Who makes the best vegan chocolate croissant in Los Angeles? I know of four places that make vegan chocolate croissants, and my dad’s birthday was a great excuse to try them all, so we had a vegan chocolate croissant taste test competition.
Croissants were judged on appearance, texture, taste, and chocolate quality.
The unanimous winner, by far, was Bakers Bench in Chinatown. Everything at Bakers Bench is vegan. The bakery wasn’t originally supposed to be 100% vegan, but due to the cost of dairy and eggs during the pandemic, founder Jennifer Yee turned to vegan alternatives. In December the New York Times named Bakers Bench one of the 22 best bakeries in the country. (Not vegan bakeries, but bakeries.) Their chocolate croissant is moist, flaky, looks good, and contained more chocolate than the other croissants we tried. Add to that the fact that they use amazing-tasting not-too-sweet TCHO chocolate, and they are the clear winner of our croissant test. (I also got their passion fruit Danish this morning. It disappeared before the croissant contest.)
Tied for second place was Chaumont Vegan in Beverly Hills. They have some stellar pastries (like the pear tart pictured), but the chocolate croissant was a bit dry and tough compared to Bakers Bench. (I suspect they would win if we had a pastry filling competition, their creams and custards are outstanding.)
The other tie for second place was Frogs Bakery. Although this one isn’t all vegan, they do offer vegan croissant staples: plain croissant, chocolate croissant, almond croissant, and a cinnamon roll made out of croissant dough. You’ll most likely see them at farmers markets, but they also have a shop you can visit in Gardena. It seems like their specialty is loaves of bread, so maybe I’ll try one of those next time. They originally started in Tucson in 2010.
And in last place we have ID-Eclair, the all-vegan French pastry shop in Pasadena. Started by Food Network star Romuald Guiot, their website claims to be the first vegan French fine pastry shop in Los Angeles. At first I thought, What about Chaumont? But after seeing their selection of fancy eclairs, I think I understand what they mean. Hopefully the eclairs are amazing, because the croissant was unanimously, by far, the loser of our taste test. The chocolate was a bit too sweet, which isn’t the worst thing, but the croissant had a French-bread texture that was about as far from the buttery, flaky layers of a croissant as vegans are from escargot. I’ll have to back and find out about those eclairs.
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