There are structures and systems that frankly never worked and the pandemic just laid them so clear and bear and now that we know them and now that we see them

it is all of our responsibility to change them.

It's my responsibility as an owner to figure out how to afford to pay everyone an ethical, fair, livable wage. You're listening to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health and social impacts of the coronavirus

pandemic. I'm your host Dr. Saline Gounder. The Amanda Cohen is the James Beard nominated chef and owner of Dirt Candy.

It's a vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Before dirt candy, when people thought about vegetarian restaurants,

they really thought about sort of more like hippie, natural health food restaurants restaurants which actually can be totally

absolutely delicious but they're not usually sort of that cool like

nighttime romantic restaurant a dirt candy we really wanted to change people's idea of what

vegetables and vegetarian food could be. We have these white walls with graffiti plants drawn

all over them, red banquettes, a big huge open kitchen.

You can see everything that's happening.

There's no private kitchen.

I like my kitchen to be fun, so it's already pretty, always pretty like a boisterous.

There's a lot of talking, it and certainly not a quiet dining room.

Every dish is based around a different vegetable, even desserts and even our

cocktails. You definitely get your all servings of vegetables that you're supposed to have in one day and one meal at dirt candy.

One of dirt candy's iconic dishes is a portobello mushroom moose.

And this is the dish that put us on the map. So we took the

Portobello mushroom, which you know for years it's sort of been either grilled on a

plate with some side vegetables as your entree as a vegetarian or stuffed into a bun as your

burger. Instead we turned it into this really, really luscious, sensuous patte,

...