Momma’s Soul Food Fusion
Invents Soulshi Rolls
Chef Guidance Moon
Combines Southern Comforts
with Japanese Techniques
By Matt Kettmann | May 16, 2024
It’s pretty rare to bring a completely new dish into any culinary community, but that’s what Momma’s Soul Food Fusion appears to be doing for Santa Barbara with “Soulshi,” a handheld mashup of Southern and Japanese cuisines. The idea came to Chef Guidance Moon soon after she’d moved to California from her native Louisiana.
“Santa Barbara was saturated with sushi restaurants,” explained Moon, who moved here two years ago to intern as a chef at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara. “That’s really rare where we come from. People are kinda scared of it.”
With her 15-year-old son, who serves as sous chef, they wondered, “How can we combine soul and comfort food with the comfort food of other cultures? That’s how we came up with our shrimp ‘n’ grits roll, our gumbo roll, and our fried chicken roll as well.” They didn’t stop there, adding Soulrito (a soul food burrito) and an Italian option. “We even make soul food pizza with collard greens, mac and cheese, and beef tips right there on the pizza,” she said.
Moon’s path to Santa Barbara could be the plot to a best-selling memoir: poor and extremely religious as a child; graduating with a class of 15; fighting cancer and other intense health issues; leaving retail work to study cooking; becoming Louisiana’s first legal cannabis patient; coming out as a lesbian; falling in love with her partner of seven years; appearing on screen in cooking shows, films, and music videos; living at Lake Cachuma while interning at the Bacara and then in her car for longer; fighting for custody of her youngest boy; and teaching culinary arts to people with developmental disabilities.
“We fled the poverty and death of that region,” said Moon of her exodus from Union Parish, which surrounds Lake D’Arbonne, where she grew up fishing every day with her family. She’s happy to say that Santa Barbara has been a welcoming place, and she is finalizing permits to host meals and cooking shows in her own backyard.
At Saturday’s event, she’ll be preparing shrimp and grits shooters as well as her signature Gumbo Roll, with Andouille sausage, fried okra, gumbo rice, and a seaweed wrapper. Expect many more stories to come from this fascinating and inspiring addition to our culinary scene.
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