Samah Dada Takes Charge

On a warm August Wednesday, Samah Dada meets me at the Union Square Greenmarket with a dark chocolate bar—and an apology. “I was going to make you my chocolate chip tahini cake,” she says. She’d taken the redeye from LA and didn’t have time to collect the ingredients. Instead, I get two bars of Spring & Mulberry brand Date Sweetened Chocolate and a smile. “Sorry.”

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For Example. Samah Dada, sovereign of things sweet, whole and spicy—seen here lying back in the Hotel Chelsea with Klipsch’s portable bluetooth speakers—is opening doors for others: “The point is to show young Indian girls that you can be in this space, too. My work is pointless if I’m not helping somebody.”

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While she might not have baked it, the chocolate, which has no added sugar and is sweetened only by dates, is very Samah. Born in Southern California to parents from India, the 29-year-old (who now calls Williamsburg home) has built a career crafting considered, healthy vegetarian recipes that draw on her heritage and introduce her audience to not only sugar- or gluten-free options, but to a whole new world of ingredients.

“I don’t tend to lead with labels. I try to lead with ingredients and how something will make you feel,” she says. “I create food that’s healthy but in a comforting way, where it can be seen by someone in Iowa who can say, ‘Oh, I can make that creamy pasta that just happens to be vegan.’”

Her go-to ingredients range from turmeric to coconut sugar, common and not-so-common flavors from the East that define her Tomato Egg Curry and Brookie Pie, and are plentiful on her vivid @DadaEats Instagram page—which, since 2015, has burst not only with recipes, but also hopeful, inspirational videos and quotes from Samah to her 446,000 followers. Since 2018, she’s appeared in regular segments on the “Today” show, where she recently taught the audience to make a nutty Tahini Caesar Pasta Salad while dressed in a natty Thom Browne suit. She has two TV series under her belt, “#Cooking” and “How to Eat Plants”—both streaming via “Today All Day” on Peacock—and a bestselling cookbook, Dada Eats Love to Cook It: 100 Plant-Based Recipes for Everyone at Your Table.

Meanwhile, @DadaEats has evolved into a platform that spans everything from cooking content to sales paths leading to her branded button-ups and cookbooks.

“I feel guilty when I’m not working, which is why a lot of my stories on Instagram are motivational reminders for myself,” she says, walking towards Halal Pastures Farm’s stand, a favorite. “Followers will say, ‘Thank you so much for speaking to me.’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m so glad. But this is for me too.’”

The location is also very Samah; it’s a time of year when the greenmarkets are at their most colorful, if not verdant: There are heirloom tomatoes, beaming cucumbers, regal beets, peaches, plums, and bright basil. She’s wearing a sharp Thom Browne oxford, the brand’s striped tricolor insignia forming bands around its contrasting gray stripes, which bounce off her jetblack hair. And then GAP shorts and Nike Dunks. She wears little makeup—just some dark pink lipstick—but her hands are carefully dotted with intricate lines of henna, a temporary experiment that may soon be permanent.

She hoists a basket of Sungold tomatoes, a gift for her stylist who she’s meeting later that day. Seven dollars for a half pint. “She’s worth it,” she says.

Samah was already internet famous when the “Today” show discovered her as an intern in their own studio. “I was waking up at 3 in the morning, going to work at 4, working in the control room, going home at 2, then cooking for my blog,” she says. “The producers had found my blog and thought it was interesting. The whole idea of the segment was, ‘Samah, put a secret ingredient in both of these desserts.’ I made chickpea blondies and tahini brownies.”

“I knew I wanted to do something in TV production, but this was a total plot twist.”

That episode was a significant step but it also identified a problem that still worries the young food star: How much of her culture does she want to spoon feed to her audience? In other words: is America ready for more tahini, and less blondie?

“We were the only brown people I knew,” Samah says of Orange County, where Samah lived until her family moved to London when she was in her early teens. As a child, Samah wanted to fit in with generic O.C. blondes, but “it just was never gonna happen.” Her parents emigrated to the United States as teenagers; her father became a success in finance while her mother took care of Samah and her older sister. “I love my mom’s food. I was always really interested in helping her in the kitchen growing up. My sister did nothing. No shade to her.”

Samah’s next lesson in food came in college, at the notoriously crunchy Berkeley, where she noted gaps between the principles espoused by shops like the Berkeley Student Food Collective and what was available on their shelves. “When I was reading the labels for all these healthy things, there was an essay of ingredients,” she says. This, along with being diagnosed with chronic polycystic ovary syndrome, inspired her to search out and play with whole ingredients in a new way; the results were recipes including Mini Vegan Pecan Pie and Date Crumble Bars, made with coconut flour (which, she declares, she’d like to have sex with—more on this below).

Settling into a quiet table at ABCV—Jean-George’s aria to vegetables on East 19th Street—we’re drinking beet juice and playing “Marry, Fuck, Kill” with three flours: almond, coconut, and all purpose. “Fuck coconut. It plays a little hard to get. It’s three times as absorbent as a regular flour. It feels like there’s some interesting power dynamics there.” She’d marry almond. “She’s my ride or die. She is gluten and grain free without trying—she just woke up like that. It makes everything cakey and dense, but not too heavy.” That leaves poor all-purpose doomed. “The whole basis of my work is: ‘How can I pare down things that are processed or refined and make them in a way that feels really minimal?’”

Samah admits that, while she hates to be “that person,” gluten doesn’t affect her in Europe. “In Copenhagen, the amount of cardamom buns I ate, somebody should have locked me up,” she says. She was there to chef two pop-ups, one at the Popl Burger (run by former Noma chefs), and the other at Sanchez (by former Noma chef Rosio Sanchez), where, she says, “We did a take on a chili relleno, but we stuffed it with tandoori vegetables.” That experience was life changing.

“What I found in Copenhagen, working with these illustrious chefs and bringing Indian flavors to the forefront, was seeing how excited people were to experience it. I want to make sure I’m not hiding from it anymore,” she says.

A little on the nose, but she indeed found a connection to her true self in a cardamom bun in Denmark. “I spent so much of my earlier life running away from my heritage and wanting to fit in with other people and not seeing it as a strength,” she says. “I already infuse my heritage into my food. I feel like if I do it wrong, the aunties are gonna come for me. And I don’t think it’s about reinventing the wheel. I think it’s about having more acceptance for myself—less of an Indian twist
than digging deeper.”

What form this will take is still up in the air. Right now, Samah is sitting in this moment: not pressuring herself to create more content, but journaling, spending time with family, even taking an acting class. “It’s a sensory class—it’s really hard. I cry every class.” Her ambitions extend beyond the regular boundaries of food. She likes the idea of hosting a talk show. Why be “The French Chef” when she could be Oprah? “I’m never gonna put a limit on myself and what I think I could do,” she says.

ABCV’s chef comes out of the kitchen to say hello, and she immediately asks about his young daughter. Watching Samah, you sense the ease that she casts—her warmth and genuine curiosity infusing the space around her like the aroma of a mother’s cooking. A talk show does not seem farfetched. But for Samah, it’s not about leveling up, for likes and fame, or even the food. It’s about the people around her, the people she can help. “I get messages every day from people who tell me—whether it’s recipes or positive messages—that I’ve helped them in so many ways,” she says.

It turns out the chocolate she handed me, which the Wonka gods have blessedly kept firm while buried in my bag, is exemplary. Years ago, the brand’s founder reached out to Samah: She had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had to stop eating refined sugar. She discovered @DadaEats, which let the sweetness back into her life. Later—cancer free—that woman launched Spring & Mulberry.

“That’s why I started this. I wanted to make sure that people who couldn’t eat a regular cookie could eat a cookie,” she says. “The point is to build and serve my community, and to show young Indian girls that you can be in this space, too. I think that my work is pointless if I’m not helping somebody.”

Looking into the formidable pools of her eyes, her easy smile and heart, it’s hard not to get on board with this mission. I want this for Samah Dada: for her to share more, to help people eat whole ingredients, and well, to expand America’s palate, and her own sense of self. I want her to impress the aunties, and to make more content and cookbooks. I want her to make other people’s dreams come true—I want all of this for her. And for all of us.

And I want my goddam chocolate chip tahini cake.

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SAMAH DADA FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATE OWEN / ASSISTANT: ASA LORY, PROP STYLIST: KERRI SCALES, STYLIST: KAROLINE SPENNING, JEWELRY BY CARTIER

(RED DRESS LOOK) CLOTHING DESIGNER: VIVIENNE WESTWOOD
(SUIT AND TIE LOOK) COAT: SAINT LAURENT, SHOES: THE ATTICO

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