our story
What happens when…
LŪNÄ started because we wanted a banh mi and didn’t have bread. What we did have was tortillas.
That kicked off a years-long quest to make the perfect banh mi taco. Then the questions kept coming. What if dumplings tasted like tamales? What if birria met luau pork? That’s how tamale dumplings and Island Birria happened, and honestly, that’s how most things at LŪNÄ begin.
Everything we make starts with a random spark of curiosity, a little kitchen alchemy, and a lot of testing. We only put something on the board if we genuinely love eating it ourselves.
Our food is usually rooted in the flavors we grew up around, Mexican and Filipino, but curiosity tends to wander. The result is food that’s a little weird, very loud with flavor, and usually surrounded by a lot of art.
By day, we have regular 9-to-5s. On weekends, we moonlight as LŪNÄ. That’s where the name came from.
a short conversation
The two people behind LŪNÄ
- So… who are you two?
Just a couple of nerds who really, really like food. German is an engineer. Aleena is a technical product manager. And we are very, very, very in love.
- How did this become a food trailer?
People kept telling us how much they liked our weird food, so we started small: a tent, a couple of Blackstones, and a lot of experimenting.
Then people kept liking it.
So we took a much bigger leap and built the trailer. Also, we’re getting older and tents are wildly overrated.
- Who comes up with the weird ideas?
Both of us. We feed off each other’s energy and keep pushing ideas further.
Neither of us was doing anything quite like this before we met. We basically started making each other progressively weirder.
- What makes something a LŪNÄ dish?
It usually starts with a simple idea.
Then it gets way too extra.
Then we simplify it again.
Then we tweak it a few more times because apparently we don’t know when to leave well enough alone.
- Why keep doing this if you both already have day jobs?
Because we have so much fun making this food, and we genuinely love eating it.
It isn’t easy, and we are definitely not getting rich doing it. But when someone tells us, “This is one of the best things I’ve ever eaten,” that feeling is ridiculously hard to beat.
- And the name?
Honestly, it just kind of appeared.
We were driving home from Detroit after a weekend full of really good food and talking about the places we had visited, especially this Japanese patisserie we loved. We started doing the usual “what if we had a place like this someday?” thing.
Then came: what would we call it?
We wanted something timeless, simple, and easy to remember.
“Luna” just popped out.
It ended up fitting us better than we realized at the time. We were building this thing on nights and weekends, in a weird in-between phase of life, making something together that felt completely ours.