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

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.

It is also called Dirt Candy. The letter gave the family one month to rebrand.

Thus began a very public battle rooted in America’s current crisis of mistrust. Through one lens, there couldn’t be a clearer example of urban hubris and litigious overreach than a successful New York chef using trademark law to bully small farmers in a red state. On the other hand, a New Age-y family with libertarian leanings and enough wealth to create a self-sustaining compound with an organic farm can’t just skirt laws they don’t like.

That the bad blood rose between people who shared much more than a punchy brand name — a devotion to chemical-free farming, plant-based food and local causes — speaks to the way suspicion stoked by social media can tear apart even like-minded communities.

“It’s really a microcosm of what’s going on in the world,” said Ms. Cohen, who remains baffled by the Cutlers’ animosity. “They’ve taken something so small and put out all this misinformation about it.”

It’s a fight the Cutlers, who have chronicled the twists and turns of the conflict on Facebook and with a local TV station, never wanted.

“I felt like I had escaped California and the sophistication of litigiousness that was required in order to survive in that world,” Mitch said. “Here I am being pulled back in by some people I’ve never even met in a state I have nothing to do with.”

Ms. Cohen didn’t want it, either. She told her attorneys to write as supportive a cease-and-desist letter as possible. “We have the impression that behind the ‘Dirt Candy’ farm is an altruistic and well-intended team that cares about sustainability and integrity,” it read. “We hope, therefore, that your unlawful violation of Ms. Cohen’s rights was completely unintentional.”

Ms. Cohen, who studied cultural anthropology at New York University and built a culinary career that landed her on TV shows like “Iron Chef,” dreamed up the name with her husband, the writer Grady Hendrix. She registered it with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2012. She sells food, and so does the farm. It doesn’t matter whether the Cutlers are in Texas or on 10th Avenue — their use of the name, she said, could threaten her control of the brand.

“I own Dirt Candy, and I really I try so hard to be protective of it,” she said.

Ms. Cohen likened the situation to the time she added the sweet fried-dough treats called beaver tails to her menu. She grew up eating them in Canada, but had no idea that the Canadian restaurant chain BeaverTails owned the trademark until they sent her a cease-and-desist letter.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry,’” she said.

The Cutler family came up with the name during a dinner-table brainstorming session at the start of 2021. It had a kind of punk, Texas-gunslinger sensibility, and emphasized the importance of healthy soil to the family’s identity. They researched trademarks and found no other businesses named Dirt Candy Farm, though they did notice Ms. Cohen’s restaurant.

They thought the two enterprises were completely different. “We don’t make very much money,” Mitch Cutler wrote in an email. “This is a mission-driven enterprise. It’s not like opening a NYC concept that is executed in a way primarily to make money.”

He knows from making money. For 23 years, he and his wife, Tracey, 62, ran the restaurant La Fondue, in Saratoga, a Silicon Valley suburb that is among the most affluent communities in California. Their two children graduated from Roman Catholic schools and landed college soccer scholarships.

Tracey had always been the spiritual seeker in the relationship. A vegan, she had found health and clarity through fasts and meditation. When her husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2011, he re-evaluated his lifestyle and eventually embraced her way of living.

Five years later, she had a profound flash of insight that she calls “a download”: It was time for a radical change. Within days, they had sold their restaurant and house, and headed out to discover the next chapter. They landed in a community in the Arizona desert called Tree of Life that teaches both the medicinal and spiritual importance of food.

“It was like an Ayurvedic-meets-Torah tradition,” Mitch said. “Lots of raw food. A lot of meditation, prayer and puja. We rebuilt our understanding of food.” They left after nearly three years.

Meanwhile, just before the pandemic shutdowns hit in 2020, their son, Sky, left his surfing life in Bali and moved into the Brooklyn apartment of his sister, Ali Tate Cutler, 34, who was working as an actor and model. (It’s a point of family pride that she was the first plus-size model for Victoria’s Secret.)

New York in the early days of the pandemic was miserable for both of them. Then Ali had a dream. In it, the whole family moved to Texas and she gave birth to a boy.

She called her parents and insisted that it become the plan. They were open to messages from the universe. They also liked the possibility of a grandchild. After a little shopping around, they bought 51 acres near Wimberley, a sleepy Texas ranching town about 40 miles southwest of Austin filled with artists and people escaping city life. Paul Simon and his wife, Edie Brickell, have a ranch there with a small recording studio.

Ali and her husband had a boy, and conceived a second child there. Her parents cleared the land, and built roads, hiking trails and three vacation rental houses with a midcentury touch. They dug a pond and stocked it with fish that could provide food as a hedge against what Mitch Cutler calls “the zombie apocalypse,” his playful shorthand for a societal breakdown.

Sky, shocked by the fear he saw in the faces of New Yorkers lining up to buy food at grocery stores whose shelves were almost bare, had decided to walk the path of self-reliance and health. Farming was the perfect fit. With what he learned during two internships and some YouTube farming videos, he joined the family in Texas and began to grow food.

Then the letter arrived and threw paradise off balance.

As news of Ms. Cohen’s cease-and-desist request spread, locals fumed. Several one-star reviews of her restaurant popped up on Google. A message on her Instagram feed was blunt: “The world needs more kindness and you are not it.” The Facebook group for Wimberley residents lit up with hundreds of comments defending the Cutlers. At local farmers’ markets, customers were appalled by the intrusion by an outsider. “They are more pissed than we are,” Tracey said.

Vanessa Simpson, who manages the market in New Braunfels, said many businesses share the same name. “Why is it that this is such a major issue unless you just want to fight?”

Ms. Cohen didn’t. “The last thing I wanted was a whole state mad at me,” she said. And she surely didn’t want to involve her restaurant in a lawsuit. “I hate conflict, and the restaurant is just me. I don’t have a corporation or big money behind me.”

At first, Mitch tried to contact Ms. Cohen through her lawyer. Surely they could talk it out. She thought it was better to have lawyers handle everything. So the family hired its own and made an overture they hoped would invite negotiation.

“Cooked restaurant food and natural produce don’t seem to mesh much,” their lawyer wrote, “but let’s see what we can do about it.”

After months of back and forth, a compromise seemed possible: Ms. Cohen would lease the Cutlers the name for a nominal fee and no royalties as long as they didn’t grow their enterprise beyond the farm and farmers’ markets. The family agreed to not file for their own trademark or open a restaurant.

But somehow — and they don’t agree on how — the question of Ms. Cohen’s right to approve related artwork the Cutlers might install on the farm came up. “I couldn’t coexist with someone who wants to control the air we breathe,” Mitch said.

The Cutlers went on the offensive. They asked the trademark office to register Dirt Candy Farm. Their lawyer told them they had a clear-cut case in part because the agency listed farms and restaurants in different categories.

In May, the office denied their application, citing the likelihood that consumers could be confused by another food-adjacent Dirt Candy. The family appealed. The office issued another ruling against them on Sept. 3.

The Cutlers had sunk $10,000 into the case. They said their lawyer thought they could ultimately prevail, but the fight would likely cost another $40,000.

A family meeting was called. Ali was ready to let it go. Sky disagreed, but then thought about all the farm equipment he could buy with that money. Tracey was the holdout, saying the family’s “sovereignty” was at stake. She couldn’t stand getting pushed around by someone she considered a big-city egomaniac.

“At some point,” Mitch said, “we all kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Do we really want our energy being poured into this? Is it that important?’”

Ms. Cohen was relieved when the Texans decided to give up. “I was happy that it seemed like we were all going to be able to move on,” she said.

The Cutlers started thinking about a new name. Candy Ranch sounded a little too much like a brothel. A brand consultant liked Dirty Cowboy Farm, but it sounded like a bachelorette party. Little Dirt Cowboy didn’t really stand out in a state where everything seemed to be named Cowboy. They finally landed on Wild Candy Farm.