Ugh - I have really gotten into this terrible habit of not writing my reviews until weeks later. Apologies for some of these half-assed reviews - it kind of defeats the purpose of me writing these! In any case, I was at Nix a few weeks ago with Mabel and Aarti - it's another super popular vegetarian friendly restaurants in the city by the owners of the fabulous Narcissa and Dovetail. If you try to go on OpenTable to find an opening, you'll probably get nothing but Mabel actually called the restaurant (who does that these days?!) and was able to score a reservation during primetime Friday night - 7pm.
It's located smack in the middle Union Square and I swear this place has turned over a bunch of times in the last few years. I wonder why a restaurant never sticks. But I think this one might stick. The menu here is divided up into small, light and bold dishes - think of them as small bites, appetizer and main entrees. Again - everything here is veggie and almost vegan friendly too. We started with the kale salad ($14) because that's what people do now and then we got the cauliflower tempura ($16), tofu skin pockets ($15) and the Shitake cacio e pepe ($18). The kale salad was a really well done shredded dinosaur kale salad with roasted sunchokes - while it wasn't anything that I haven't had before, it was really well dressed and a hearty salad. It's the kind of salad that makes you really like eating kale. Big fan of it. As for the entrees, I'm going to be honest and say that I can't remember the details very well except for the cauliflower tempura - I'm not sure if that means the other dishes weren't that good or I'm really losing my memory but at the very least I can recall that the cauliflower dish was excellent. It was lightly battered cauliflower with a buffalo-like sauce on it and then you put it in a white steamed bao and add pickles to it. I have to say that the bao was very on point and as good as the ones I've had in several Chinese restaurants. Super soft and pillowy. While it's not an adequate substitute for a pork belly bun, it was surprisingly filling and tasty. The tofu skin dish was similar to an enchilada dish with butternut squash and a tomatillo salsa on top of it. While the cacio e pepe dish had a delicious polenta base to it, that I used the steamed bao to sop it up with.
The dishes, while good, were a bit on the light side, so we had room to share a dessert. We opted for the maple custard ($11) with cream and it was amazing. It tasted EXACTLY like what you think a maple custard would taste like. It was definitely a winner. Similar to my recent veggie friend meals at Semilla and Avant Garden, it shows that you can have a creative and fulfilling non-meat dinner in the city. The 2 downsides I would say are that the portions are on the small side, so I did leave a bit hungry and the acoustics are terrible in there - it's so freakin loud that I had to yell just to get the girls to hear me. Total bill: $32/pp with tax and tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
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