Remember carob? And those people who swore not only that carob tasted just like chocolate but also that it was better for you? In the seventies, there was a certain kind of restaurant, usually vegetarian—which had its epicenter at Moosewood, in Ithaca, New York, or somewhere on the Pearl Street Mall, in Boulder, Colorado—that gloatingly served “health food.” These hippie outposts abounded with wood tones, ferns, loving sentiment, and sprouts. They didn’t really care about presentation or what was trendy, but they did believe in the healing power of the legume. Most of those quaint, outmoded places have gone the way of Jerry Garcia, replaced by the juggernaut that is the Whole Foods salad bar, as well as a new kind of health-food café. Dimes, located in an unlikely pocket of Chinatown, is such a place: bright, stylish, California-tinged, with handmade salt scrub for sale, catering to moneyed vegans and their friends.
Breakfast, when the tiny, whitewashed corridor has a brisk turnover, is lovely. But are we ready for açaí bowls? Brazilians have been eating them for decades; proximity to the South American palm trees from which the berries come makes them a cheap option. Americans brought up on Frosted Flakes and Toaster Strudel have been slow to catch up, and Dimes wisely mixes the açaí with lots of nuts and berries we have heard of, to make a sort of açaí sundae—in one of four versions, the frozen berry pulp is blended with house-made almond milk to make something like sorbet, which is sprinkled with bee pollen and topped with strawberries, bananas, and goji-berry granola. Of course, there’s also fresh juice, cayenne lemonade, and a pH tonic (apple-cider vinegar, lemon, honey, and chlorella, a kind of algae), and the breakfast tacos nod admiringly to Santa Monica, with soft scrambled eggs, avocado, peach salsa, and house-made hot sauce. Because Dimes is run by reasonable people—the co-owners, Sabrina De Sousa and Alissa Wagner, met while working at Lovely Day, in Nolita—who recognize that some patrons subsist on more than nuts and berries, there’s also thick-cut bacon and juicy, brightly spiced sausage.
Dinner, when the lights are dimmed and the yuzu-sake and dandelion-wine cocktails are flowing, is more problematic. It’s hard to love a plate made up of two tablespoons each of eight kinds of vegetables and grains, even if it’s pulled together with a little grapefruit-ginger-ponzu sauce. Appetizers fare better, like an inspired salad of seared peaches and shishito peppers or a fine chicken-liver mousse. But it doesn’t matter, because Dimes is where the cool kids want to be, discussing Bushwick apartments or their latest love affair or the purpose of Instagram. Right now, one of those kids might be enjoying a carob-açaí bowl, which is like a muted chocolate-powder-flavored pudding, with bananas, dates, cinnamon, and coconut. There are seven kinds of food in that bowl, all of which have been on this earth for millennia. ♦
Open weekdays for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and weekends for brunch and dinner. Large plates, $14-$20.
