When the dishes arrive at the table, Sun Moon Studio’s dining room undergoes a subtle transformation. On the bottom floor of a newer build in West Oakland, the restaurant is a small rectangular room. The cold concrete floor and the modern interiors suddenly soften and warm up. A correspondence begins between a bowl of bright orange mussels and the surrounding décor—bouquets of blooming wildflowers, a platter of pumpkins on display at the kitchen counter and a stack of pulchritudinous persimmons that look fat enough to burst.
Chefs Sarah Cooper and Alan Hsu’s cooking manifests the bounty of a farmer’s harvest. Hsu credits the products—the produce itself—with the end results. He doesn’t claim to have a discerning palate, despite serving an array of dishes with startling and original flavor profiles. Hsu also happens to have the precision of an artist’s eye when it comes to arranging beautiful plates of food.
“I grew up in the East Bay and cooked a lot when I was a kid,” Hsu said. He and his sister used to watch Jacques Pépin and Yan Can Cook. “After that, we would make something for breakfast or lunch that we saw on TV,” he explained. Not only did his parents encourage him to cook from an early age; they allowed him to use knives and the stove.
At college, Hsu began to cook weekly meals with his roommates before finding work in restaurants. “I fell in love with the environment, how you get to meet people of varied backgrounds,” Hsu recalled. When he moved back to the Bay Area, the chef secured a stage at San Francisco’s Benu before becoming the sous chef there.
Cooper and Hsu led the culinary team that opened Aomboon Deasy’s restaurant Pomet on Piedmont Avenue. But they’d all agreed upon a certain timeline, after which the couple would venture out on their own. In the year between leaving Pomet and opening Sun Moon Studio, Cooper said they wanted to find a way to express themselves with “not very much money.” After a potential project fell through in the Pacific Northwest, they found the space in West Oakland the old-fashioned way, via Craigslist.
“The way that we talk about our cuisine at Sun Moon Studio is farmer and producer driven,” Hsu explained. “It’s really important to represent the work that someone else has already done.” Chefs can manipulate ingredients, but the food is only as good as the produce itself. “We represent what the broccoli or the sunchoke is by cooking it simply—when you see it, you can identify it because it looks like what it should be,” he said, adding, “with the exception of a purée.”
There are two evening seatings on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at Sun Moon Studio. The tasting menu is seasonal, and it changes from week to week. Hsu said they decided to create a tasting menu, in part, for people to dine out and enjoy a meal together as a celebration. From a restaurant owner’s practical standpoint, a tasting menu makes it much easier to plan for and prepare the dishes. “By having a reservation-only system, we can be very precise on how much food we need to bring in, and we don’t have as much waste as other restaurants,” he said.
Currently, Sun Moon’s reservations are booked weeks in advance. Cooper explained that they’d like to be able to accommodate more diners. They’ve considered adjusting the tables or the number of seatings. But she believes that people have enjoyed the experience, “because of the care we put into the meal, but also the personal interaction of us delivering food and interacting with the tables. We thrive on that energy as well.”
Cooper’s baked goods thoughtfully pair with and complement Hsu’s magical preparation of vegetables and savory dishes. The chef poured a sweet potato and green garlic potage to make a creamy sea for smoked mussels to swim in. The potage was heaven sent, light as a cloud with a devilish bite of green garlic spice. To accompany the dish, Cooper baked red corn buttermilk biscuits with corn miso butter. A clever way to amp up the flavor of corn.
The week before I visited Sun Moon, Cooper had made a porridge with bloody butcher cornmeal, a red corn variety from Full Belly Farms. She used the same cornmeal to make many-layered biscuits. “The potage is normally potato soup, but we’re making it with cabbage and green garlic, and then we have baked sweet potato on the bottom so it’s like a chowder,” she said.
Hsu’s Mendocino uni dish with Hodo soy tofu and fermented tomatoes reminded me of a 17th century Dutch still life painting in miniature. The ingredients in the small bowl shimmered with colors that most painters struggle to conjure up. Pale orange uni, translucent orange cherry tomatoes, lemon yellow tofu and tiny green herbal leaves. Like a Dutch still life, the composition also suggested a hidden world, one that exists outside of the frame. Or, in this case, the bowl. Someone had harvested the uni, destemmed the tomatoes, transformed the soybeans and plucked each green leaf.
Sun Moon Studio, open Thu to Sat 5–9pm. 1940 Union St., Ste. 21, Oakland. [email protected]. IG: @sun_moon_studio_. sunmoonstudio.com.
