‘It’s better to have loved and lost.’ Noche Bruta waves goodbye to Charlotte’s Hex space
Noche Bruta, an acclaimed restaurant pop-up, is leaving Hex Coffee, Kitchen and Natural Wines in Camp North End a year after its inception.
Its last service will be Saturday, Jan. 18. Hex will host a seated Valentine’s dinner with chef Hector Gonzales-Mora on Feb. 13 and Feb. 14 for one last final hurrah.
Noche Bruta was recognized as one of Charlotte’s Top 50 Restaurants by Charlotte Magazine and Charlotte’s Hottest Restaurants by Eater. Known for its ceviche, flautas and tacos dressed-to-the-nines, Noche Bruta was an experimental, permanent pop-up that flipped the daytime Hex cafe space into a full-service restaurant at night, Thursday through Saturday.
“I think we kind of found a way to kind of push people’s ideas of what our space is, creating an entirely different atmosphere at night,” Chandler Wrenn, co-owner of Hex, told CharlotteFive on Tuesday.
Like the recent Fenwick’s closure, Noche Bruta wasn’t a forced shut-down. It was a choice made by Hector Gonzalez-Mora.
“Being a chef and being in charge of a food program takes you away from your personal life,” Gonzalez-Mora told CharlotteFive. “What I want to do is give a different part of me some attention.”
Gonzalez-Mora and Hex’s owners — Wrenn and Tanner Morita — are not succumbing to closure culture; they’re calling it a “cheeky breakup … It’s better to have loved and lost,” Wrenn said.
These three were friends before and plan to remain friends after the “breakup.”
Gonzalez-Mora made the decision to leave “out of consciousness for Hex … they need somebody who’s going to be ready to go now to take it to the next phase,” he said. “That can’t be me right now for a number of reasons that are personal to me.”
Hex is here to stay
But Hex — the cafe, the kitchen, the natural wine bar — is very much here to stay.
As Noche Bruta departs, Hex will maintain its coffee shop stature and extend its existing daytime food and natural wine menu into the evening. Visitors will now be able to visit Hex from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with food, wine and coffee. For now, there’s no flipping the dual-concept space into a separate restaurant.
Hex’s new head chef will be Michaela Moehring — a former executive pastry chef with the 5th Street Group.
She’ll build upon Hex’s current menu, which showcases Japanese-Hawaiian-Southern American flavors with:
Katsu Sando with panko fried pork, Japanese mustard, katsu sauce on Hawaiian shokupan (milk bread).
Spam Musubi with seared Spam, teriyaki, rice and nori.
Rice Porridge with pork belly, charred cabbage and togarashi.
As business owners, Morita and Wrenn are no strangers to change. The two are coming up on 10 years of owning Hex Coffee, and now oversee Fly Kid Fly, Stablehand, the Hex Coffee roastery and Hex Coffee, Kitchen and Natural Wines.
“No year has ever looked like the previous year,” Morita said. “You are always going to be putting out fires, you’re always going to be pivoting … Recontextualize what you’re doing and modernize and move forward,” he said.
Noche Bruta as an experiment
During Noche’s year-long stint, Morita learned a lot: mainly that people are hungry — literally and metaphorically — for creative, non-traditional dining experiences.
“I’m totally OK with being kind of the weird child in Charlotte restaurant scenes,” he said, referring to Hex’s ability to shape-shift and evolve. “I think we need more spaces for the experimental, the grungy, the rougher around the edges, the hole in the walls … that’s what makes a city enriched and unique and exciting.”
In December 2023, Morita and Wrenn approached Gonzalez-Mora to collaborate and take over Hex’s space at night, after the chef had left El Toro Bruto at Resident Culture after two years.
The Hex team had witnessed his success there, and wanted to create a platform for him to have “creative freedom,” Morita told CharlotteFive. They have a soft spot for pop-ups anyway; Hex was born from a coffee pop-up outside of a beer shop in South End.
What came of that collaboration — food that felt very much like Gonzalez-Mora’s identity “without any apologies,” a mix of traditional and nontraditional Mexican cuisine, Morita said.
“Ultimately what we got out of this was seeing your heart on a plate,” Wrenn told Gonzalez-Mora.
What’s next for Gonzalez-Mora?
As Gonzalez-Mora approaches turning 33, he said he wants to make “an impactful career move” for himself. Although, he doesn’t quite know what that is yet.
Gonzalez-Mora wants to stay in the industry, but he needs time to “look around to see if it is here, or if it’s somewhere else in the country,” he said. After he trains up Hex’s new chef, Gonzalez-Mora will head to Mexico and see his mom.
“I think it’s good for me to not escape, but just to be in a different place,” he said.
Evolving identity
While Hex won’t be flipping into a brand new concept at night anymore, it will likely evolve as Camp North End itself evolves with now-open apartments, and “with some strong additions to the tenant lineup here like Thrift Pony and Gravity Pizza,” Wrenn said.
Wrenn expects increased food traffic eventually, although he recognizes the anticipated financial dip from losing Noche Bruta.
“We feel like Camp is on the right trajectory to become more centered around daily life,” Wrenn said. “We’re hoping that is the direction we can go.”
This story was originally published January 15, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
