Our story
About Ember and Oak
A restaurant built around one oak grill and the farms that feed it.
Since 2019
It started with a grill and a lease
We took the old Lantern Row smokehouse in 2019 because of its chimney. Seven years later the chimney is still the hardest-working thing in the building. Everything we serve passes over oak fire, from the morning bread to the last dessert fruit.
The room seats sixty. The grill seats nobody. It just burns, all service, every service. Cooks rotate through fire duty the way other kitchens rotate through pastry. Fire is the first station you learn and the last you master.
Our menu changes with the market, sometimes midweek. Farmers call, we rewrite. That is the whole business plan, and it has never let us down.
The chef
Aoife Brennan
Aoife cooked over fire in Copenhagen, San Sebastian and the Catskills before coming home to open Ember and Oak. She believes a great grill cook needs exactly three skills: patience, a thermometer, and the humility to wait ten more minutes.
Her tasting menus have won two regional awards, but she is prouder of the staff meals. Ask anyone in the kitchen. The family meal at five is the best cooking in the building.
Head chef and co-founder
Sourcing
Three farms we could not cook without
Meat
Hollow Hill Farm
Pasture-raised beef and lamb from an hour north. Dry-aged in house for forty days.
Millbrook Valley
Vegetables
Two Acre Market Garden
Salad leaves, squash and herbs picked the same morning they hit the plate.
Eastfield, third generation growers
Fish
Greyline Day Boats
Line-caught bream and trout, landed daily and on ice within hours.
Harbor fleet, boat numbers on the board
What we believe
Values, lived nightly
Fire first
Gas is a backup, not a plan. If the coals are wrong, the dish waits.
Seasons, not cravings
We serve what is ripe. Tomatoes in August taste like August. In February, embrace the root.
Waste nothing
Bones become stock, trim becomes staff meal, ash cures the beets. The bin stays light.