Dirt Candy.(vegetarian restaurant)

The new vegetarian restaurant Dirt Candy (not to be confused with the X-rated movie "Dirty Candy") deserves a better name. According to the owner and chef, Amanda Cohen, vegetables are like candy from the dirt. Maybe, but there is nothing earthy about her nine-table East Village restaurant. The translucent white tabletops, the glass-panelled walls, the greenish lighting, and, most of all, the food evoke some utopian future where the people have renounced not just meat but also soil, in favor of brightly colored, hydroponically grown produce.

Cohen is not a vegetarian (she eats seafood), but she is vegetable-mad. She has a problem with most vegetarian restaurants, which she says have a politicized, uncreative approach. She likes cream and butter and deep-frying, and is big on drizzling and tall garnishes. Many of her dishes are so earnest in their embrace of a single ingredient that you find yourself stopping to really think about that vegetable, as if for the first time. This is true of the portobello mousse, a dense, comforting cube topped with a pile of grilled mushroom slices. But if the candy-colored carrot risotto reminds you just how sweet and rich carrots can be, it can be exhausting for the same reason. Some of the other dishes suffer from the opposite problem. A pappardelle with cauliflower is ...