James Truman Takes Us Inside Nix, NYC's Hottest New Vegetarian Restaurant

Firstly, vegetarian restaurants have a well-earned reputation for being rather dour, joyless places that you visit from a sense of duty rather than pleasure. There’s no reason why eating vegetables shouldn’t feel celebratory and sexy, with the same attention to lighting, music and ambience that every great restaurant strives for. With the food, an important starting point for us was to not replicate the typical coursing of a meat restaurant—app, entree, dessert. Vegetarian food is more satisfying when there are a bunch of dishes on the table, with different but complementary flavors, and everyone gets to try bites of all of them. We were determined to avoid the “entree trap” that vegetarian restaurants often fall into—for example, the slice of yam with grill marks on that’s supposed to replicate a piece of salmon, served with two sides and a sauce. Vegetables are vegetables and shouldn’t need to imitate meat or fish.