Item From the Past: The Harvest Moon's Mooñu!

Back in October 1985, I nicked a menu from the Harvest Moon Saloon, a joint in the Buckhead district of Atlanta. Now the menu is one more bit of the ephemera I keep in a large envelope marked "Nashville 1983-87." This is the front page of the menu:

That fall, I spent a long weekend in Atlanta. I can't remember much about it now, not because it was especially decadent, but because now and then are separated by too many years. But I'm fairly sure that the actual Harvest Moon Saloon wasn't surrounded by billowing grassland. Call it menuic license.

As far as I can tell via Internet searches, the Harvest Moon Saloon is no more. Its early history, as related on the menu (mooñu): "The Harvest Moon Saloon opened its doors to the public on the fifteenth of May, 1978. Bruce Piefke, along with a lot of help from many friends, is responsible for this Buckhead phenomenon. When Bruce borrowed $5000.00 against his car to open the "Moon" it was with the conviction that he could offer good drinks, good food and present our city's finest local music at no cover charge! Enjoy yourself!"

The menu has four pages. Pages two and three list food items, as you'd expect, and I have to note that nothing costs more than $4.95, and that price was higher than most. Even in the mid-80s, that was modest pricing. This is the back page, listing the specialty alcohol, which must have been how Harvest Moon made its money:

Even on goofy old drink menus, there are echoes of fading cultural references. The Moon offered "Hawaiian Punch," as in "How 'bout a nice Hawaiian punch? Bam!" and "The Deep Throat" and "B-52" ("She came from Planet Claire") and "The Russian Quaalude," with the symbol of Soviet Communism stamped on a bit of pharmaceutical history.

Google Bruce Piefke -- an unusual enough name -- and you find that someone by that name is running a business in the Atlanta area that organizes outdoor movie screenings, so maybe that's his post-Moon gig. Could be more lucrative and (especially) more stable than the restaurant biz.

I can't remember which musical act we saw at the Harvest Moon. It must have been somebody. The place was known for its live music back then -- in fact, I'm fairly sure I heard about the Harvest Moon before I ever went there, even as far away as Nashville. But whoever played wasn't as memorable as, say, Uncle Walt's Band at the Sutler in '82 or Afrikan Dreamland at 12th & Porter in '84 or Francis Xavier and the Holy Roman Empire at the Bitter End in '86, the last of which I remember only because of the name of the band.