Ember & OakDublin 7
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14 Marlowe Street, Stoneybatter, Dublin 7 Open now

Since 2016

Nine years of one fire

We bought a coach house nobody else wanted because it had a chimney you could stand inside. Everything that has happened since — the menu, the wine list, the twelve tables — happened around that chimney.

How it started

A wreck on Marlowe Street, and one thing worth keeping

In February 2015 an auctioneer walked us around a derelict 1890s coach house off Marlowe Street. There was a hole in the roof roughly the size of a Fiat, forty years of undisturbed pigeon tenancy, and a survey that managed to use the word unsound four separate times. He apologised for the place twice on the walk from the gate. Maren had stopped listening at the door — she was standing in the old chimney breast, looking straight up at a square of Dublin sky.

We had been searching for eleven months by then, mostly at units in new developments: three-phase power, a gas connection at the back wall, and absolutely nothing to say for themselves. This one had no gas, no floor worth saving and a roof that was more of a suggestion. It also had a hearth two metres across, built by someone who assumed horses would need warming for the next hundred years. We signed in April.

The rebuild took eleven months and very nearly everything we had. We kept the chimney, the two brick walls that were still doing honest work, and the cast-iron tie plates that hold them together. Everything else was built around the fire, in that order: the oak floor, the zinc bar Aoife dragged out of a salvage yard in Ballymount, and twelve tables made by a joiner in Kilmainham from a single felled beech. The hearth went in first and the plumbing went in last, a sequencing decision our engineer still refers to, generously, as “a choice”.

The hearth, 2016 Two metres wide, one flue, no gas line behind it. It has not been properly cold since the March we opened.

We opened on a Tuesday in March 2016 with nine dishes, sixty-one bottles and a dining room that still smelled powerfully of varnish. Fourteen people came. Nine of them were related to one of us, and one of them was the joiner, checking on his tables. The ninth dish — a whole roast onion buried in the ash — was the only thing anybody talked about afterwards, which told us more than the takings did.

Then we learned about wood, which is a polite way of saying we got it badly wrong. Our first winter we bought a trailer-load of oak from a man in Meath who described it as seasoned, and it was: seasoned for about four months. It hissed, it sulked, it threw a wet grey smoke that got into everything, and one Friday in November it put a genuinely acrid edge on nine plates of lamb that we could not in good conscience send out. We sent the guests home with a bottle instead. We now buy eighteen months ahead, stack it under cover on Marlowe Street's back lane, and own a moisture meter that Ruth guards like a family heirloom. Nothing goes on that fire above eighteen per cent.

Nine years on, the menu runs to more than nine dishes and the list runs to about a hundred and forty bottles. We have added a pastry section, a proper coeliac prep area, a room upstairs we call the Loft, and roughly thirty growers, fishers and makers we would now describe as friends. We have not added a gas line, a second sitting we didn't want, or a thirteenth table.

The chimney is the same chimney. On a slow Tuesday, when the room has gone quiet and the last order is in, you can still stand under it and see a square of Dublin sky.

How we cook

Everything meets the fire, or it doesn't leave the pass

There is no gas line into this building and we have never applied for one. The whole kitchen is a single open hearth two metres wide, a grill that racks up and down on a chain, a bed of embers we rake sideways through service, and a stone shelf set into the brick above it that holds a steady, gentle heat all night.

We burn Irish oak and beech, nothing else — no briquettes, no charcoal bought in a bag, no aromatic woods pretending to be a seasoning. Oak for the long, patient heat that gets a lamb shoulder to give way after eight hours. Beech for the brighter, faster flame we want under fish and over the plancha. Both are seasoned eighteen months and metered before they go anywhere near the grate.

Ember-roasting is the slowest thing we do and the reason people book three weeks out. Beetroot and onions go straight into the ash and stay there overnight. Bread proves beside the fire and bakes at six in the morning in the residual heat, because the oven never really goes out. The stone shelf holds sauces, warms plates and finishes the burnt honey tart. Nothing is held under a lamp. There is no lamp.

It makes us slower than a gas kitchen and much fussier about the weather, since a wet westerly changes how the flue draws and therefore how everything cooks. Ruth, who runs the fire on Fridays and Saturdays, checks the forecast before she checks the bookings.

See what the fire is doing tonight Look inside the room

Nine years in figures

What that adds up to

Counted honestly, including the years we would rather not repeat.

9 yrs On Marlowe Street
34 Growers & makers
140 Bottles on the list
480 Covers a week

The people

Four people, one fire, an unreasonable amount of firewood

Small kitchen, small floor team, everybody knows what everybody else is doing. On a good night you can hear all four of them laughing from table six.

Head chef & co-founder

Maren Kovač

Maren grew up between Zagreb and Ranelagh — a Croatian grandmother who cooked everything over wood in a summer kitchen, and a Dublin childhood spent mostly indoors resenting the weather. She trained at Chapter One, where she learned precision and, in her own telling, how to be shouted at productively. Then she staged at Asador Etxebarri in the Basque hills, came home three weeks later, and announced that she was never cooking on gas again.

What she cooks now is not Basque and it is not Croatian. It is Irish produce treated the way her grandmother treated it: put it near fire, leave it alone, salt it properly, don't fuss it on the plate. That means Ballyknocken hogget on the embers for eight hours, Goatsbridge trout over beech for four minutes, and a whole onion buried in ash overnight that has been on every menu since the first Tuesday.

She writes the menu on a Tuesday morning after the Cloughjordan van arrives, not before, which is the single most inconvenient thing about working with her and the reason the food is good.

“Fire isn't a technique, it's a colleague. It has opinions, it has bad days, and you cannot rush it — you can only decide what to put near it and when to take that thing away.”
Maren KovačHead chef & co-founder

Aoife Brennan

Co-founder · Wine & front of house

Aoife ran the floor at a Merrion Row wine bar for six years before this, and holds the WSET Diploma, which she will only mention if you ask her twice. The list is hers end to end: around a hundred and forty bottles, low-intervention and organic-leaning, two thirds of them from small European growers she has met in person.

She is the reason nobody gets upsold here. Ask for something under forty euro and she will find you the best thing under forty euro, cheerfully, without a flicker.

Tomás Delgado

Pastry chef

Galician, joined us in 2019, and the only member of staff with a genuine claim to a temperature-controlled corner of the building. He arrived to do a two-week trial in a kitchen with one fire and no pastry section, and stayed to build one.

The burnt honey tart is his — brown butter pastry, honey from the Cabra allotment hives, caramelised to a point he describes as “one second before regret”. He has tried to take it off the menu twice. He has been overruled twice.

Ruth Ní Mhaoldúin

Sous chef

Ruth runs the fire on Fridays and Saturdays, which are the two hardest shifts of the week and the two she asked for. She came to us from a hotel kitchen in Galway with four induction ranges and left it because, in her words, nothing in there ever surprised her.

She keeps the wood log, meters every load that comes in, and can tell you what the flue is going to do tonight from the wind on Manor Street. She is usually right.

What we are stubborn about

Five decisions we keep making

None of them are complicated. All of them cost us something, which is roughly how we know they are worth keeping.

  1. Fire, not gas

    We could put a six-burner range in tomorrow and serve forty more covers a week. We won't. Wood gives food a depth you cannot fake with a blowtorch, and it forces a kind of attention on a kitchen that gas lets you skip. The cost is real: a longer prep day, a full-time wood habit, and dishes that simply cannot be made when the fire isn't right. We think it tastes better. That's the whole argument.

  2. One supplier per thing

    One farm for lamb. One market garden for vegetables. One trout farm, one oyster co-op, one mill. Not because it is cheaper — it isn't — but because it means we get a phone call when the hogget is right, rather than a price list. It also means when a crop fails we change the menu instead of quietly buying Dutch.

  3. Use the whole thing

    Whole animals in, butchered here, which is why the menu has cuts you won't recognise from a supermarket. Bones become stock overnight on the stone shelf; fat becomes the thing your potatoes are cooked in; trim becomes the bar snack. Vegetable ends and coffee grounds go back to the Cloughjordan market garden on the same van that brought the vegetables — they compost it, it grows next season's roots, we buy those too. It took two years to arrange and we are unbearable about it.

  4. Pay people properly

    The optional twelve and a half per cent service charge goes to the team in full — kitchen and floor, split by hours worked, paid through payroll and visible on every payslip. We don't play tipping-culture games, we don't take a house cut, and nobody here is asked to make up a wage from the goodwill of strangers. Take the service charge off if something went wrong; we would rather hear about it than be tipped politely and never see you again.

  5. Twelve tables, deliberately

    Thirty-four covers and eight bar seats is the largest room one hearth can feed without lying to somebody. We have been advised, more than once, to squeeze in a thirteenth table and turn each one twice. That's an extra sixty covers a week and a completely different restaurant. You would be able to hear it from table six.

Where it comes from

Eight people we ring before we write a menu

Almost everything on the table comes from inside a ninety-minute drive of Marlowe Street. The exceptions are the wine, the olive oil, the salt and the coffee — and we will tell you exactly why, at the table, if you ask.

See the menu
Our named suppliers, updated each season. Distances measured from the front door, in Dublin traffic, optimistically.
Supplier What they bring us Where they are
Ballyknocken Lamb and hogget, whole carcass, butchered here. The eight-hour shoulder starts its life on their hill. Co. Wicklow · 70 min
Cloughjordan Market Garden Vegetables and leaves, picked to order. Tuesday's van decides Tuesday's menu, and takes our compost home with it. Co. Tipperary · 90 min
Goatsbridge Trout Farm Spring-water trout and trout roe. Over beech, four minutes a side, nothing else on the plate arguing with it. Co. Kilkenny · 85 min
Velvet Cloud Sheep's milk yoghurt and cheese. In the beetroot, on the tart, and on the cheese plate at the end of the set menu. Co. Mayo · by courier
Broderick's Oyster Co. Carlingford oysters, opened to order at the zinc bar. Six on ice, or three of them briefly over the embers. Carlingford Lough · 80 min
Kish Fish Whatever the Dublin Bay day boats landed that morning. If it isn't good, it isn't on — which is why the fish course has no name until 4pm. Dublin Bay · 15 min
The Cabra allotment hives Honey, about ninety jars a year. It runs out in February and we simply change the dessert. Dublin 7 · 12 min
Ballybrado Organic flour, milled in Cahir. The 6am sourdough, the pasta, and Tomás's brown butter pastry. Milled in Cahir · 95 min
The ninety-minute rule If we can't drive to it and back inside a working day, we think hard before we put it on the menu. It isn't a purity test — the wine list crosses a continent and the pepper crosses an ocean — but it does mean we have stood in nearly every field, boat and mill on this list, and that everyone on it can ring the kitchen directly. Ballybrado, at ninety-five minutes, is a rounding error we have chosen to live with.
“Nine years in, Ember & Oak has not grown, franchised or softened. It has simply got better at the one thing it decided to do in a derelict coach house in 2016. Dublin has flashier rooms. It has very few more convincing ones.”
Niamh Costigan Food writer, The Liberties Review

Come and see

Best told with a glass in your hand

The fire is lit from four o'clock and the chimney is still doing its job. Twelve tables, thirty days of availability, and eight seats at the bar that never need booking at all.

Book a table Find us in Stoneybatter

Walk-ins welcome at the bar · Last kitchen order 21:45 · Closed Mondays