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At Luna’s Living Kitchen, Juliana Luna serves up health-conscious, mostly raw, vegetarian fare and juices made with local, organic products. BY SUNNY HUBLER | PHOTOS BY JAMEY PRICE
Juliana Luna’s passion for food as a way to express love and togetherness came fi rst. Her dedication to the restaurant industry and to preparing fresh, organic, living food followed. As a result, Luna’s Living Kitchen captures that ephemeral air that all restaurants are striving for - that thing that takes a place to eat from merely “good” to “great.” As any foodie worth their salt knows, it’s about more than the taste of the food or the presentation of the plates, and lodged in something deeper than the carefully curated atmosphere or the cultivation of the menu. That spark that leaves an indelible sensory memory comes from the sort of raw passion you can’t fake. That passion is what sets
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a business into motion in the first place, the thing that infuses the food and the space and the experience with soul. Juliana Luna’s eponymous Living Kitchen has soul in spades. What makes hers such a unique venture is the combination of “soulful” with a type of food with which that word is not often associated. The food served at Luna’s is true clean eating even by the most dedicated healthy eater’s nutrition standards: it’s raw, organic, plant-based, and local. At the same time, the food is also lovingly crafted; every dish is full of rich and interesting flavor, painstakingly sourced to invite - rather than alienate - all types of eaters, and is served day in and day out in a bright,
warm, open-plan space that seems to buzz with people around the clock. Owner and chef Juliana Luna is originally from Bogota, Columbia. She worked in the food industry in her hometown before completing a bachelor’s in Hospitality and Tourism Management in Brig, Switzerland. She arrived in Charlotte in 2007 as an eager trainee in the hotel industry and before long became involved with Real Food Charlotte, a small organization that focuses on simple, organic foods. Luna explains that her food experience formally began in 2002, but stems mostly from time spent in the kitchens of her hometown and then later from her extended studies in Switzerland. She credits the dual pairing of learning about nutrition and learning about business management as the keys to her current success. “I have had far more hands-on, experiential learning in home kitchens than I have formal Culinary Arts training,” Luna says. “That said, my hospitality degree required a lot of technical work in the kitchen and certainly helped guide me in the business aspect of the culinary