If there’s one thing about me, it’s that I’m constantly learning new things about the car world as a relatively new member of this beautiful vroom community. For example: I just learned what “brakes” are, which the EMT told me about after I swerved into oncoming traffic to avoid pancaking a pair of mating squirrels. He also said this thing called a “seatbelt” would’ve kept me from hitting my head on the steering wheel after hitting the oncoming tree, but that’s irrelevant here.

More importantly than both of those, I recently learned about the name MOONEYES and their long legacy of hot rodding, sick art and merch, as well as their frighteningly well executed, period correct diner built in the middle of Yokohama, Japan that I just had to have a meal at.

They’re a far cry from my childhood filled with NASCAR races and off-roading since the age of 10, but the history of the brand is one that stretches decades and has a bigger cultural penetration than I ever would’ve expected. They’ve touched both ends of the car Venn diagram (general car culture and motorsports), and succeeded at peaking the interests of my simple primate brain. So with that in mind, I set my sights (and my big, famished American tummy) on the mecca of the mechanical and set out on my my hajj to the headquarters of the one, the only, the almighty: MOONEYES.

What is MOONEYES?

In 1950, a man named Dean Moon founded the company known as “MOON Speed Equipment,” a custom hot rodding company that takes “pride in producing high quality products that look great and get the job done right.”

While that’s a line from their website, there’s also an indelible truth behind it. As the story goes, Moon himself used to work at a Lincoln-Mercury dealership while in high school, and he used the knowledge he gained working on ignitions and fuel delivery to make some better parts in his high school shop class. Not long after, he started selling those parts while he was still in school.

His automotive career stalled for a bit after joining the military in WWII and getting drafted in the Korean War, but he eventually found his way back to the States and the world of hot rodding. He bought himself some property down in Orange County, right down the street from a little spot called “Moon Cafe” that his family was already operating.

That shop is where he continued his automotive work, and, unbeknownst to me, it became a site of automotive history much sooner than I ever would’ve guessed. From their site:

After acquiring the property in the ’50s, Dean Moon expanded by adding a new building for shipping and warehousing featuring a three-bay garage. This garage is the very location Dean’s friend Carroll came over in 1962 [and] turned out the very first Shelby Cobra.

So while Dean and the MOON brand (sometimes stylized MQQN, with the Q’s tail meant to look like an eye) were already doing alright, Shelby was ironing out the kinks on one of the most iconic roadsters ever made. You know, the very same Shelby that became associated with some of the most batshit Mustangs your money can buy? If that proximity to greatness was MOON’s only legacy, that would be cool enough, but their story marches on.

Dean and MOON loved going fast, and their stage of choice was overwhelmingly the straight lines, whether that’s the drag strips or the salt flats of Bonneville. They had their own insane cars, like the beautiful and blistering Moonliner, which reached 285-MPH on the sodium chloride with a design based only on “vibes,” as well as plenty of ones they sponsored through the years.

We’re talking an NASCAR Xfinity car done up completely with some MOON visuals, funny car dragsters still sprinting about today, and this gorgeous Mercedes AMG special used in the 2021 Indianapolis 8-Hour race.

They’ve been around, to say the least.

The MOONEYES Shop

When I was tracking down stories to find during my Japan trip, one thing I learned about was dajiban racing, where tuners take old as dirt Dodge vans (dajiban is basically a phonetic Japanese translation of Dodge van) and mod them to hell and back to become both grip and drift attack machines at the track. While I failed to make any dajiban connects, my research led me to a man named Todd Lappin, who is both a fan of the site and the man I’m dubbing the American authority on dajibans. While a dream of covering dajiban was elusive for this trip, our conversation also brought up the MOONEYES shop in Yokohama, and I was sold immediately. So before heading to Osaka on a bullet train, I figured I’d stop by and see what was up.

My oh my, it was so much more than I expected.

To aggressively gloss over the history of how the brand became associated with Japan: a man named Shige Suganuma took his love for fast vrooms and American goodies to the bank by selling MOON’s kit in Japan. After Moon passed, his wife Shirley kept the brand going for a few years before shuttering it in hopes to find a new torchbearer for the brand. She passed before the passing of the torch could happen, and shortly thereafter, Suganuma purchased the company and renamed it to MOONEYES USA, now headquartered in Yokohama.

Google Maps was weird and routed me to the back, but I’m happy it did because that’s where all the goodies (aka ‘cars’) were. My only complaint was that the doors to the paint shop were closed due to some rain, so I wasn’t able to see their in-house painter giving the cars their beautiful hot rodded up paint job, but the entire facility had me feeling like I was in the footsteps of giants.

The merch shop is an overload to your senses, as your eyes get violently flooded with memorabilia, knick knacks, clothes, bumper stickers, and, of course, car parts.

I’d be lying if I said I was impervious to the allure of the gorgeous MOONEYES clothing, that I didn’t waste the equivalent of a downpayment for a house on things as frivolous as clothes, but that would be a lie. Unfortunately for all, I’ve rejected my natural birthday suit and am writing this in the coolest shirt I could find in Yokohama.

I’m not wearing socks though.

Okay but what’s this talk about a burger?

Remember earlier when I said that Dean’s family had the MOON Cafe? Yeah, they brought that to Japan, too.

Walking in felt like I took a hit of the strongest hit of American spirit (metaphorically; not the tobacco tubes), like I was on set of that old stupid movie about high schoolers clearly played by 40-year-olds garbed in greasy leather jackets. And while I didn’t see any retirees struggling with geometry class like you would in the movies, I did see plenty of damn good food.

Okay well I ate the food, too.

The first course was the burger. I had them put a cheese chip over the top of it, which was a case of shredded cheese sitting on the griddle to crisp up and lay over the top of the chuck patty. What’s interesting, though, is I can’t even say for certain if it’s chuck. Bear with me, I promise it will come back into the main point:

If you’re a cooking nerd like me who loves burgers, you probably also bought a meat grinder before a mattress at your first apartment (a true story by the way). Grinding your own meat is fun because you get to interact with the cooking process in an atypical way, and because you get to choose the meat ratios that go into your grind. While chuck is the most common piece of the cow to use, some folk love to get bougie and ruin a good cut of meat by turning a top sirloin into a burger, ignoring the fact that grinding it very frequently churns it into an amalgamation that’s hardly different than the cheap chuck you ignored.

Something else you can do, however, is add in other meat, like bacon. If you haven’t had a bacon blend, I advise you to either buy a meat grinder (before you get that mattress, obviously), or go to your local grocery store and pick up that sweet pre-blended meat, because it’s an take on the familiar recipe. There’s a chewier texture to it, and the meat itself just lends itself to a smokier flavor profile over all. I don’t frequent it, but I like it a lot. Why am I bringing it up?

Because it’s so close to being the burger you know and love, but not quite there. That’s kind of how I felt about a lot of stuff I saw in Japan. I think about how Japanese fans of USDM cars import our trash to make their cars look more authentically American, but the cars still look just a little bit too clean and thoughtful to imitate our unique flavor of fatass. Fashion wise, I saw plenty of historical looking Americana clothing that evokes military styling, but it’s far too nice to storm Normandy in; or the kids dressed like LA hypebeasts decked out in 30 layers of baggy denim articles.

It’s like…yeah that’s definitely got American influences, but it’s more adjacent than it is authentic. That’s how the burger was: incredibly well done at imitating, but not quite there.

Also I got some Spam musubi, delicious pie, and a divine Japanese lager so who’s winning here! (Hint: They are. They have all my fuckin yen.)

That’s it. That’s MOONEYES for you. Thanks to Todd for the suggestion, next trip to the izakaya for a nomihodai is on me. Thanks for reading.