Chef Paul Luna reads the last page of a book first. Knowing the ending, he claims, doesn’t make the journey any less exciting.
Accordingly, he’s offering Atlanta the conclusion to his own second chapter in the city: “I will be mayor in three years,” he said on a recent Saturday afternoon as he prepped for the dinner crowd at Lunacy Black Market downtown.
But first, a bit of back story.
Luna was 27 when his culinary empire began its ascension: . “The food's so experimental you can practically hear the test tubes pop,” the AJC wrote in 1993 of his first chef-owner project, the now-closed Luna Si on Peachtree Road.
Before The Food Network elevated chefs to the level of rock stars, Luna blossomed into an iconic mad-genius figure in Atlanta’s restaurant scene.
Introducing pre-recession crowds to untapped segments of European, Mediterranean and South American cuisine, he became Atlanta’s tapas auteur and engineered enduring, high-energy restaurants (including Eclipse di Luna and Loca Luna) with food and drink menus as seductive and wild as the décor.
Equally wild is his reputation. He’s notorious for getting naked in front of customers. Local foodies still gab about him banning salt and pepper shakers from tables and stealing chairs out from under diners who provoked his ire.
“They’re all true,” Luna said of these stories from his past.
“It was very difficult in my first restaurant. I couldn’t understand people. You spend 18 hours doing something no one can see and no one can understand. When the curtain goes down, you are left physically drained."
To recoup, he took his talents on the road and was a chef and consultant in Mexico, California, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii.
The dining community was thrilled when he returned to Atlanta to open Lunacy Black Market late last year with his business partner, Cynthia Thomet, whom Luna calls his wife, though they are not legally married. But many were also scratching their heads.
The restaurant is deliberately positioned to contradict everything Atlanta revered about the rebel chef. The location, 231 Mitchell St., on a neglected strip of downtown, is metaphorically a million miles away from Miami Circle.
"Buckhead Betties" have been replaced with lunching government employees, suit-and-tie clad dinner guests, drug addicts, prostitutes and homeless people. Luna serves those who can't pay, treating them as he would beloved regulars.
At dinner, Thomet tells every guest, “This is your table for the night,” an anti-turn-‘em-and-burn-‘em policy that befuddles diners who’ve driven in from tonier ZIP codes for Luna’s obscenely low-priced food only to find no open tables, no wait list, nor even an area to wait in if they wanted to.
The result is a small room where up to 30 people at a time let down their guard around tables and couches from Goodwill. Wine glass in hand, the trim chef with his long salt-and-pepper braid circulates in a way that does seem a bit mayoral, frequently offering diagnoses and remedies for the city's ills.
He becomes particularly impassioned about race, talking about how it has affected gentrification and backstreet blights, including drug addiction and homelessness.
“We’re still segregated," he said. "All my white customers think, downtown: black. Period.
“We’re not going to get a black mayor to address black issues. Because that black mayor is not interested in his black people. If his sponsors are white, or the crème de la crème of black people, then he is not interested in that homeless person. He is not interested in the streets of our neighborhoods, and is not going to take these issues to the white governor.”
He says government is too biased and broken to see that small businesses run by mixed-income, multi-national owners are the way to breathe culture and vitality to a historic downtown whites fled long ago.
The restaurant is an example.
Initially Luna wanted to set up Lunacy as a nonprofit that would benefit young people but decided instead to run it for profit and train one or more refugee women on the restaurant business then hand it over to them. He’s working with BryAnn Chen, executive director of Refugee Women’s Network, on securing candidates for the job.
“I believe a refugee woman could do this,” Chen said. “Many women we work with say they love cooking and want to open restaurants, which happens to be one of the hardest businesses to succeed in. "
Luna is serious about his bid for mayor and asserts that he has a team in place.
“He would be the Johnny Cash of politics,” said Bruce Budd, an Atlanta artist who does charcoal drawings duringdinner every Saturday. We might as well set the bar high. Even if we don’t quite make it, we’ll be higher than we were before."
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