Billie Eilish and Finneas are entering the restaurant business. The talented siblings, who collaborate to produce and write most of Eilish’s songs, have partnered with vegan restaurateur Nic Adler to open a new Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, CA.
Adler is the co-founder of celebrity favorite Monty’s Good Burger, a vegan fast-food chain with four California locations, and he is also the force behind popular plant-based restaurant Nic’s On Beverley on Los Angeles’ Beverley Boulevard.
The new restaurant, called Argento, is set to open soon in the former space of Little Pine, a vegan restaurant in the Silver Lake neighborhood of LA founded by musician Moby in 2015, which closed in 2022.
The menu will be a celebration of fresh, plant-based Italian food. Unlike Monty’s Good Burger, which offers vegan meat patties and tenders, the Mediterranean-inspired space will be entirely vegetable-forward, without the processed plant-based meat alternatives. “We somehow got away from vegetables,” Adler told Los Angeles Magazine. “Let’s let eggplant have its moment.”
Nic’s On Beverly
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Billie Eilish: ‘Vegan food is for everyone’
For Eilish, the best part about Argento is how approachable it will be for everyone—regardless of whether they are vegan or not. “I want plant-based food to be more accessible,” she said. “What’s really cool about Argento—and Nic’s [On Beverly] and Crossroads and Donut Friend—is they are all vegan places, but they’re not branded as ‘vegan.’”
“Vegan is for everyone,” she added. “You don’t have to be vegan to eat vegan. The world is so much better than it was. Ten years ago there was nothing vegan anywhere, and now it’s so much more universal.”
The boom in the vegan food industry is being led not just by vegans, but by flexitarians, too. In fact, people who aren’t exclusively plant-based are one of the biggest reasons why vegan food is becoming so much more accessible today.
“I want it to be clear that I’m not preaching. All I’m saying is, ‘Hey, you ever hear of this, of how much water it takes to produce a f***ing burger?’ I’ve never, ever had meat,” Eilish says.
In the US, research suggests that more than half of young people aged between 24 and 39 describe themselves as flexitarian. But like Eilish, many are embracing veganism, too. Around 7 percent of Gen Z and Millennials describe themselves as vegan or plant-based, while 10 percent say they are vegetarian, according to data from YPulse.
Eilish has been vegan for around a decade, and before that she was vegetarian. Like most people her age, she is extremely concerned about the climate crisis.
Billie Eilish/Instagram
Billie Eilish is named on the ‘Time100 Climate’ List
In 2022, Eilish founded Overheated, a London-based, plant-based event that aims to raise awareness of environmental issues and solutions by hosting leading voices in the climate activism space. She also doesn’t fly private and prioritizes renewable energy at her concerts. Her headlining set at Lollapalooza, for example, was partially powered by solar.
She was even recently named in the Time100 Climate list, which aims to spotlight influential climate leaders. During an interview with the publication, she encouraged people to eat a plant-based diet for the planet.
“Animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to climate change, destruction of our oceans, and loss of biodiversity, and yet it is not talked about enough in climate conversations,” she said. “One of the most impactful things an individual can do to reduce their impact on the environment is switch to a plant-based diet.”
Eilish’s mother, Maggie Baird, is also a keen advocate for plant-based food. She co-founded the nonprofit Support And Feed during the COVID-19 pandemic, which aims to simultaneously combat the climate crisis and food insecurity. It was Baird who initially inspired Eilish to go vegan, alongside Finneas and Eilish’s father, actor Patrick O’Connell.
“I grew up vegetarian because my parents didn’t believe in eating meat, but we ate dairy galore,” she explained to Los Angeles Magazine. “I learned about the cruelty that goes into the meat industry pretty early on, and I couldn’t really get around it.“
“With dairy, my God, did I love cheese and milk,” she continued. “I was very, very against going vegan. [Then] my mom went vegan, then my brother, then my dad. I was the only one not vegan for years. I guess I just learned about the dairy industry and how much [it] and the meat industry [were] affecting the climate crisis. And affecting people.”
When will Argento open?
The remodel at Argento is still in the works, but it’s set to open its doors in December. And when it does, Adler, Finneas, and Eilish are looking to create a welcoming, relaxed vibe.
“I love Italian food,” Adler said. “I love Sunday dinners—the longer, the better,” before noting that he hopes Argento will feature “a revolving door of friends coming by, cooking, eating, and drinking together.”
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Charlotte is a writer and editor based in sunny Southsea on England’s southern coast.
