Since opening in Vancouver in 2012, The Acorn has become a destination restaurant for vegetarians and omnivores who know meat isn't necessary for a fantastic meal. Using fresh, seasonal ingredients and culinary creativity, The Acorn has become one of the standard-bearers for a fresh style of "vegetable-forward" cooking that doesn't try to tart up vegetarian food into some sort of faux-meat facsimile.
"Really, it’s just about celebrating vegetables," co-owner Shira Blustein told the Times a few months after opening. Then-chef Brian Skinner elaborated on the restaurant's philosophy, which aims to bring out what's compelling in ingredients traditionally relegated to the Forgotten Land of Sides: "We could have called the mushrooms scallops and the fried cheese fish, but we didn’t. We don’t try to make people think a certain way, like a lot of other vegetarian restaurants. We wanted the vegetarian to be incidental."
Not unlike Dirt Candy, The Acorn seems like an ideal restaurant in which to seduce your devoutly carnivorous friends into admitting that a vegetarian dinner can be as delicious and satisfying as a carnivorous one. This week you'll have your chance to make that case—without flying to Vancouver—when The Acorn's current chefs, Robert Clarke and Brian Luptak, run a pop-up in the Lower East Side culinary event space Exhibit C.
From February 3rd through the 7th, The Acorn will be serve a single-seating 5-course vegan tasting menu, with optional wine pairing curated by Kurtis Kolt, one of Vancouver’s top sommeliers. (Kolt will be on hand each night to detail the wines he's chosen.)
"The winter in British Columbia yields some wonderful options in the way of produce," Clarke says. "We get to be creative and think outside the box with what we serve up."
The five course dinner is $99, or $139 with wine pairing, and starts at 7 p.m. each night at 88 Eldridge Street. RSVP here.
