Photographs by Cayce Clifford
With only 12 seats, Sun Moon Studio is booked six weeks out. This is a meal you plan for, one you anticipate. Yet there’s a relaxed comfort to dinner in the airy concrete-floored loft, starting with the Taiwanese sausage that arrives as an early bite, wedged into homemade brioche like a tiny hot dog and plucked up between two fingers. Over about 12 courses, you’ll eat rosy pink pork from one of Northern California’s best farms and intensely savory butter made with miso from Shared Cultures, a small-batch producer coveted by local chefs. Santa Barbara uni is suspended over tofu made with soy milk from Hodo Foods, the Bay Area’s favorite purveyor, dressed in a clean gingery soy sauce. The earnestness with which chef-couple Sarah Cooper and Alan Hsu approach their vision makes Sun Moon Studio feel like a collaborative culinary experiment, a team project you’ve been invited to join in on. Find the most passionate food people in the Bay Area; celebrate their work. In the region where this culinary philosophy first took root, dinner at Sun Moon Studio still feels like a revelation. —Elazar Sontag
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Credits
Restaurant Editor: Elazar Sontag
Project Manager: Kate Kassin
Scouters: Amiel Stanek, Jennifer Hope Choi, Joseph Hernandez, Pervaiz Shallwani, Sam Stone
Production Editor: Alma Avalle
Creative Director: Caroline Newton
Visuals: Ingu Chen, Leurin Estevez, Megan Paetzhold, Travis Rainey, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Marc Williams, Disco Meisch
Dining and Cooking