Our story
Built around a fire.
Olive & Ember began with an oven, a grove of olives and a chef who could not stop cooking for other people.
The chef
Elena Marchetti-Vasquez
“My grandmother had one rule in the kitchen: never cook anything you would not eat standing at the stove. That means salt, fire, good oil, and patience. Everything else is decoration.”
Elena grew up between Bologna and Valencia, cooking beside two grandmothers who disagreed about nearly everything except the importance of a hot oven. After ten years in professional kitchens in London and Athens, she came home to the West Country with a plan: cook for people she could see.
Today she leads a kitchen of fourteen, rolls the first pasta of the day herself, and can usually be found at the pass with a spoon, tasting something that a young cook is worried about.
Timeline
Fourteen years, one oven.
- 2011
Elena leaves a Michelin-starred kitchen for a summer with a family olive grove in the Peloponnese. She stays for two years.
- 2016
A stone oven, a borrowed trestle table and a pop-up in a Bristol car park. The first night sells out by four o'clock.
- 2019
We find the old cooper's workshop on Cooper's Yard and build the oven first. The kitchen follows, then the walls.
- 2022
Named one of the city's best new restaurants. We tell no one to tone down the smoke.
- 2025
A second dining room, the Hearth Room, opens beside the fire. We plant a herb bed in the yard.
Oil from one grove
Our extra-virgin comes from the Karamanlis family grove near Kalamata, cold-pressed within hours of picking. We bring it in by the tin, twice a year, and use it lavishly.
Herbs from the yard
Rosemary, thyme, bay, oregano and mint grow in troughs behind the kitchen door. If it is in the dish and it is green, it was outside an hour ago.
A list with a point of view
Forty bottles, no more. Every one has been poured by our sommelier, Tomasz, at least twice before it earned a place.
