Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times
Don’t skip dessert: 19 L.A. restaurants with decadent sundaes, shaved ice, sorbet and more
A restaurant dinner is a treat anytime, but it becomes particularly enjoyable in the summer when we shudder to think of turning on our home ovens and can hardly stand to leave non-air-conditioned spaces when the sun is at its peak. During this season, dining out feels luxurious, not just for the steady breeze that pumps overhead and sweeps through outdoor patios but also for refreshing, cooling desserts that are worth tacking onto a perhaps already indulgent meal.
From burger joints to artisan ice cream parlors, where to find the best soft serve in Los Angeles, whether new or nostalgic.
In fact, you might plan your entire evening out around a singular dessert, such as a silky-smooth bowl of Japanese shaved ice swimming with fruit syrup and creamy condensed milk or an ice cream sundae towering with whipped cream, chopped nuts, rainbow sprinkles and caramel drizzle, prepared tableside. Some of L.A.’s best restaurants have dessert programs to match, including house-made sorbets, signature soft-serve flavors, freshly baked cakes with scoops of just-churned ice cream melting on top and seasonal specialties to round out a Michelin-starred meal. From Santa Monica to downtown L.A., Silver Lake and beyond, be sure to save room for these 19 worthwhile frozen desserts. — Danielle Dorsey
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(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Antico Nuovo
Larchmont Italian $$
With ice cream so good that it helped keep the restaurant afloat during pandemic shutdowns, Antico Nuovo’s gloriously smooth, perfectly balanced and freshly spun offerings are easily some of the finest in Los Angeles. Chef-owner Chad Colby had roughly eight months of normalcy at Antico before restaurants ceased on-site dining in 2020, during which he pivoted to takeout-only focaccia-style pizzas and pints of the restaurant’s ice cream from then-chef de cuisine Brad Ray. Ray’s ice cream was so successful that he and Colby could sell hundreds of pints on a busy weekend, sustaining the business for its next iteration: Antico Nuovo, slightly more honed to dishes from the Italian countryside and with a finer edge — though the ice cream, thankfully, remained the same. Made with an imported Italian machine so specialized and expensive that it required its own financing, Antico Nuovo’s ice cream is so airy and smooth it practically dissolves when it hits the tongue. It’s served in a handful of varieties at a time, with classics such as honeycomb and bunet — playing on the combination of chocolate and amaretti — almost always on offer. Fruit varieties rotate frequently, often made using a 50/50 blend of the house ice cream base with macerated produce from some of L.A.’s top farmers, be it strawberries from Harry’s Berries or peaches from Colby’s own garden. The pistachio alone is worth a visit, creamy and light, topped with a toffee-like house-made pistachio brittle and — as with all flavors here — a light drizzle of imported olive oil and flecks of sea salt.
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(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Best Bet
Culver City Pizza $$$
Most Italian restaurants offer burrata in some form, but how many are whipping it into their ice cream? At Best Bet, Jason Neroni’s new pizza-forward, Cal-Italian restaurant where the farmers market dictates nearly every dish, he’s using the bright and creamy cheese in the pizzeria’s most popular dessert. Inspired by Italy’s buffalo-milk gelato, the Rose chef sought to make his ice cream creamier and fattier; lacking easy access to buffalo milk, he opted for the next best thing, imported Puglian burrata, which he spins with a simple house-made ice cream base. Perfectly toeing the line of sweet and salty, and with an absolutely silken texture, Best Bet’s burrata ice cream makes for a perfect — and unique — spoonful. Initially planned as a riff on strawberries and cream, the slightly savory ice cream is paired with fresh seasonal fruit like strawberries or mulberries, and easily takes on flavor from added touches like house-made fig leaf powder.
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(Danielle Dorsey / Los Angeles Times)
Connie and Ted's
West Hollywood Seafood $$
Dessert is no afterthought at Connie and Ted’s, a casual East Coast-style seafood house in West Hollywood that’s on The Times’ most recent 101 best restaurants list. Pastry chef Daphane Delone makes the ice cream from scratch daily, in flavors like vanilla, butterscotch, chocolate and Lamill coffee fudge swirl, plus dairy-free blood orange, raspberry and limoncello sorbet; both come with two scoops per order, with flavors available to mix and match. For a nostalgic treat, there’s the Sundae Funday, served in a footed sundae dish and layered with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and torched marshmallow, with house-made graham crackers wedged on top. While the s’mores-reminiscent sweet is limited to the summer menu, the blondie, with a crumbly brown sugar bar crowned with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce, is a classic that’s available year-round. Chocolate chunk cookies, a chocolate “Snickers” cake and pies such as blackberry lemon meringue round out the dessert menu, with custom full cakes and pies available when ordered in advance.
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(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Coucou
Venice French $$
To match its classic, Parisian-leaning setup where bistro chairs flank the tables and windows open onto a busy Venice thoroughfare, French-Californian restaurant Coucou offers a simple, chic sundae to cap off a visit full of steak frites, zucchini beignets, oysters, fried olives and the like. The vanilla soft serve comes twirled upward in a frosted seafoam-green glass, all cloudlike and thick thanks to a base of Straus Family Creamery dairy made in Marin County. Served alongside it are ramekins of Luxardo maraschino cherries, chopped almonds and a pour-it-yourself house-made chocolate hard shell that solidifies almost instantly over the soft serve’s swooshes. Iconique.
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(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Craig's
West Hollywood American $$$
What began as a customer favorite at one of L.A.’s most celebrity-studded restaurants has expanded to a popular retail brand of ice cream pints found at thousands of stores and supermarkets around the country. Owner and A-list whisperer Craig Susser knew he was onto something when guests began asking for take-home scoops at his eponymous restaurant: The house-made vegan ice cream by Susser and chef Kursten Kizer was simply that good. The best place to tuck into the creamy, cashew-based ice cream is at Craig’s itself, ideally from a big booth while full of shrimp cocktail, chopped salad and Jerry Weintraub’s Spaghetti Clam Show. At the restaurant, the plant-based treat can be ordered as simple scoops in a rotation of flavors such as salted caramel, Melrose mint chip and cold brew; as a behemoth multiflavor sundae served in a sprinkle-rimmed oversize martini glass designed by influencer (and Craig’s regular) Tinx; or as a snowball, coated in chocolate and coconut. Given how hard it can be to snag a reservation at Craig’s, though, the retail pints aren’t a bad consolation prize.
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(Danielle Dorsey / Los Angeles Times)
Damian
Downtown L.A. Mexican $$$
After elevating Mexico City’s Pujol to a globally revered destination, founder and head chef Enrique Olvera in fall 2020 opened his first L.A. restaurant, Damian, featuring plates that marry Mexican and California influences in a sleek, almost hidden, jungle-like space in the Arts District. The menu from head chef Chuy Cervantes pivots elegantly to fit California’s subtle seasons, with summer highlights such as a vibrant salmon tostada with Sungold tomatoes and crunchy chicatana ant mayo and grilled swordfish that’s so plump, meaty and moist, it could practically double for pork belly. The shareable plates are filling without being heavy, and chances are you’ll still have some space for dessert. The soft serve swirls pineapple and coconut flavors with lime zest and layers in chunks of pineapple for a refreshing piña colada taste that my dining partner said felt like “a hug from the sun.” The hibiscus meringue, conceived by the restaurant’s late pastry chef Joshua Ulmer, cracks open to reveal a jammy strawberry curd and cloudlike Chantilly cream that melts on the tongue. Both desserts are available during weekend brunch, though the soft serve gets the parfait treatment with granola and papaya.
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(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Funke
Beverly Hills Italian $$$
Evan Funke’s new, eponymous restaurant is a temple to regional Italian cooking and handmade pastas, but the dessert program — from James Beard Foundation award semifinalist Shannon Swindle — does things just a bit differently. There’s a frozen component to nearly every pastry: not a very Italian procedure, but a benefit to diners that allows a taste of the house-made gelati and sorbetti, which are all crafted from meticulously sourced ingredients. Fluffy and freshly fried bomboloni might arrive with a single quenelle of Harry’s Berries ice cream, and Sicilian cannoli could be topped with cherry sorbetti, as opposed to the frozen treats served separately, though Swindle’s excellent gelati and sorbetti also can be ordered a la carte, generously scooped into sundae cups and occasionally garnished with the likes of pizzelle. There are often three flavors of each on offer at a time, with Swindle spinning at least one flavor every day. Previously, especially in his years at Craft, he made rich, French-style custard-based ice creams. At Funke he gets to explore lower-fat, milk based gelati — some with egg, some without — all made with whole ingredients. To let natural flavor shine, the sorbetti is always crafted from fresh fruit gathered during his triweekly visits to the farmers market; herbs, spice or a liqueur might find their way in, though rarely. Swindle also oversees the dessert program at Hollywood’s Mother Wolf — which sells twice as much gelati and sorbetti due to the size of the restaurant.
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(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Heritage
Long Beach Californian $$$
Some of the L.A. area’s best and most seasonal restaurant ice cream can be found in a former Craftsman home, part of a tasting menu from a brother-and-sister team — in the first Long Beach restaurant to earn a Michelin star. Chef Philip Pretty, who runs Heritage with his sister, Lauren, purchased a home ice cream maker and began experimenting with his own base of farmers market eggs, cream and high-quality milk. At Heritage his ice cream program expanded to the point of savory notes — with options such as vanilla parsnip — and ingredients from the siblings’ own farm, like a recent fig-leaf variety featuring leaves that were toasted and then steeped in cream, later topped with honeycomb crumble and bee pollen. Perhaps Heritage’s most popular ice cream to date is the toasted marshmallow, so creamy and nostalgic it inspired one diner to offer $100 for a pint of the stuff (which, sadly, the restaurant doesn’t offer). Pretty was so taken with the quality of his ice creams that he began toying with frozen yogurt too, which he now uses as a vehicle for fresh fruit such as Meyer lemon, kumquat, strawberry and mango. Even the restaurant’s savory courses can involve some sort of frozen sweet, with herbaceous granitas and sorbets spooned over beets, tomatoes and grilled strawberries — always playing with the balance of sweet and savory, and always evolving with the seasons, as often as multiple times a month.
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(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Jemma di Mare
Italian $$
Wheeled out as the pièce de résistance, Jemma di Mare’s sundae cart is a customizable showstopper. A typical meal at former “Top Chef” contestant Jackson Kalb’s Italian American seafood-focused restaurant might include lobster fettuccine, Sicilian kanpachi, garlic bread heavy with gooey caciocavallo and fontina, and a thick wedge of lasagna al forno, but in eagerness to try it all, make sure to save room for the spumoni cart. Riffing on the iconic tricolor Italian gelato flavor of chocolate, cherry and pistachio, Kalb and his team whip up creamy vanilla soft serve in-house and flank it with a fresh and chewy brownie, then wheel it out on a little wooden cart for tableside flourish. Swirled over the lip of a large glass sundae bowl, this is a multiperson affair — and a perfect vehicle for its accompaniments: thick pistachio cream, sweet-tart cherries in syrup, rich chocolate sauce, rainbow sprinkles, toasted hazelnuts and a thick house-made whipped cream, all spooned over the top to your liking.
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(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Katsu Sando
Chinatown Japanese $
Kakigori season at Katsu Sando is the most wonderful time of the year. The window for the Japanese sandwich shop’s weekend-only, piled-high shaved ice is short, arriving each summer and staying only as long as the hot weather lasts — but they really know how to make the most of it. Both the Chinatown and the San Gabriel location use ice machines imported from Japan, and they don’t stop there: The ice itself is also flown in from Japan via clear-ice specialist Kuramoto Ice, which readily takes on bright hues from the flurry of syrups, fruits and creams Katsu Sando employs. Flavors rotate every three weeks for the shops’ Kanazawa-style shaved ice, in options such as strawberry pavlova topped with strawberry-milk syrup, milk whip and meringue, with strawberry preserves hidden throughout; mango syrup with coconut whip, pandan tapioca and marinated mango chunks; watermelon with condensed milk and lime whip; and figs with aged balsamic glaze and whipped ricotta. Shaved almost imperceptibly thin, every spoonful disintegrates on the tongue immediately, like catching snowflakes — but much, much tastier.
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(Wesley Lapointe / Los Angeles Times)
Pijja Palace
Silver Lake Indian Californian $$
With achaari-spiced buffalo wings, Malai rigatoni, chutney pizzas and dosa onion rings, the menu at Silver Lake’s Indian sports bar is never short on fun. At Pijja Palace, chef Miles Shorey and owner Avish Naran better Americana staples such as wings, sliders and tenders with Indian flair and heat, all the way down to the in-house soft-serve program. Two varieties have been on the menu since the launch, both a riff on classics, swirled into their glasses and made with spices and aromatics that steep for one to two days. The vanilla-based cardamom is a riff on cookies and cream that infuses both black and green varieties of cardamom in ode to Naran’s days in culinary school, when he’d regularly stop at a nearby ice cream parlor and order cookies and cream and cardamom flavors, then combine them. At Pijja Palace he tops his lightly botanical soft serve with a mountain of Oreo crumbles, which only get better as they soften and mingle with the frozen treat. The chocolate variety plays off a classic malted chocolate but adds chai, tinging the soft serve with a house blend of the deeply aromatic tea for a complex undertone. It’s topped with chocolate-covered malt balls and a dusting of chai spice and malt powder, an amped-up version of the old-timey flavor that fits right in with Naran and Shorey’s genre-bending menu.
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(Danielle Dorsey / Los Angeles Times)
Plant Food + Wine
Beverly Grove Vegan $$$
After closing the Venice flagship earlier this spring, world-renowned plant-based chef Matthew Kenney has opened a new outpost of Plant Food + Wine in the Four Seasons Los Angeles. The seasonal-leaning menu has been updated with items like vadouvan taquitos, a cornmeal waffle with fried maitake mushroom that’s drizzled with maple butter and a raw lasagna with heirloom tomato and zucchini. Dessert offers a stone fruit creamsicle with peach granita and vanilla gelato that hits all the right notes of icy, creamy, fruity and not too sweet. For something a little more decadent, try the chocolate cake that’s served with pistachio ice cream and rosewater meringue.
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(Danielle Dorsey / Los Angeles Times)
Ronan
Fairfax Pizza $$
Tucked away from the madness of Melrose Avenue, every diner at seasonally minded Ronan seems to be in agreement about over-ordering. Plates clutter tables as parties order at least one pizza for every other person, plus pillowy, wood-fired focaccia that’s served with burrata or chicken liver pâté and a Caesar salad that’s the platonic ideal of the dish with a colorful bed of little gem lettuces tossed with herby crouton crumbles, Parmesan and glistening anchovy slivers. Even as patrons break apart blistered pizza crusts and spoon spicy clams over cheesy garlic bread, they know to save at least a smidgen of space for dessert, with house-made ice cream that spans chocolate chip, coffee Oreo, banana, boysenberry and Gold Medal Ribbon, based on a Baskin-Robbins flavor that was co-owner Daniel Cutler’s father’s favorite flavor while the chef was growing up. The bosyenberry is tart, fruity and creamy for a satisfying and light bite to conclude your meal. Go for the affogato with a scoop of coffee Oreo ice cream if you need to rally for post-dinner plans.
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(Danielle Dorsey / Los Angeles Times)
République
Hancock Park French $$$
The almost century-old building on La Brea Avenue that was originally built by Charlie Chaplin and now houses République restaurant and bakery is convivial and warm under chef-partners Walter and Margarita Manzke. Dining rooms with exposed brick and stone walls hum with chatter and laughter; a line holds steady at the pastry counter throughout the day. The menu skews contemporary French with seasonal California touches — a kanpachi crudo might feature crescents of fresh nectarine, while a skillet of wood-fired cauliflower and Brussels sprouts is sprinkled with crumbs of chewy, oven-dried apricot. Margarita Manzke is a 2023 James Beard Award-winning pastry chef, so you can’t go wrong with any of the desserts here, from strawberry tiramisu studded with Harry’s Berries to gooey dark chocolate fondant with almond, banana and salted caramel. There’s also a cast of rotating ice creams, with summer standouts like lime crème fraîche, creamy and light with the perfect amount of mouth-puckering citrus. Nondairy sorbets are available in flavors like mango, raspberry and peach.
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(Joseph Weaver)
Saffy's
East Hollywood Middle Eastern $$
When Genevieve Gergis and husband Ori Menashe opened Saffy’s, Gergis made a pineapple and cherry swirl soft serve that was a dead ringer for a Big Stick Popsicle. She changes her flavors with the seasons, but you can always count on ice cream that’s playful and typically bursting with fresh fruit. Depending on the time of year, you’ll find raspberry and Regier Farms peach, vanilla and boysenberry or salted date. You can always order a swirl with both flavors on offer. And if you’re lucky, there will be an option to add a magic chocolate shell. Or even better, a sherry float.
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(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Tonchin
Larchmont Japanese $$
The ramen is the draw at Tonchin, but the head-sized kakigori has its own gravitational pull. According to co-owner Anan Sugeno, whose father and uncle co-founded the ramen chain in Tokyo in 1992, customers regularly come to the Larchmont ramen shop solely for the shaved-ice dessert. A childhood favorite of Sugeno’s and a signature item since Tonchin’s expansion to New York in 2017, the kakigori comes positively packed, a sphere bursting over the top of a bowl that looks like it can barely contain the mound of ice topped with clouds of honeyed whipped cream. Collab flavors occasionally crop up — such as strawberry shaved ice made with Oishii berries, or coffee shaved ice crafted from New York’s Parlor Coffee — but the standard menu of hits remains year-round, and is worth ordering in its entirety. Highlights include the earthy, not-too-sweet matcha kakigori crowned with red beans and matcha-dusted honey cream, and the mango kakigori exploding with flavor from puréed and chopped fresh mango all dappled with honey cream and fresh mint. Be warned: This isn’t single-serving kakigori, and could very well be the largest Japanese shaved ice being served in L.A. Bring reinforcements.
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(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Tsubaki
Echo Park Japanese $$
There’s care in every small plate and kushiyaki skewer by Charles Namba, and ditto every pour from the lauded sake program by Courtney Kaplan. It should come as no surprise then that the owners of Echo Park’s California izakaya treat its desserts just as respectfully, especially when it comes to ice cream. The soft-serve program from this 101 Best Restaurants awardee is small but exceedingly thoughtful: The base — made with Straus Family Creamery dairy — steeps with hojicha for 48 hours, pulling earthy notes from the roasted green tea leaves. It can be ordered as-is, the full flavor of hojicha on display, or as a parfait layered with house-candied walnuts grown by local, fourth-generation farm K&K Ranch, and a sesame black-sugar miso caramel that chars Saikyo miso with sake and mirin before sweetening it all with Okinawan brown sugar and sesame paste.
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(Dylan + Jeni)
Yangban
Downtown L.A. Korean $$
“The works” soft serve at Yangban, Katianna and John Hong’s Arts District restaurant, is a party in a cup. It starts with a swirl of dense, rich buffalo milk soft serve. Then comes a generous drizzle of both a soybean-intensive daenjang caramel and chocolate injeolmi. Depending on the bite, you’ll get bitter and/or sweet. The ingredient that really gets the party started is the nurungi puffed rice. The toasty, crunchy grains taste a lot like a grown-up version of Honey Smacks.
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(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
Yess Restaurant
Downtown L.A. Japanese cuisine
In the few months since it has opened, Yess Restaurant has featured one dessert: kakigori, or Japanese shaved ice, in two flavors. Recently, those flavors were sangria with summer fruit and coffee with dates and ultra-soft whipped cream. From chef Junya Yamasaki’s kitchen you can hear the hand crank turn on the old-fashioned manual shaved-ice machine (an iron Recro from Japan) and the gear-driven blade scraping a clear block of ice into fine snow. The coffee kakigori arrives in a white mound about the size of a large cantaloupe, blanketed with a thick layer of whipped cream. A server will pour coffee into the center, and as you scoop into it with your golden spoon, through snow and cream, you eventually will reach the lush dates at the bottom that have been marinating in Irish whiskey. If you’ve ordered the sangria version, a light sangria syrup, tart and wine-y, is poured over your shaved ice — just sweet enough to edge the red berries and wedges of stone fruit into luxe-dessert territory.
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