CULTURE
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This photo of a menu cover from the Moon Garden restaurant
was discovered on a tiki restaurant blog. Daughter
family’s second restaurant, Moon Islander, in Titusville,
Florida. She also painted murals on the restaurant walls.
39
the growing season was short, which
is what drew Moon Lueg to Florida.
It wasn’t until the late 1950s that
the Luegs built their first Florida
restaurant, Moon Garden, on North
U.S. 1 next to the present-day
Hillcrest Memorial Gardens. It was
new to Fort Pierce and the elegantlydesigned
restaurant offered Chinese
and American cuisine, providing an
introduction to new dishes and food
preparation for the area. It quickly
became one of the places where
young men took their prom dates
for dinner and where families went
for a “nice dinner out.” The building,
which has since been razed,
had a red-brick façade and was
beautifully decorated. Moon Lueg
constructed a fountain near the entrance,
and he put in a rock garden
with a replica of a Chinese village,
complete with china figurines, according
to Raymond.
ART AND DESIGN
Daughter Irene came home on
a visit from college and painted
beautiful murals on the wall in the
restaurant’s bar and in the banquet
room. Another mural on the wall
of the dining room was painted by
“a local artist.” The children do not
know who painted it. Some stories
said Fort Pierce’s most famous artist,
A.E. “Beanie” Backus, was asked to
paint the mural, but there seems to
be no substantiation for this version
of the story. And, sadly, the mural
and all the other beautiful accoutrements
of Moon Garden, including a
large porcelain sign that graced the
outside, are now gone. The restaurant
and the large home on the hill
behind it were razed some years ago.
“The sign was very expensive,”
Raymond says. “The building was
built to code and then we strengthened
it more. I think everything
was built to last through 150 miles
per hour winds back then and
we made it so it could withstand
winds of 200 miles per hour. Then,
about 50 years later, we had to
knock it down.” He adds that they
also knocked down the three-story
home that was built long ago on the
one-time pineapple plantation.
Moon Lueg was the chef in the
kitchen of Moon Garden, fixing the
Cantonese dishes and the American
foods, utilizing the vegetables grown
>>
Start Living Your Life!
Irene Lueg designed this cover and others for the
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