When the “Mad Men”-style glass-and-gold beverage cart is wheeled out from the kitchen at Shuggie’s, I’ve got my fist extended in midair, ready for dessert to be assembled on the back of my outstretched hand.  

Clad in his signature cowboy hat, chef and co-owner David Murphy squirts peanut butter fluff onto my hand from a pastry cone, then wields two thin metal spatulas to place a chocolate semifreddo bonbon on top. Using tweezers, he deposits a fine twig of chocolate tuile onto the bonbon. There’s one final step. “The last bit is a little Shuggie’s magic,” Murphy says, sprinkling my hand and most of my forearm with edible glitter. “There we go, baby.”

It’s a lot of glitter. But as with a caviar bump, this dessert goes down the hatch in one decadent mouthful. 

Dubbed the “Bon Bon Handy,” this fanciful little bite — at $7, the very definition of affordable luxury — is the Mission restaurant’s only dessert. Murphy created it for a benefit dinner that requested something to be eaten sans utensils. And he clearly loves it whenever patrons order one. “It’s, like, the stupidest, most fun little thing,” he says.

Minimal waste with maximum style is par for the course at Shuggie’s, which Murphy and his wife and partner, Kayla Abe, opened to much fanfare in April 2022 as a pizza-and-natural-wine spot with a bonkers, kitsch-filled interior. At first, upcycling whey and sourcing spent oat flour from an oatmeal manufacturing process to make “trash pies” felt bold and daring. Over time, though, novelty gave way to creative constraint.

“Our pizza does more for the planet than any other pizza,” Murphy says, “but as a chef, a little piece of you dies when it’s just carb, carb, carb.”

So they closed in July for a refresh. Shuggie’s 2.0 opened in August with a broadened menu of “climate-positive” dishes and one of its two rooms transformed from yellow to mostly orange. The couple’s gleefully madcap, DIY ethos is palpable throughout, with a disco-ball ceiling fixture upholstered in Mylar bought on Facebook Marketplace for $15. The countertops are even more thickly coated in — you guessed it — metallic glitter.

Murphy and Abe made even bigger changes to the food. There’s no menu on the Shuggie’s website, giving the farmers-market-loving chef freedom to play. The pizzas are gone — except for Sundays — and in their stead are late-summer creations like an eggy cacio e pepe “pillow” blizzarded with grana padano ($18) and a bowl of polenta with sweet corn, blistered okra, and sungold and fried green tomatoes ($23). 

The centerpiece is the “beef three” ($42), a buttery, mushroom-y trio comprising New York strip steak, beef cheeks, and sweetbreads. While sweetbreads are typically prepared with veal, Murphy prefers the challenge that beef presents, tenderizing them in a milk-salt brine. The result might be the world’s most elegant McNugget in the world’s fanciest barbecue sauce.

But nothing embodies Shuggie’s gonzo sustainability like the tuna rib crudo ($26). Murphy purchases parts of the fish that aren’t destined to become sushi, slices them into sections, then adds green-curry aioli and pickled chiles. It has a carnal, Poseidon’s-wedding-banquet quality, requiring guests to scrape the tuna themselves. “Just when you think there’s no more meat, you flip it to find more,” Murphy says.

With respect to drinks, the natural wines have mostly faded away as the reaction against unfiltered, kombucha-esque pours has gained strength in recent years. Shuggie’s now has a well-rounded beverage menu with seven wines by the glass plus sake and beers with a 3-ounce shot. Of the cocktails, all $17, the best may be the foamy, lemony beet gin fizz, which goes down as easily as iced tea.

The Vegas-in-space Shuggie’s is, to be sure, not to all tastes. Ditching pizza was certainly a risk for a restaurant that was plenty audacious to begin with. But the bravery is commendable, and Shuggie’s latest iteration feels even cozier and more convivial than before. Think of it as the city’s smartest, most fun little thing.