• 3
• Trendy, overdone vegan restaurant

We've heard fantastic things about Crossroads. To be honest, it's very much a 3.5 in my opinion, and there are many other (better) vegan restaurants in LA. Service was good but not terribly friendly. The menu feels like they're trying to cater to a non-veg crowd to make them like vegan. While some dishes were creative, many were spins on typical dishes you'd get anywhere, rather than being truly inventive vegan. We started with the spring pizza. We prefer red sauce to white on pizzas, but the dish itself was quite good. There was no shortage of toppings, and they all worked nicely together. We then had the grilled maitake mushrooms. The mushrooms were prominent on the dish, but there were so many things on the dish that they didn't shine. They tasted almost fried and crispy, yet they weren't oily as a fried food. The celery root puree on the dish also stood out, creamy like a mashed potato but not quite as hearty. Also, the flavor had a strong, bitter taste to it. We got the tortellini special, which ended up being $20 for 8 pieces!! That's outrageous to me. The tortellini was cooked well, almost like pillowy blankets, and the sauce was my favorite part of the night, creamy with great pea flavor, but the price left a bad taste! We weren't quite full, so we split the lentil flatbread. We expected this to be like a small pizza, but it was a pita with dips. The pita was made of lentils, giving it a crunchy and earthy texture, but still an underwhelming overall dish. The display was nice and the bread warm, it was served with small bowls of pea pesto, smoked white bean hummus and spicy tomato banana pepper jam (the best, sweet & spicy). The dips were very strong in their flavors, but the hummus was too earthy and the pea pesto was off compared to the pea in our tortellini. We also split the ice cream sundae. It was okay but paled in comparison to other vegan sundaes we've had. The top had coconut whipped cream, nuts, brownie pieces (stale/hard) and hardened chocolate sauce. Toppings were minimal, leaving you with mostly an absurdly cold vanilla ice cream. The vanilla tasted okay but was plain. We also split a bottle of sparking water, and considering the amount of water in it, it was expensive at $7 for the bottle. We went this route, as $10 for non-alcoholic cocktails seemed too much, especially given the regular cocktails aren't priced considerably higher than that. The ambience here is trendy and well-decorated, but we won't run back.