A Culinary Trip at Café Luna: Restaurateurs Offer a Taste of Their Kazakhstan Homeland

Centre County diners can take a culinary trip through eastern Europe and central Asia right here in Pleasant Gap. Café Luna , which opened in October 2022, focuses on sweet and savory regional dishes from faraway lands.

The restaurant is run by Gary Shindy, his parents and other family and friends. The family hails from Kazakhstan and came to State College in 1997. Shindy graduated in 2008 from State College Area High School.

Shindy and his family treat their customers with great hospitality and enjoy sharing their favorite recipes.

“Everything is from home recipes. We have zero café experience,” Shindy says. “We started from scratch, and we get a lot of help from good local people.”

The menu takes inspiration from dishes around Europe and Asia, including Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey and more.

“It had a very rich culture,” he says of the family’s homeland. “We took a little bit of everything and brought it here.”

Café Luna offers a variety of dishes, from quick snacks to full meals. It offers a vast baked good selection including Honey Walnut Caramel Cake, Chocolate Temptation Cake and Pistachio Cake, as well as Napoleons, Baklava and cookies. Everything is made in-house except for some cakes imported from Italy. The dessert selection changes with the seasons and new recipes the family wants to introduce.

For those looking for a light lunch, Café Luna has a rotating selection of salads and soups including Chicken Noodle, Pelmeni (similar to a dumpling in light broth), Kharcho (spicy meat and vegetables) and Borscht (traditionally made with beets and vegetables). Shindy says their soups are popular and the family hopes to add more offerings in the next year.

Diners can also try Borek Bites, which are light and flaky phyllo puff pastries filled with spinach and cheese or potatoes and mushrooms. The savory Baked Beef Cheburek is a homemade dough stuffed with minced meat and onions.

Some of the most popular items are the Khachapuris; the term means “cheese and bread” in Georgian. Café Luna offers a few different types, which Shindy says is because the dish differs by region. The word preceding khachapuri denotes where the style of cooking originated. Adjaruli Khachapuri, for example, gets its name from the Adjara region of Georgia.

Adjaruli Khachapuri (also known as the cheese boat) is an open-faced loaf of bread filled with a blend of cheeses and topped with an egg yolk and vegetables, if desired. The cheese boat is heated and cooked before adding the egg yolk at the end. Shindy says the dish is put back into the oven for at least a minute, which helps cook the egg. Still hot, the cheese boat arrives to the table, where it is customary for the diner to rip a piece of the bread and use it to mix the yolk and cheese together. The fusing of the two further heats and cooks the egg. The consistency ends close to what Pennsylvanians call a “dippy egg.”

The Imeruli Khachapuri is a cheese blend and dough presented in a flat, pizza-like shape, while the Penovani Khachapuri is like a cheese puff pastry. The Georgian Cheesesteak marries a Philly favorite with traditional Georgian bread.

“It’s like a fusion,” Shindy says.

Café Luna attracts community members with and without eastern European backgrounds. Shindy says there is a sizeable Russian speaking population in the area, as well as international students from Penn State.

“It reminds them of home,” he says. The texture of the bread of the Adjaruli Khachapuri is unique and similar to the style of a lot of breads in the Middle East and south Asia. “They say it reminds them of local dishes they have.” T&G

Hannah Pollock is a freelance writer in State College.

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