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

Our architect, Elizabeth Roberts, also designed the Rachel Comey store on Crosby Street, which is one of New York’s most beautiful retail spaces. I very much admired the strength, simplicity and femininity of her work, and feel she also brought that to Nix. I really love some of the finishing details that came in toward the end. We spent months trying to figure little details like the lamps on the shelves that run along the side walls. The design world is so dominated by the mid-century modern aesthetic, and that just didn’t seem to fit with our vision. So in the later stages we steered toward a kind of '70s California spirit, from which came our lamps, which are the roots of juniper trees engineered into sculptural, slightly hippy-esque light fixtures.