LUNE Restaurant’s star is rising with a prestigious James Beard Award nomination.

When Charlotte and Mick Formichella thought of their future together from their home on the West Coast, it was always a question of when, not if, they would begin to lay down their roots on Cape Cod. The couple had been working in multiple award-winning restaurants in Portland, Oregon for five years when, shortly after marrying, and with a lease set to expire in 2022, they set their eyes eastward ready to begin the next chapter. After settling in Dennis, they quickly started conceiving their next venture. In less than a year they found themselves co-owning LUNE, a trailblazing new Cape Cod restaurant. 

Nine years prior, the couple met in the restaurant industry as they were working their way up the ranks. Charlotte, a 13th generation Cape Codder, had gone from bussing to bartending to management and now does “everything but the cooking” at LUNE. Mick, who grew up vacationing on the Cape, worked his way up from prep cook to sous-chef to head chef and now runs the restaurant’s kitchen. “We spent so many years working for other people but always put our hearts and souls into everything we did,” says Charlotte. “Our mentors taught us a mantra that we abided by which is that if we treat it like it’s ours, one day it will be.”

The first iteration of LUNE was a weekly pop-up restaurant in the Borsai Gallery in Dennis in 2023. Mick and Charlotte served their first patrons an eight-course dinner on Tuesday nights in February—a challenging set of circumstances anywhere let alone in Dennis. After three months the second iteration came in the form...