It’s early afternoon on a holiday weekend, and a flock of out-of-town guests mingle on the back porch of Mentone’s magical Wildflower Café, soaking in the mountain vibes while they wait for their tables.
Inside, the 120-year-old house is humming as diners enjoy chicken salad, spinach quiche, strawberry crepes, hormone-free burgers and the café's famous tomato pie.
Guitar picker Tony Goggans, in his white beard and black derby hat, strolls through the crowded front lobby, encouraging everybody to join in and sing along to Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee."
L.C. Moon, who has run this roadside café on top of Lookout Mountain for almost a dozen years, doesn't need any prompting. She hops right in and begins to belt out: "Feelin' good was good enough for me . . . good enough for me and my Bobby McGee."
A while later, she pulls off her boots and sits barefoot in the shade of a hickory tree outside her restaurant, surrounded by wisteria, sumac, violets, black clover and an abundance of other plants and flowers.
She's wearing a cap that says "Keep Mentone Funky" and a pair of copper-and-pearl earrings made by Rachel Ragland, a server and host at the café.
“Moon,” as almost everybody calls her, is in her happy place.
"When my dad passed, he said one of the things that was most important to him was that we would create as many smiles -- that my brother and I would create as many smiles -- as we possibly could, in honor of him," she says.
"That's what I do here. I love creating experiences. I love helping people to feel good. When they come in here and walk in this space, they can just have a great experience. They get fed with food. They get fed with soulfulness."
L.C. Moon, right, sings along with Tony Goggans, "the Mentone Troubadour," at the Wildflower Cafe in Mentone, Ala. (Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
A country girl in the city
Like a lot of folks around here, Laura Catherine Bonnett Moon says she was called to this idyllic mountain town in the far northeast corner of Alabama.
It just took her 23 years to find it.
The youngest of Bob and Nancy Bonnett's two children, she was raised in eastern Birmingham, where she attended Huffman Baptist Church and graduated from Huffman High School.
"I grew up on a dead-end street in Birmingham, so that was a huge luxury to me," she remembers. "Even though I was in the city, when I was a kid, I spent most of my time running around in the woods and outside all the time -- daylight to dark, as much as I could."
She dropped out of college at UAB at 20 and hit the road for California, dreaming of becoming a model or actress.
"When I went to Sunset Strip, I thought I had died and gone to heaven because the streets were lined with people like me," she says. "And (in Birmingham), I always stuck out like a sore thumb. I never was (so) odd that people didn’t like me, but I just was different. And there, I kind of felt like I fit."
After just a couple of years in LA, though she grew disenchanted with life in the city and longed to get back in the woods. She stayed in her apartment watching nature shows on PBS and reading guides to edible and medicinal plants.
"I thought (LA) was everything I ever wanted, and then it wasn't," she says. "I remembered being a kid and being in the woods and how great that felt. So, I was just really ready to get back to nature."
A home in the woods
Back home in Alabama, her father told her about this little town of less than 400 people in DeKalb County, not far from the Alabama-Georgia state line, that he and his wife had visited that fall.
"My dad said, 'If you love nature and beauty, you should go check out Mentone,'" Moon says.
She didn't know anything about Mentone -- had never even heard of it, actually -- but she remembers the first time she drove up Lookout Mountain and pulled into town.
"I topped the hill, came up past the rock wall, and the old (Mentone Springs) Hotel," she says. "I was mesmerized."
She and her husband, Dane Lovechio, a musician and carpenter she had married at the Little Church of the West wedding chapel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve 1995, bought 20 acres of land on the east fork of the Little River.
"It was nothing but woods," she says. "We went in the first day, cut in a trail and set up a campsite. The next day, we cut in a circle so that we could get in and out. Then we started scoping out where we were going to build our house."
They made a house out of trees off their land and lived without power and running water for three and a half years, she says.
"Everybody's asked me: 'What was it like? How did we not have TV and power?'" she says. "That was nothing. No running water, that's the hardest part."
They captured water off their roof to bathe and wash dishes and bartered with neighbors for drinking water. Moon canned her own vegetables and cooked on a wood stove.
"Cooking was a natural skill that just came to me," she says. "I would cook these big meals, and people would come over just to eat the things that I cooked off that wood stove."
Not long after coming to Mentone, she adopted the pen name L.C. Moon -- "L.C." for Laura Catherine and "Moon" reflecting her love of astrology -- to write for the local paper, The Groundhog.
"'Moon' is a nickname I got in California," she says. "So, when I came here, I was just Moon. Nobody knew me, and it just fits."
She has since legally changed her name to Laura Catherine Bonnett Moon.
"Some people call me L.C.," she says. "Everybody that really knows me calls me Moon."
In 1998, a year before her daughter, Zoe, was born, Moon opened a little shop in Mentone’s Log Cabin Village Shops, where she began selling her own line of herbal teas, soaps, salves, lip balms and moisturizers.
The shop moved a few times, and in 2007, after Moon and Lovechio had divorced, Moon found out that the Mentone Smokehouse was closing and the space was going to be available. So, she began exploring the idea of opening a restaurant, too.
The Wildflower Cafe in Mentone, Ala., is a quaint and quirky restaurant that also features live music and local art. (Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
A destination for travelers
The original Wildflower Café was a small, 20-something seat restaurant on the back side of The Hitching Post, an old general merchandise store that became home to several shops and boutiques over the years.
Moon convinced the café's owner, Margaret Baker, to sell her the business, and with the help of chef Ben Keener, who had worked at the original Wildflower Café, she reopened the café in its current location in October 2007.
"I'd never even worked in a restaurant before, so it was challenging," Moon recalls. "I didn’t even know that tables were supposed to have numbers."
She started out small, serving a limited lunch menu and three or four entrees for dinner, and over the years, as she expanded her culinary horizons with trips to Europe, Asia and the Caribbean, the menu grew.
"Every time I go so somewhere, I get inspired by the food," Moon says. "So that's what my specials evolve around. I've done Caribbean specials, Asian specials, and I really love Mediterranean food. So, I do a lot of Mediterranean specials."
In the 12 years since Moon took over the business, the quaint and quirky café has become one of Alabama’s most popular destination restaurants, with guests making the drive from Birmingham, Huntsville, Chattanooga and Atlanta to eat here, she says. Last year, the cafe served more than 26,000 guests, Moon says.
"We get a lot of Huntsville-Atlanta traffic because there are a lot of people traveling back and forth," she says. "They see it, and they're like, 'Oh, that's cute; I should stop one day.' And usually, once they stop, they're hooked and then they keep coming."
Earlier this year, during Mentone’s annual Rhododendron Festival on the third weekend in May, the Wildflower Cafe served a record 547 guests that Saturday, Moon says. She anticipates another record crowd during the World’s Longest Yard Sale, a 690-mile yard sale that begins in Gadsden and ends in Addison, Mich., on the first weekend in August.
"The third weekend in May through the first weekend in August, when the yard sale happens, we are hopping, especially on weekends," she says. "That’s why I would love to stress to people to try us out during the week because if you come on a Saturday, the likelihood is you are going to have to wait a long time."
In 2015 and again in 2018, the Wildflower Café was voted best café in the state by readers of Alabama magazine, and two years ago, AL.com featured it on the list of The Best Restaurant in Every County in Alabama.
The tomato pie is the most popular dish at the Wildflower Cafe in Mentone, Ala. This one is served with bacon. (Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
The pie to eat before you die
The tomato pie, which has been on the menu since before Moon took over the restaurant, is a perennial on the Alabama Tourism Department's list of 100 Dishes to Eat in Alabama Before You Die.
An old customer at the original location, Cindy Tyson, brought in a tomato pie recipe one day and asked Keener to make it, Moon says.
"She came in with a recipe from Southern Living and asked Ben to make it, and he did," Moon says. "After that, it has become a staple at the Wildflower."
The savory dish features sliced Roma tomatoes that are marinated in a balsamic vinaigrette and baked in a pie shell with a blend of grated cheddar and Mozzarella cheeses, mayonnaise and basil.
The tomato pie is available year-round, and during the peak summer months, Moon says she buys between 100 and 140 pounds of Roma tomatoes a week to meet the demand.
"Now, I have tomato pie burgers, I have tomato pie pasta, I have tomato pie salad," Moon says. "I mean, about any way you want tomato pie, you're going to get tomato pie here."
With its scruffy wood floors and intimate table lamps, live music and local art, the Wildflower Café is the kind of cozy, casual place where guests may choose anything from a spinach quiche or a chicken salad wrap to prime rib or grilled salmon.
"My new slogan is, 'From soul food to whole food,'" Moon says. "It's super-important to me to support and create great food. I don’t fry anything here. And I use 100 percent all-natural ingredients -- no artificial colors, no artificial flavors, no MSG.
“I offer alternatives for people who are gluten-free and vegan and vegetarian. I try to offer something for everybody, but I don’t promote myself so much as a health-food place because I’m afraid people won’t want to come eat the burgers.”
The Wildflower Café also includes a country store that sells artwork, pottery, jewelry, soaps, candles, jellies and other wares from local artists, crafters and makers.
"That’s one of the things I love about owning this place," Moon says. "As you see, with the gardens and the art and supporting the artists, it's not just about food."
Called to be here
No matter how crazy things get at the cafe, Moon is never more than a few minutes away from her place on the river, which she shares with her mother, Nancy.
“Where I was with this place seven years ago and where I am with this place today, as far as my stress level, it’s like day and night,” she says of the restaurant.
“I have five acres on the river, and if (the staff is) fine and it’s the middle of the day and I’m going to be here a long day, about 3 o’clock or 3:30, I’ll go run down to the river, jump in the river, get on a tube, float down for a little bit, and then come back.”
It was seven years ago, in February 2012, that her father, Bob Bonnett, the man who taught her to love music and told her to go to Mentone, died. It was a grief unlike anything she had ever experienced, she says. Then her big brother, David, died on Christmas Day 2015, and she grieved some more.
But in her father's death, Moon also found grace, amazing grace. And she discovered her voice.
"I got up every single morning at daylight, and I went outside and prayed," she recalls. "I had a little waterfall in my backyard, and I would go sit on top of that waterfall and I would pray, and I would meditate.
"Then when I got done, I would sing 'Amazing Grace,' every line of 'Amazing Grace,' all verses, every day. And I did that for a year and a half probably.
"It helped me remember what's important, and that grace is real," she adds. "And then it also helped me because I wanted to sing, so it was helping me train my voice to sing."
Now, nearly 21 years after she took her father’s advice and made that drive up Lookout Mountain into Mentone, Laura Catherine Bonnett Moon knows she is right where she was always meant to be, doing what she was always meant to do.
"If you walk around and ask two dozen people that live here now and didn’t live here before, I would bet at least 20 of them will tell you they were called here," she says.
"I don't know exactly what it is, but there is a vibe in Mentone. There's nature here, and it's one of the most beautiful places ever. The rivers that flow through here are very cleansing. You've got big rocks. You've got birds and trees."
And you’ve got L.C. Moon and the Wildflower Café, both doing their part to keep Mentone funky.
The Wildflower Cafe is at 6007 Alabama Highway 117 in Mentone, Ala. The phone is 256-634-0066. The restaurant is open for lunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, for dinner from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, and for brunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays. For a menu and more information, go to www.mentonewildflower.com.