A New York Restaurant, a Texas Farm and Their Plant-Based Brawl

They shared the same name, Dirt Candy, and a devotion to healthy food. But a trademark dispute turned into an urban-rural standoff.

The letter from the New York City lawyer came in April. Sky Cutler, 36, was admiring his young tomato plants and preparing to harvest the spring lettuce he grew in a pocket of rich soil here in the Texas Hill Country.

He and his family had named it Dirt Candy Farm. It’s only two and a half acres, but he could grow enough to do a good business at the local farmers’ markets. That’s something, considering that only a few years earlier he was running a falafel stand in Bali to support his surfing habit.

As soon as he tore open the envelope, he knew it was trouble. He walked it over to his father, Mitch Cutler, 62, a former Silicon Valley restaurateur who had sold his business and home and, at the height of the pandemic, bought 51 acres in Texas to build his family a self-sustaining spiritual refuge. The farm was a big part of it.

“It was moving from a transactional life to a more authentic life,” Mitch Cutler said. “It was a movement away from being agents of the matrix.”

The letter was from a lawyer hired by the chef Amanda Cohen, who runs a 60-seat vegetarian restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where a five-course meal — which recently featured Korean rice cakes in smoky kale broth, and kabocha squash flan topped with hot coffee and popcorn — costs $110.