Juicery favorite Moon Juice opens new Silver Lake location

The Venice hit juicery Moon Juice is expanding to Silver Lake, owner Amanda Chantal Bacon’s second location offering her take on cold-pressed juices and raw food.

Moon Juice Silver Lake, next door to Pho Cafe in a Sunset Boulevard strip mall, is scheduled to open its doors this weekend.

On a hot afternoon at the Silver Lake store (three times bigger than the tiny Venice location), would-be customers already were pounding on the door trying to get their fix of juices such as Beet Aid (beet, lime and cucumber) and Moon Milks such as a Yam Julius (spiced yam juice with ginger, cinnamon, lucuma, tocotreinols and almond milk).

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Bacon, who has worked with Suzanne Goin at Lucques and helped open Silver Lake restaurant Forage, says she’s also expanding her Moon Juice menu. The glass cases are topped with neatly lined-up packages of her sprouted seed crackers, to be served with her new nut cheeses and pates.

“Coming from a fine dining background, I wanted to have great raw food options that are a simple, healthy celebration of food,” Bacon says.

She’s sitting at a table set with a bowl of crystals and a tray of raw vegan cheeses, sprouted crackers, salt-and-vinegar dehydrated almonds and zucchini. The cheeses include an air-cured “farm-style” macadamia nut cheese, a smoke chipotle cheese of raw pili and cashew nuts, and a raw pili nut pate with shallots and herbs.

She smears a little of the pili nut pate on a sprouted spelt cracker with rosemary and onion and says, “People even say it tastes like liver. It’s great with cornichon and raw mustard and some red wine.”

“I see this as a market” where people can pick up or order delivery of picnic baskets of nut cheeses and crackers or take some to a dinner party, she says.

A few tables and chairs will furnish the 1,200-square-foot space designed by Eric Lamers (“an old-school genius” who has helped restore Schindler and Lautner houses) and appointed with art from friends of Bacon.

Customers can sit down for one of Bacon’s new glass-bottled tonics and her raw desserts: chocolate mousse with raw cacao, avocado, wild honey, cracked and sprouted hazelnuts and Maldon sea salt; chia pudding with California farm almond milk and raw vanilla beans; or thumbprint cookie-like jam cups made with ground apricot kernel and filled with black-pepper-seasoned sour cherries.

The raw food menu isn’t “necessarily for adherents of raw,” she says. “But people might remember, ‘I had an experience with nuts and seeds and veggies and it was delicious and satiating, and then make it a part of their lives.”

Moon Juice Silver Lake, 2839 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, www.moonjuiceshop.com.

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