Oak & Ember Kitchen LLC is a design and management studio for commercial kitchens, restaurants and bars. One team handles the floor plan, the equipment package, the menu, the hiring and the weekly operating rhythm, so your concept opens on time and holds its margin after the launch buzz fades.
Most kitchen problems are not design problems or management problems on their own. They are the seam between the two. We own that seam, which is why our plans survive contact with a Friday night rush.
Our layouts come from people who have worked the pass, not only from CAD operators. Every station is measured in steps taken, plates handled and reach distances during a 300 cover night.
Concepts are tested against a working profit and loss model before a single wall moves. If the room cannot carry the rent at realistic covers and spend, we say so during week one rather than month nine.
Sixty two venues currently sit under some form of Oak & Ember management. That daily exposure keeps our design assumptions honest and our supplier pricing current across Texas and the Gulf South.
Oak & Ember Kitchen LLC began in 2014 when a chef and a food service engineer kept meeting on the same rescue jobs: good operators with beautiful rooms and kitchens that could not deliver the menu printed on the table. The first office was the back half of a barbecue pit house in Waco. The oak in the name is the wood we cooked over. The ember is what is left when the fire is doing honest work.
Today the studio covers design, build coordination, menu engineering, staffing and full operational management. We work with owners who want one accountable partner across the whole life of a venue rather than five vendors pointing at each other when the walk in fails on a Saturday.
A kitchen is a machine for turning hours into plates. Design it around the people who will actually stand in it and the margin looks after itself.Marisol Trevino, Founding Partner
Take one, take the set. Most clients start with a single piece of work and move into a management retainer once the room is trading.
Full back of house layout, equipment schedules, utility loads, ventilation strategy and health code compliant drawings ready for your contractor and inspector.
DetailsFront of house planning, seating maths, bar wells and speed rails, service routes, lighting mood and the material palette that carries your brand into the room.
DetailsSpecification, quoting, vendor negotiation, delivery sequencing, install supervision and commissioning, with warranty terms tracked in one place for you.
DetailsWe take the operating seat: rotas, ordering, cost control, service standards, maintenance calendars and a weekly review that keeps prime cost inside target.
DetailsRecipe costing, yield testing, portion control, menu layout and pricing psychology, plus seasonal rewrites that protect margin when supplier prices move.
DetailsFeasibility studies, food safety systems, allergen and HACCP documentation, manager coaching and service training built for the crew you can actually hire.
DetailsPublished rates, no percentage of your revenue, no hidden vendor commissions. Project work can also be quoted as a fixed fee.
For a single room that needs a plan and a steady hand on the numbers.
Three month minimum
For venues in build, in launch or in the middle of a turnaround.
Six month minimum
For groups running several rooms that need one operating standard.
Twelve month minimum
We had a beautiful dining room and a kitchen that could not send eighty covers. Oak & Ember redrew the line in three weeks, moved the pass six feet and cut our ticket times by nine minutes. The room finally works the way it looks.
They took over ordering and rotas for two of our bars during a bad summer. Food and beverage cost came down eleven points across the quarter and, more to the point, my general managers stopped quitting. That is the part I did not expect.
The feasibility study talked us out of a site we loved and into one two blocks away. Eighteen months on, that call was worth more than the whole fee. Honest advice from people with nothing to sell you on the equipment side.
Send the floor plan, the menu or just the problem that keeps you up. We reply within one business day and the first conversation costs nothing.