Marisol Trevino
Founding Partner, Culinary and Operations
Eighteen years on the line before the studio, including six as executive chef of a hotel group. Leads menu engineering, management retainers and anything involving a difficult service.
Our story
It started with the same phone call, over and over.
In 2013 Marisol Trevino was running a forty seat kitchen in central Texas and taking weekend consulting work for friends who were opening rooms of their own. Dele Okonkwo was a food service engineer specifying hoods and gas lines for the same set of projects. They kept arriving at sites where the drawings were fine, the equipment was expensive and the kitchen still could not push the menu on the table.
The gap was never in the individual trades. It sat between the person who drew the room and the person who had to work in it at nine on a Saturday. So in 2014 the two of them rented the back half of a barbecue pit house on Reuter Avenue in Waco, put a drafting table next to a six burner range and started doing both jobs under one roof.
The first client was a taqueria three miles away that had failed a health inspection twice. We redrew the wash line, rewrote the prep sheets and stayed for six months of Saturdays. That room is still trading under the same owner.
Since then we have drawn more than one hundred and forty kitchens, opened rooms in seven states and taken on the operating seat for sixty two venues. The pit house is now the front office. We kept the smell.
At a glance
Talk to the studio
Oak & Ember Kitchen LLC
- Founded 2014 in Waco, Texas
- Registered as a Texas limited liability company
- Studio team of 21 across design, culinary and operations
- Projects delivered in 7 states
- Independent of equipment manufacturers and distributors
- Fee based only, we take no supplier commission
Where we work
Texas and the Gulf South are home. We travel for design and consulting work anywhere in the continental United States, and we take remote management retainers where the room already has a manager we can coach.
The road so far
Eleven years, told in the projects that changed how we work
2014
Two people, one drafting table
Marisol Trevino and Dele Okonkwo register Oak & Ember Kitchen LLC and take the back rooms of a barbecue pit house on Reuter Avenue. First year work is entirely kitchen rescue jobs for independent operators inside a fifty mile radius.
2016
The first full build
A ninety cover steakhouse in Austin hires us from empty shell to opening night. We learn the hard way that equipment lead times, not design, decide an opening date, and we build the delivery sequencing system we still use on every project.
2018
We take the operating seat
A client asks us to stop consulting and simply run the kitchen for a season. That six month experiment becomes our management practice. Managing rooms full time changes our design work permanently, because we now live with our own drawings.
2020
Rebuilding through the shutdown
We convert eleven dining rooms into commissary and delivery operations in under four months, waive fees for four clients through the worst of it, and come out with a ghost kitchen practice we never planned to have.
2022
Bars become a discipline of their own
After a run of taproom and cocktail bar projects we bring in a dedicated beverage lead. Bar design, pour cost control and beverage program work become a standing part of the studio rather than an add on to restaurant jobs.
2024
Group work and multi site standards
The Authority retainer launches for owners running several rooms. We start writing operating standards that survive being handed to a general manager we did not hire, which is a harder problem than any floor plan.
2026
Sixty two rooms and counting
The studio now covers design, build coordination, culinary and full management, with a team of twenty one. The brief has not changed since the pit house: make the room work for the people standing in it.
What we hold to
Five rules we will not trade away for a fee.
These are not posters on a wall. Each one has cost us work at least once, and each one is the reason clients stay an average of nine years.
01
Say the hard thing in week one
If the site cannot carry the rent, if the menu is too wide for the line, if the partner structure is going to break, you hear it early while it is still cheap to fix.
02
No commission, ever
We take no rebate, kickback or referral fee from equipment makers, distributors or suppliers. Our income is your fee, which is the only way a specification can be honest.
03
Design for the crew you can hire
A layout that needs three specialists you cannot recruit in your market is a bad layout, however elegant. We plan around the labour that actually exists near your door.
04
Leave the room better staffed than we found it
Management work is coaching, not replacement. Your people should be able to run the standard without us in the building, and most of them can within a year.
05
Numbers in front of the owner every week
Prime cost, labour percentage, waste and covers, in one page, every week. No dashboard theatre and no quarterly surprises hidden in a slide deck.
Anyone can specify a combi oven. The job is knowing whether the person who will load it at six in the morning has somewhere to set the tray down, and whether the dish that comes out of it makes money at the price on the menu.Dele Okonkwo, Partner and Head of Design
The people
Who you actually work with
Small studio, senior team. The partner who scopes your project stays on it through delivery.
Dele Okonkwo
Partner, Head of Design
Food service engineer by training. Owns kitchen layout, ventilation strategy, utility coordination and the equipment schedules that contractors actually build from.
Rachel Hoang
Director of Beverage and Bar Design
Ten years behind and above bars from Houston to New Orleans. Handles bar layout, pour cost, beverage programs and the training that keeps a cocktail list consistent.
Come see the pit house.
Our office is at 3128 Reuter Ave in Waco and the coffee is decent. Book a call first and we will have your plans on the wall when you arrive.