About Sun Moon Studio
The most sought-after reservation in Oakland sits in a West Oakland suite at 1940 Union Street — twelve seats arranged at four small tables, a kitchen barely visible from the dining room, and a menu that has never repeated itself in the same form twice. Sun Moon Studio is, by almost any metric, the most radical fine dining proposition in the East Bay: reservation-only, impossibly small, and entirely at the discretion of chefs Alan Hsu and Sarah Cooper.
Hsu is a Benu alumnus — Michael Tusk's celebrated three-star San Francisco restaurant — and Cooper trained at Per Se in New York under Thomas Keller. The collision of those two lineages produces cooking that is technically immaculate, personally expressive, and rooted in California in a way that the formal fine dining tradition often isn't. The 2025 Michelin star arrived after just over a year of operation. The New York Times included Sun Moon Studio in its six best restaurants in California for 2025. Neither recognition surprised anyone who had managed to eat there.
The Tasting Menu
The menu changes every week — not every season, every week. This is both the restaurant's defining commitment and its most daunting characteristic for anyone trying to plan a visit. What persists is the philosophy: thirteen courses, California ingredients at their seasonal peak, presented with the technical authority of alumni from two of America's most demanding kitchens.
Past menus have featured Monterey spot prawn with tofu and yuzu, Sonoma squab with black garlic and pickled elderberry, rockfish with fermented chilli and wild herbs, and desserts built around local citrus and shiso ice cream. The $180 price for thirteen courses is, by the standard of comparably credentialed tasting menus in the Bay Area, genuinely reasonable. Optional beverage pairings are available at $100 per person.
The restaurant operates Thursday through Sunday only, four evenings per week. All twelve seats are reserved simultaneously — walk-ins do not exist here. There is a single seating per evening, and the experience typically runs three hours.
Best Occasion: Proposal
The arithmetic of intimacy at Sun Moon Studio makes it the most powerful proposal venue in Oakland. There are twelve seats in the room — you and your partner, and ten other people having the most significant meals of their year. The shared experience of discovery — course after course of something you've never tasted before, prepared by two chefs who clearly care about every plate — creates exactly the kind of emotional state in which a question of that magnitude lands with maximum force.
For solo dining, the four-table format is exceptionally well suited — single guests often find themselves in conversation with the chefs or with adjacent tables in a way that larger restaurants never permit. Sun Moon Studio is the rare fine dining experience that feels genuinely communal.
Practical Information
Sun Moon Studio is located at 1940 Union St, Suite 21, Oakland, CA 94607. Reservations are accepted exclusively through the restaurant's own website at sunmoonstudio.com. Bookings typically open six to eight weeks in advance, and given the twelve-seat capacity, they fill within hours. The restaurant does not appear on OpenTable or Resy — the only booking channel is direct. Cancellation policies are strict given the format: expect a full charge for late cancellations. The West Oakland neighbourhood is easily reached by rideshare from BART's West Oakland station. Allow three to three-and-a-half hours for the full experience.