Amanda Cohen is laughing as she picks up containers. “This is

what happens in a tiny kitchen,” she explains, still reeling from the

container avalanche that had hit moments earlier. “On a good day,

only one thing goes wrong.”

Dirt Candy’s kitchen is seventy-five square feet. With regular

customers packing the house almost every night, Cohen—who

works alongside three others in the tiny space—is forced to be

resourceful. (“A menu is dictated by the size of the kitchen,” she

tells me.) Her resourcefulness leads, in turn, to creativity, and

Cohen’s food is endlessly creative. That’s why I’m here to cook

with her. I’m here to answer the question: “How do constraints

lead to innovation in the kitchen?”

Answer #1: You’re forced to use everything because there’s no

room to store anything. When making her famous carrot buns (a

riff on Chinese pork buns), Cohen buys bunches of purple, orange,

and yellow carrots and puts them to immediate use. She juices

them all separately, uses their pulp to make carrot powder, and

then chops the remaining carrots for the carrot filling. Some of the

juice goes into the bun dough and the remaining juice is used to