The best restaurant you’ll never go to

This column originally ran in the Off Menu newsletter, where you’ll find restaurant news, gossip, tips, and hot takes every week. To sign up, visit the Standard’s newsletter page and select Off Menu.

Last week, within days of each other, The New York Times and Bon Appétit both crowned Sun Moon Studio — a four-table, 12-seat restaurant on a rather nondescript, industrial block — as one of the country’s best restaurants of 2025.

Even with an ocean of great restaurants to consider, the media love to fish in the same pond. Back in December, MacKenzie Chung Fegan, the Chronicle’s chief restaurant critic and a former Bon Appétit editor, deemed Sun Moon Studio, which opened last summer, the best restaurant of 2024. Michelin awarded a star in June. Is it really a coincidence that this was followed by two national heavyweights? 

This kind of groupthink anointment can put a lot of pressure on one restaurant to live up to expectations — much less manage the onslaught of reservation requests. Even before the hype, securing a table at Sun Moon required quitting your job in order to spend the day obsessively refreshing OpenTable. Last year, when Chung Fegan filed her rave, she said her one hesitation was that her review could take an already tough rez and make it untouchable.

Well, we’ve officially reached unicorn level. My trusty mathematician friend, ChatGPT, estimates that if you add up the website readership (I mean, who reads print?) of both Bon Appétit and The New York Times, you’re looking at 584.7 million per month. If only 1% of these people have an interest in dining at Sun Moon, which is open four nights a week and reasonably does two turns, that makes the chances of getting in 1 in 14,000.

Which is why no one on The Standard’s food team — not I, not Lauren, not Astrid — has been.

That means no mini hot dog made of lap cheong crafted from pasture-raised pork from Riverdog Farm on a brioche bun. No dessert “bolts of dopamine,” as Times critic Eleanore Park put it. We have been denied the chance to feel “emotional (in a good way).” 

Sun Moon chef-owners and life partners Sarah Cooper and Alan Hsu have a pedigree that goes beyond their modest confines. They met at Blue Hill at Stone Barns but last worked together at Oakland’s Pomet. Cooper was the bakery sous chef at Per Se; Hsu was a sous chef for five years at Benu. When I called Cooper Friday, just hours after Bon Appétit dropped its pick, she graciously said, “It’s such an honor — there are a gazillion restaurants to choose from. And obviously, both the Times and Bon Appétit made a thorough effort to scour the country.”

Currently, the autoresponse from Sun Moon’s email says: “We are aware of some reports of the [Open Table] app crashing when attempting to make a reservation.” Cooper admits that the second reservations open up, “They are gone within the first minute.” 

And that, my fellow diners, is the scarcity effect: The harder the ticket is to get, the more rarified the location, the more intimate and personal the space, the greater the perceived value, and the lower the likelihood you’ll ever get in. It also gives social cachet to those who have dined (and the ability to use the 💅emoji). Just trying to get in is a flex of deep culinary dedication. 

For everyone else, there is frustration. In its brief, one-paragraph writeup, Bon Appétit stated the obvious: “With only 12 seats, Sun Moon Studio is booked six weeks out. This is a meal you plan for, one you anticipate.” To which Lauren responded in our rather heated Slack thread: “I cannot plan for it!!!! It is impossible to get in!!!!!” 

I love that the folks behind Sun Moon Studio opened such a personal little spot. More of this, please. But the fact that national publications chose to put a nearly unbookable spot on their “best of” lists feels a little gatekeeper-y. Or maybe I’m just experiencing FOMO.