Wildflower Cafe helps keep Mentone funky

MENTONE — 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."

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.

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.

"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."

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 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."

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

"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.