About
Kaito Okada opened Bright Moon Hub in April 2018 in a narrow shopfront on Kita 7-chome in Urawa, Saitama. The space had been a dry-cleaning drop-off for twelve years before he took the lease. He spent three months stripping the walls back to bare concrete, building the counter himself from reclaimed cedar, and installing a secondhand Carpigiani batch freezer he sourced from a restaurant closure in Nagoya. The first week of trading, he sold out of pistachio by noon on the second day and had to close early. He has not run out of pistachio since.
The gelato training happened in stages. Kaito studied food science at a university in Saitama, then spent two years working in the pastry section of a hotel in Shinjuku. In 2015 he did a three-month stage at a gelateria in Bologna, which is where he learned to make waffle cones from scratch and to think about milk fat the way a cheesemaker does. He came back to Japan with a notebook full of base recipes and a strong opinion about stabilisers. The Bright Moon Hub menu is a direct result of that notebook, adjusted over eight years for Japanese seasonal produce and the particular milk from the Chichibu cooperative.
Kaito Okada studied food science at a university in Saitama before moving to Tokyo, where he spent two years in the pastry section of a hotel in Shinjuku. In 2015 he completed a three-month stage at a gelateria in Bologna, returning with a notebook of base recipes and a clear idea of what he wanted to build. He opened Bright Moon Hub in Urawa in April 2018. Outside the shop, he grows shiso and yuzu in pots on his apartment balcony and occasionally uses them in limited seasonal batches.