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“The most coveted reservation in the Pacific Northwest, and the rare one that deserves the wait. Marsh cooks with the confidence of someone who has nothing to prove and one thing to say.”
Our story
One fire, and everyone who feeds it
Ember & Oak is a kitchen with no gas line and no electricity at the stove. That single decision shapes everything else: who we buy from, how far ahead we plan, and why dinner takes as long as it takes.
The chef
Elena Marsh spent nine years learning to stop using a stove
“Fire doesn't follow recipes. It asks you to pay attention. That's the whole restaurant.”
She grew up in Astoria, cooking on a woodstove because the power went out every winter. She left for San Sebastián at twenty-three and stayed nine years — first on the grill at a Basque asador, then running it, learning the only technique that has ever really interested her: put good things near fire, and know exactly when to take them away.
She came home in 2018 with a plan that every investor called a liability — a restaurant with no gas line, twenty-two seats, and one menu. Ember & Oak opened the following spring above a former machine shop on SE Oak. The hearth was built before the dining room was.
She still calls the first course herself, every night, standing at the pass. If you're sitting close, you'll hear her count the duck down from the hook.
Elena Marshchef & owner
How it got here
Seven years, one hearth
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2018
The machine shop
Elena signs a lease on a derelict metalworks on SE Oak Street, largely because the ceiling is high enough to vent a hearth. The build takes eleven months; the chimney takes four of them.
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2019
First fire
Ember & Oak opens in April with five courses, sixteen seats, and no reservations system beyond a landline. The first month runs at a loss. The second is fully booked.
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2021
The wood pile becomes the menu
A partnership with a Coast Range woodlot gives us seasoned white oak, cherry and fig — and the menu starts changing with the wood as much as the market. The seventh course is added.
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2024
Restaurant of the Year
Rose City Monthly names Ember & Oak Restaurant of the Year. The Hearth Room opens behind the wine wall, seating fourteen at a table milled from a single oak.
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2025
Cascadia Table Guide
Selected in the Guide's first Pacific Northwest edition. Elena keeps the menu at seven courses and the room at twenty-two seats. Nothing else changes.
Sourcing
Fire is unforgiving to a mediocre ingredient
There is nowhere to hide in this kitchen. No sauce carries a tired vegetable; no butter rescues a fish that sat too long on a truck. Cooking over embers means the shopping list is the recipe — so we buy from people we can call by name, and we pay them before we pay ourselves.
Most of what you eat here travelled less than a hundred miles. The wood travelled sixty.
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Sauvie Island Farm
18 miles
Beets for the coals, chicories, the nasturtium on the scallop. Three generations; we take the whole crop, including the ugly ones.
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Netarts Bay Oyster Co.
82 miles
Tumbled Pacific oysters, harvested Tuesday, grilled Wednesday over cherry wood. Never older than that.
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Liberty Farms, Sonoma
duck
The only ingredient we let travel far. Aged twenty-one days on our own hooks before it ever meets the fire.
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Face Rock Creamery
236 miles
Alpine-style raclette from Bandon, melted at the fire's edge and scraped straight onto rye.
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Newport day boats
135 miles
Rockfish and lingcod, line-caught, whatever came up that morning. The menu card is written after the call.
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Coast Range woodlot
60 miles
Oregon white oak for the long burn, cherry for shellfish, fig branches for dessert smoke. Seasoned eighteen months, split by hand.
In the kitchen
Twenty-two people watching one fire
In the press
A hypnotic study in fire — Ember & Oak turns a seven-course evening into quiet theatre.
Cascadia Table Guide · 2025 selection
Rose City Monthly
“Restaurant of the Year. A room that could have been a gimmick — no gas! — and is instead the most disciplined kitchen in the city.”
The Willamette Ledger
“★★★★ — The duck comes off the hook thirty seconds before it reaches you, and you will think about it for a year. Book on the first of the month, at nine in the morning.”
Cascadia Table Guide — selection, 2025 Rose City Monthly — Restaurant of the Year, 2024 The Willamette Ledger — ★★★★
Come and see
The fire is lit at four. Join us by seven.
Twenty-two seats per seating, five nights a week. Tables are released on the first of each month for the month ahead.