Tre Luna is an Italian-inspired Alabama restaurant
Fresh-made pastas and pizzas are among the offerings at Tre Luna Bar and Kitchen in Hoover. (Sara Walker)
Tre Luna Bar & Kitchen is a family-owned business, but it’s the family that owners Brian and Erin Mooney have gathered together that is key to its success. From the partners who helped make the restaurant happen to the staff and regular customers who keep it going, Tre Luna is a delicious destination.
Seven years ago, the husband-and-wife team bought an established catering company and rebranded it Tre Luna. Tre Luna, meaning “three moons” in Italian, is a nod to Erin’s heritage, the early days of Brian’s restaurant career, a play on their last name Mooney and a reference to their three children.
The full-service catering business, which they run with manager Sara Walker, has been a successful part of Birmingham’s exciting food scene ever since. Tre Luna Catering does large events like weddings, as well as smaller gatherings like business breakfast meetings. The company offers gourmet, chef-prepared, single-serving meals delivered to your home – something that has been especially fitting and welcome during the pandemic.
But Brian, who started in the food business when he was 14 years old working at an Italian restaurant within biking distance of his home, longed for his own establishment.
“I wanted a home base,” he said. The challenge with catering is “you’re making this delicious food, but sometimes you’ve got to pack it up and carry it out to the middle of a field somewhere with no running water. You learn to adapt. But here, I’m making it in the back, we’re bringing it out and serving it 50 feet away. This is something I’ve always wanted to do. This is where my heart is.”
The Mooneys partnered with longtime friends Rick and Christine Botthof to open Tre Luna Bar & Kitchen in May 2019.
Tre Luna is serving up ‘Italian-inspired’ food in Hoover from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.
Christine’s eye for design created a space that is sophisticated and comfortable, upscale and fun, transforming part of the recently constructed Village at Brock’s Gap shopping center in Hoover into a delightful culinary destination for the surrounding neighborhoods and beyond.
Walk in and find yourself somewhere else.
A striking chandelier (the first thing she and Erin picked out for the space) is likely the first thing you’ll notice, too. A handsome marble bar anchors one wall, and a beautiful, handmade Acunto Mario pizza oven commands the back corner. This serves as a second bar and an entertaining chef’s table, too, and adds a spot of color to the restaurant’s stylish neutral palette.
“I wanted it to look like a bistro,” Christine said. “When we were discussing the restaurant, we wanted something completely different from everything that exists here in the city of Hoover. We wanted to be a date-night spot, and we did win Hoover’s Best Date-Night Spot last year.”
Christine’s design proved to be incredibly practical.
When the restaurant had to shut down indoor dining at the beginning of the pandemic, a pass-through that served an outside bar on the patio became a convenient, socially distanced, walk-up window for to-go orders.
“It was interesting,” Brian said, “because with our catering background, it was easy to transition from a restaurant to a to-go service. … The window almost turned into this kind of drive-thru for the neighborhood.”
“After a while,” Christine added, “we had people who just sat out on the patio with their to-go food and felt like they were having a night out. People socially distanced themselves. We even had people bring their own tablecloths and come for their standing Friday-night date and eat their takeout outside and bring their own wine glasses. We really have had a tremendous amount of support.”
The patio remains popular; heaters and a centralized fire pit will extend the season of full-service dining out there. Inside, tables are spaced out and there’s room between diners on the comfortable banquettes with their shimmering fabric and fun throw pillows. Both options feel good. And the restaurant does a brisk takeout and delivery business, too.
The food at Tre Luna is “Italian-inspired.”
“(Brian) is very talented with Italian food, but we didn’t want to stick ourselves into a box with just that,” Erin said, “because we like to experiment. We wanted to have raw oysters, which are my favorite. We wanted to have fish specials and experiment with appetizers.”
“Everything’s from scratch,” Brian said. “We hand-make our own pastas, our own doughs for pizza and focaccia.” They grind the beef for the bistro’s popular burger, and serve steaks, Italian-American comfort foods, seafood fresh from the Gulf and daily specials.
The restaurant is a variety of different things, Brian said. “It’s a place especially for the community that we’re in. You could come here one day and grab a burger or pizza and come the next night … and have something like a great seafood risotto or a filet.”
There’s a weekday happy hour with craft beers and wines by the bottle and glass, and Tre Luna’s bartenders create specialty cocktails like an apple cider martini; a rosemary-scented, lemony gin drink called Three Moons; and a Rye Pomma Fizz made with Bulleit Rye, thyme-infused simple syrup, Pama liqueur and prosecco.
Some of the most popular starters are bestselling favorites from the catering company – things like the cheesy spinach and artichoke dip, citrus-herb Gulf shrimp, slow-braised boneless beef short rib sliders on house-made buns with horseradish cream. “We knew it would be a home run,” Erin said. “We had fed … hundreds of people braised beef short ribs, and everyone seemed happy.”
Other great ways to start: burrata with San Marzano sauce and pesto focaccia; fritto misto with flash-fried fish, shrimp and oysters; and chicken wings made fancy with caramelized onions, Calabrian chile peppers and lemon aioli. The raw/seafood bar features unusual oysters on the half-shell or baked; mussels sauteed with pancetta, white wine, herbs, lemon and butter; and a classic shrimp cocktail with homemade sauce.
The large, wood-fired oven cooks pizzas and other dishes at Tre Luna. (Sara Walker)
Pizza-making, using a dough recipe that Brian spent weeks perfecting, becomes performance art as the cooks stretch the dough, artfully top it and then cook the pies in the wood-fired pizza oven. These pizzas range from a simple Margherita with fresh mozzarella, basil and San Marzano tomatoes to a shrimp scampi version with Gulf-fresh shrimp, roasted garlic, spinach, cherry tomatoes, Grana Padano and mozzarella. The pie with house-made Italian sausage; ricotta; whole, fiery Calabrian chile peppers; spinach and mozzarella is popular, too.
The special board lists fresh fish as well as seasonal entrees like an 18-ounce bone-in veal rack. Other options include chicken Francese (the first dish chef Mooney learned to make) with sauteed broccolini and McEwen & Sons polenta and a grilled ribeye with chimichurri and roasted potatoes.
Classic Italian pasta dishes include penne with wild mushrooms, spinach, roasted tomatoes and white-wine cream sauce; braised pork shoulder orecchiette with mushrooms, spinach and bechamel; lasagna Bolognese; and linguini shrimp with pesto cream, oven-dried tomatoes and spinach.
It all reflects a simple approach to cooking honed by classical training and years in kitchens, including Frank Stitt’s Bottega Restaurant. “I like to let the food speak for itself,” Brian said. “My job as a chef is just to … let the product be what it is. So, you source great products (from local purveyors like Evans Meats, Greg Abrams Seafood and Ireland Farms), and then it’s just really letting the food speak for itself and not overcomplicating it.”
Brian trained at Florida Culinary Institute in West Palm Beach, and he and Erin met working together at Dancing Bear in Fort Lauderdale, Florida – he was a line cook and she was a server.
Erin said she plays a support role at Tre Luna, but, really, she is the friendly face of the place, as she makes her way around the dining room, bar and patio, refilling glasses, greeting old friends and making new ones.
“We live down the street,” Erin said. “This is our neighborhood. So sometimes I walk in the back door after I drop off at cheer or karate and then walk around the restaurant for 45 minutes with water and greet everyone and ask them how they are. Then I’m out the back door.”
Her graciousness, even between carpool duty, is genuine. “I would say I have a servant’s heart. There’s nothing that makes me happier than for someone to be … fulfilled … with food and also just with joy,” she said. “I love that feeling of knowing that we’ve done a good job and that we’re bringing happiness to someone’s life.”
Tre Luna, the restaurant, had hardly gotten started when the pandemic hit, but the Mooneys lost little ground.
“I think Brian and I both have an entrepreneurial spirit about us and always have. We have big dreams,” Erin said. “Brian and I are both dreamers; we’re both very hard workers. We like to do what we do. I feel like we’re on the right path, and I feel like we’re survivors. … You know, I’m proud that we stuck to that dream and didn’t give up, because we easily could have given up a bunch of times.”
“We really wanted to work for ourselves,” Brian said, “because we wanted to be able to do this for our children. We wanted to give them something, a better life, give them the life we’ve wanted for them.
“They’re getting to see that the hard work has paid off,” he added. “My oldest daughter, who’s 16, has really seen the transitions from, ‘OK, Dad’s working at this job to this job’ and now, ‘I’m watching Dad build this business.’
“I think that the proudest thing is for our children to be part of it,” Brian said. “They know all of the staff here; the staff … has become family. Especially through the COVID part, we’ve really become a tight-knit family. We take care of each other. This isn’t just a restaurant to me. This is a family of people, and it’s been really beautiful to experience it.”
Fresh-made pastas and pizzas are among the offerings at Tre Luna Bar and Kitchen in Hoover. (Sara Walker)
Tre Luna Bar & Kitchen
1021 Brock’s Gap Parkway
Suite 145
Hoover, Alabama 35244
https://www.trelunabarandkitchen.com
Hours
Closed Sunday and Monday
4-9 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday
4-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday
Happy Hour Tuesday through Friday 4-5 p.m.
