The Pomegranate Café was recently named "Best New Restaurant" by Phoenix Magazine, which is a lifestyle rag for urbanites with dollars to burn. The restaurant in question is in Chandler, home to many of these people.
However, Pomegranate Café is family-owned and vegan-friendly, so I had to check it out. Everything on the menu is vegetarian and can be made vegan. There are also gluten-free and raw options, so there's something for everybody.
The restaurant serves breakfast foods like tofu scrambles, French toast, and breakfast burritos, but when I went, I chose a vegan BLT from their lunch menu. It was made with delicious smoky tempeh "bacon," and the addition of avocado was nice. My hot date ordered a pesto sandwich, which he declared pasty but tasty. Neither sandwich was huge, but they come with a spinach-pomegranate salad and some veggie chips. You get a full plate of food, and everything is extremely fresh, but I wasn't too stoked on the salad, though my hot date liked it. It would have been nice to have a choice of sides, like some fries or potato salad or something, but that was not the case.
We also split a berry smoothie, which was pretty tasty. It was no tsoynami, but...what is? They also had a good selection of vegan desserts, such as cookies, donut holes, cakes and even cheesecake. We got a slice of chocolate cake topped with pomegranate seeds to go, and it was delicious. It's so rare to find dairy- and egg-free desserts.
The atmosphere was bright, clean and cheerful. It was an enjoyable meal for sure. My main gripe about the place brings me right back to my first paragraph: everything was sooo damn expensive. Sandwiches are $8-$12, the smoothie was friggin' $7, and the slice of cake was $6.
So, if you wanna splurge and try a new vegan place on the far east side of town, it's definitely worth a try. But unless you're one of those rich people that can afford things, you might want to bring a friend and split some stuff. The food is tasty, but I don't think I'll go back because I wouldn't dream of spending that kind of money on a meal these days.