Full Moon Ramen at Secret Restaurant

Full Moon Ramen was the second iteration of Secret Restaurant: a one night event that served up handmade Japanese ramen noodles to over 200 diners under the light of a full moon in the desert night. Located in an area of wide-open desert just east of Iron Age Road in Wonder Valley, Full Moon Ramen was open for one night only, Saturday, March 15, 2014, and was the site of a hybrid event of sculpture, food, and performance. Secret Restaurant: notoriously difficult to find, but well worth the hunt.

Secret Restaurant by Bob Dornberger and Jim Piatt is an experimental, irregularly scheduled, and impossibly small underground ‘restaurant’ that explores current trends in the underground food movement in the US. Billed as the world’s tiniest restaurant, it is only 16 square feet. Drawing inspiration from ‘secret’ menu items, underground dinner clubs (like Wolvesmouth and the invitation-only Totoraku), and the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, the project speaks to what Mission Street Food’s Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz called the “sportification of food.”

The project aims to be aggressively marketed, but at the same time difficult to get to, to find, and to see on any satellite maps. Neither is it a comfortable situation for the diners or the cook—there are no chairs or tables to sit at, and the cook prepares food in a small bunker-like steel building. There is a gold-leafed dining room, but with only the barest hint at a structure, so as not to appear on satellite imagery.

Secret Restaurant debuted at HDTS 2013, when it served up gourmet fare to over 150 diners, and was featured in Palm Springs Life, LA Weekly, and on the Huffington Post.