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 of West Oakland — 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…