Good Girl celebrates the harvest with mooncakes, tea drinks and frozen treats

While planning for the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, Diep Tran decorates her Highland Park café with a flock of paper robins strung across the ceiling. In the kitchen, she is busy preparing her versions of the traditional sweets associated with this harvest festival celebrated in China and Vietnam.

On Sunday Tran will add mooncakes and other special holiday items to her menu. Tran fills her moon cake pastries with Japanese sweet potato with cinnamon and ginger as well as offering seasonal quince with orange.

Handpies made with Good Girl Dinette’s signature flaky pie dough come filled with nectarines and cardamom. She will also whip up batches of toasted almond meringues with amaretto cream. These items will be available on Sunday, then in limited quantities for the rest of the month.

“Who doesn’t love a harvest holiday?” Tran said. “Physical manifestations of the hopes planted in spring are finally bearing fruit in fall. If spring signifies promise, then fall signifies promise fulfilled.”

Known for her love of fresh local produce, the festival days have become the perfect time to bake with fall ingredients sourced from local farmers markets. Tran works from her grandfather’s mooncake recipe from his original handwritten draft with measurements in both grams and soup spoons.

Good Girl Dinette will also feature a pop-up appearance from ice cream specialist Quenelle Sunday, serving mandarin kalamansi popsicles, hibiscus watermelon otter pops, Thai tea coconut ice cream bars, black rice horchata macaron ice cream sandwiches and vanilla mascarpone affogatos with espresso from the Cognoscenti Mod Bar coffee cart in residence daily at Good Girl Dinette.

For the celebration, Cognoscenti Coffee’s Jack Benchakul has also created two tea-based drinks to pair with the Mid-Autumn-Moon Festival menu. In the Bernadette, green tea is combined with gin-makrut syrup and coconut. The Cosette black tea features syrah-ginger syrup and quince juice. For the coffee drinkers, he has also recently added a new signature drink called the Antoinette with espresso, cold brew, coconut milk and bourbon infused rock sugar syrup.

Good Girl Dinette will serve mooncakes and their other festival foods and beverages from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. this Sunday. Quenelle’s frozen treats will be available from 1 to 5 p.m.

Good Girl Dinette, 110 N. Avenue 56, Los Angeles, (323) 257-898.