At Ember & Oak, the Tasting Menu Finally Learns to Relax

There is a particular silence that falls over a dining room when a server explains that the carrot was grown eleven miles away, fermented for nine weeks, and finished with a butter churned that morning. It is the silence of eighteen people deciding whether to be impressed. At Ember & Oak, which opened quietly in Los Altos in February, that silence never arrives — because nobody explains the carrot. It simply appears, and it is extraordinary.

This is a twelve-course tasting menu that has, somewhere in its development, made peace with itself. Chef Nadia Okonkwo spent six years at a three-star kitchen in Copenhagen and another two running the pass at a Michelin-chasing project in the Mission that closed in 2024. You can taste both of those rooms here. What you cannot taste is the anxiety.

The food

Dinner opens with a single oyster in a broth of grilled cucumber and elderflower, served so cold it aches. It is the sort of dish that could easily be a statement — look how restrained we are — but it lands instead as a genuine act of hospitality. It wakes you up. The next four courses build steadily: a raw scallop under shaved bottarga, a folded omelette with trout roe that arrives warm enough to fog the plate, a bowl of shell beans in their own liquor with nothing else in it at all.

The bean course is the one I have thought about most. It costs the kitchen almost nothing. It requires the kitchen to be perfect. Beans cooked four minutes past their moment become baby food, and a restaurant charging $265 a head has every commercial incentive to bury them under something expensive. Okonkwo does not. She serves you beans, and she is right.

A restaurant charging $265 a head has every incentive to bury the beans under something expensive. Okonkwo does not.

The middle of the menu sags slightly. A duck course arrives with a fermented plum glaze that is a half-step too sweet, and the accompanying leg meat, rolled and sliced, had gone cool on all three of my visits — a service problem more than a kitchen one, but at this price a diner is entitled to not care about the distinction. A later dish of grilled abalone with brown butter and green almond is technically flawless and emotionally inert.

Then it recovers completely. The last savoury course is a shallow bowl of rice cooked in the drippings of everything that came before it, with a spoonful of cultured cream and a great deal of black pepper. It is, functionally, a very good risotto pretending not to be. Everyone at my table stopped talking. That is the second silence of the evening, and it is the one restaurants are actually chasing.

The room, the pour, the bill

The dining room seats thirty-two across two levels of a converted 1940s storefront, and the design does something unusual for the Valley: it is comfortable. The chairs have backs. The tables are far enough apart that you can conduct an argument. The lighting is warm without being theatrical, and the soundtrack stays below the level where you find yourself shouting about a term sheet.

The pairing is $145 and worth it, largely because sommelier Grant Ishii pours generously from small Central Coast producers and is happy to skip a course if you ask. A non-alcoholic pairing at $70 is better than it has any right to be — a lacto-fermented strawberry thing served with the duck did more for that dish than the wine did.

Dinner for two with the pairing lands around $890 after tax and service. That is a great deal of money. It is also, for what it is, honestly priced: there is no upcharge theatre, no $95 caviar supplement dangled at the table, no truffle cart. The number on the menu is the number on the bill.

What Ember & Oak has understood — and what a decade of Valley tasting menus mostly has not — is that the goal is not to be admired. It is to feed people extremely well for three hours and then let them go home. On my third visit I watched a table of four founders arrive mid-argument, order the pairing, and gradually stop performing. By the rice course they were just four people eating dinner. I cannot think of higher praise.