The story behind Bright Moon Hub

Gelato from a small kitchen in Saitama

Bright Moon Hub is a gelato shop in Urawa, Saitama, where every batch is churned in-house from local dairy and seasonal fruit. Come in, take a stool, and stay a little longer than you planned.

Founder · Kaito Okada

A vibrant display of colorful gelato flavors in metal trays at an ice cream shop.

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.

The first week, we sold out of pistachio by noon on the second day.

Current menu

Fior di latte

¥480 / ¥780

The base flavour, made with whole milk and cream from the Chichibu cooperative and a small amount of cane sugar. No vanilla, no flavouring. It tastes like very good milk, which is the point. Available year-round.

Pistachio

¥480 / ¥780

Made with a paste ground from Sicilian pistachios imported through a specialty food importer in Osaka. The colour is a natural pale green. We do not add colouring. Sells out most days by mid-afternoon.

Roasted chestnut (autumn)

¥480 / ¥780

A seasonal flavour for October and November. Chestnuts are sourced from a farm in Ibaraki Prefecture, roasted in the shop oven, then blended into the custard base. The flavour is earthy and lightly sweet, not dessert-sweet.

Persimmon sorbet (autumn)

¥480 / ¥780

A dairy-free sorbet made with ripe hachiya persimmons from Nara Prefecture. The fruit is pureed and strained, then churned with a small amount of lemon juice and locust bean gum. Bright orange, very clean on the palate.

Dark chocolate with Okinawan black sugar

¥480 / ¥780

A custard base with 72% cacao couverture and a ribbon of kokuto syrup folded in after churning. The black sugar adds a molasses note that cuts through the bitterness of the chocolate. New for autumn 2026.

Affogato

¥680

Two scoops of fior di latte or dark chocolate gelato with a double shot of espresso poured over at the counter. Served in a ceramic cup made by a potter in Kawagoe. Beans are from a small roastery in Koenji, Tokyo, ground to order.

What makes this place different

Churned every morning

Each flavour is made fresh before we open. We churn in batches of 3 kg, which means by late afternoon some flavours are gone. That is not a sales trick. It is just how the schedule works.

Milk from a Saitama dairy cooperative

We source whole milk from a cooperative of small farms in the Chichibu foothills. The fat content is higher than standard supermarket milk, which gives the base a rounder, less icy texture.

No stabiliser powder

Most commercial gelato uses a pre-mixed stabiliser blend. We use egg yolk for custard bases and locust bean gum (from a food-grade supplier in Osaka) for fruit sorbets. That is the full list.

News & Announcements

2026-08-30

Making fruit sorbet with Japanese seasonal produce

A sorbet is a simpler product than a custard-based gelato. No eggs, no cream, fewer variables. But simpler does not mean easier. The quality of a fruit sorbet depends almost entirely on the quality of the fruit, which means the menu is only as good as what the season is producing. In Japan, where fruit is grown with unusual attention to ripeness and variety, this is both a constraint and an advantage.

2026-08-14

How to plan a private gelato order for a small event

Private event orders are a different kind of work from running the counter. The timeline is longer, the quantities are fixed in advance, and the flavour choices need to work for a group rather than an individual. Kaito handles all private orders personally. This article explains what the process looks like, what decisions need to be made early, and what tends to go wrong when people leave things too late.

2026-07-07

How gelato actually differs from ice cream

Most people know that gelato is Italian and ice cream is not, and that gelato is somehow denser. Beyond that, the explanation tends to get vague. The actual differences come down to three measurable things: how much fat is in the base, how much air is churned in, and at what temperature the product is served. Each of those choices produces a different result in the mouth.