Lucky Star, the Taiwanese cafe and cocktail bar from Chef Jason Liang and John Chen, opens Dec. 6 at the Star Metals complex on Howell Mill Road.
Liang and Chen, who also own Michelin-starred restaurant Brush in Buckhead and Momonoki and Momo Cafe in Midtown, bring a two-in-one concept to Star Metals, with the cafe offering coffee, pastries, and Taiwanese dishes until 4 p.m., then transitioning to a cocktail bar serving food at 5 p.m.
For Liang, Lucky Star is a return to the food of his childhood in Taiwan.
“I grew up in Taiwan. It’s where my family’s from. We considered doing a Taiwanese and Japanese menu, but we decided it was time to do something all about my home country,” Liang said. “There’s really no place to get Taiwanese food in the city, and I wanted Lucky Star to be that place.”
The menu features an iconic Taiwanese soup ladened with chewy rice noodles and cuts of slow-cooked beef shank simmered in a rich and savory beef broth.
Breakfast to happy hour
Like Momo Cafe, Lucky Star will open at 8 a.m. for coffee, matcha, and pastries made by ChingYao Wang, who first met Liang during an internship in the kitchen at the Regent Taipei Hotel. The two are now married.
In addition to pastries like croissants filled with red bean mochi, egg custard tarts, and mocha cinnamon rolls, breakfast at Lucky Star will also include a croissant sandwich with poached eggs, gruyere cheese, avocado, and seasonal greens spiced with everything seasoning and a truffle omelet sandwich served on a house-made milk bun.
At 11 a.m., the menu shifts to heartier Taiwanese fare, including Liang’s beef noodle soup, a duck fat scallion pancake, snacks of soft-boiled tea eggs, and Three Cup Chicken. A Taiwanese sausage sandwich features a small rice sausage wrapped in a larger pork sausage dressed with cucumbers, mustard greens, and garlic soy sauce.
“The beef noodle soup is special,” Liang said of the recipe, which often varies by region and by family. “The broth is very flavorful and complex. I use beef shank because the collagen breaks down once it’s braised, and you add a little braising liquid to the sauce.”
The soup comes served with a side of chili oil.
Liang hopes to continue expanding the menu over the next few months, possibly adding Taiwanese fried chicken and a few new dishes only served at dinner. For now, Lucky Star will serve the same menu during lunch and dinner, with the occasional one-off small plate or appetizer added in the evening.
In addition to a trio of nonalcoholic mixed drinks, look for beer and wine in the afternoons, along with a handful of carbonated cocktails or those pushed with nitrogen on draft, like the Yuzu Old Fashioned and a highball made with Japanese whisky.
Nighttime vibes and cocktails
A 5 p.m. happy hour kicks off evening vibes at Lucky Star, activating the bar into full service with a more robust cocktail menu of mostly stirred drinks.
Led by Kirk Gibson and Nik Soukavong, the cocktail list mixes classics such as the Vieux Carre and Chrysanthemum with original drinks like the clarified bourbon cocktail Sabai, made with purple amazake (fermented sweet potato-based Japanese drink), pandan, and lemon. The carbonated B-Side features tequila, wormwood, and bitter melon garnished with a house-made fruit roll-up.
Soukavong, who previously worked behind the bar at Stereo in Inman Park, said he and Gibson approach creating cocktails differently, which brings more depth to Lucky Star’s drinks menu. While Soukavong draws inspiration from family ties in Laos and Southeast Asia for his cocktails, Gibson enjoys playing with foraged ingredients and esoteric flavors.
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“You’ll see some of those Southeast Asian influences in the B-Side, which uses bitter melon, seen in many savory Vietnamese dishes, or the Sabai, which is my take on mango sticky rice. It’s garnished with a sticky rice chip,” said Soukavong. “The way Kirk approaches cocktails and the way I approach cocktails complement each other in a really cool way.”
Currently the senior research and operations analyst at Giving Kitchen, Gibson tended bar at The Pinewood in Decatur, at Cardinal in Grant Park, and hosted cocktail pop-ups at Brush and during Chef Jarrett Stieber’s Eat Me Speak Me days in Candler Park before he opened Little Bear.
“The way I thought about the cocktails for Lucky Star was to take a single ingredient and work around it,” Gibson said. “For example, the How You Like Them cocktail has an apple focus using apple brandy and apple liqueur, but instead of using lemon juice for acidity, I blended Granny Smith and Fuji apples for tart sweetness.”
For the Dominic, an ode to friend and frequent cocktail collaborator Dominic Maschler, who died suddenly earlier this year, Gibson uses candy cap mushrooms to bring out top notes of warm spices and maple syrup in the scotch-based drink.
With six cocktails on draft and others easily batched, Gibson and Soukavong plan to offer half pours of certain cocktails. In March, they will launch a cocktail omakase in the evenings with food pairings from Liang.
It’s been a busy two years for Liang and Chen, who relocated Brush from Decatur to Buckhead Village in 2023 and added intimate omakase restaurant O by Brush to the lineup in 2024. Both were big risks, Liang said, especially closing the popular sushi bar and Japanese restaurant in Decatur and moving the entire operation to Buckhead. The risks paid off, with Brush receiving a star from Michelin this fall.
“I’m a risk taker and I knew it was time to end in Decatur, but I knew we needed to keep leading the omakase trend and to keep pushing myself,” said Liang. “It was a bold decision, but it worked out well for us, even before we got the [Michelin] star in October.”
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Liang and Chen will continue taking risks next year, venturing outside the Perimeter to open Japanese and temaki omakase restaurant Cuddlefish at Dunwoody’s High Street development. The longtime business partners replaced Brush in Decatur with Cuddlefish, later choosing to shutter the restaurant and relocate it to Dunwoody and the emerging High Street development.
Take a look at the food menu for Lucky Star:
Lucky Star, 1055 Howell Mill Road, Atlanta. Located beside Hayakawa. Open daily at 8 a.m. Bar opens at 5 p.m. Lucky Star closes at 9 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday, at 11 p.m. on Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and at midnight on Saturday.