A small dining room in Chelsea, built around a single hearth. The philosophy behind Ember & Ivory, in the words of the people who make it every night.
Every night at Ember & Ivory begins the same way — a match struck against seasoned oak, and a fire that will burn quietly through every course of every service.
Ember & Ivory opened on a quiet stretch of West 22nd Street in the autumn of 2019 — a forty-two-seat dining room built around a single, purpose-designed hearth.
Chef Daniel Vance had spent a decade circling the idea: a restaurant small enough to feel intimate, precise enough to feel important, and warm enough — literally, physically warm — that guests would stay a little longer than they meant to.
The result is a room that hums quietly. Candles on every table. A hearth in the middle. A menu that changes with the calendar, and a wine list chosen the way a librarian chooses books.
We believe good cooking is unhurried. A carrot roasted for an hour tastes different from a carrot roasted for twenty minutes — and it's usually the extra forty minutes that matter.
Nothing on our menu is done in a hurry. The stocks reduce for two days. The bread proofs overnight. The hearth is lit six hours before service.
Our hearth is the center of the kitchen and, in many ways, the center of the room. It burns a mix of white oak and applewood — the oak for heat, the apple for perfume — and it is tended, quietly, by a single cook throughout the entire service.
Fire behaves like a living ingredient. It rises, it falls, it needs to be listened to. Almost every plate we serve is finished, in some way, over its embers.
The fire is the oldest cookbook we know. Everything we do is a way of listening to it more carefully.— Daniel Vance, Chef & Owner
The room is small on purpose. Dark walnut floors, banquettes in aged leather, a low ceiling, and forty-two candles — one for every seat — lit before the first guest arrives.
Our service team is trained, quietly, to disappear when they should and appear when they must. We keep the pace slow. We keep the lights low. We keep the music at the volume of a conversation you don't want to interrupt.
Daniel grew up in the Hudson Valley, in a family that grew almost everything they ate. He trained in New York, then in Copenhagen, then in San Sebastián, and eventually came back — like most cooks do — to the food he'd known first.
He opened Ember & Ivory at thirty-eight, with a single principle in mind: cook one thing well, then cook the next thing well, and keep going until the night is over.
— Daniel
Almost every ingredient at Ember & Ivory comes from a small, named farm within a two-hour drive of Chelsea. If we can't source it locally, we source it seasonally. If we can't source it seasonally, we take it off the menu.
Heirloom vegetables from Blooming Hill Farm and eggs from a small flock in Stone Ridge — three deliveries a week, sunrise.
Day-boat scallops, yellowtail, and whole turbot from a small cooperative of day-boat fishermen we've known since 2019.
American wagyu from a single ranch in the Berkshires, dry-aged in our own cellar for a minimum of twenty-eight days.
Two seatings each evening, Tuesday through Sunday. The kitchen opens at five, the hearth is already lit by four.