A cook who grew up between two kitchens.
Maya Okonkwo grew up shuttling between her grandmother's open-fire kitchen in Lagos and her mum's terrace house in Lewisham, watching food carry conversations through long, loud evenings. She never went to cooking school. She just kept feeding people.
After a decade cooking in other people's restaurants — Brawn, P. Franco, a stint at a wine bar in Cape Town — she started doing supper clubs out of her flat in 2016. By 2018 the queue down the street was unreasonable, so she signed the lease on an empty unit on Rye Lane and opened Ember & Rye with two members of staff and a borrowed grill.
She still cooks on the pass six nights a week.
Exposed brick, candlelight, mismatched chairs.
The room is long and narrow, with a 14-foot bar running down one side and an open kitchen at the back so you can watch the fire do its work. Reclaimed oak floors, scuffed by six years of good nights. Forty-five covers inside, twenty more on the heated terrace when the weather behaves.
We light the candles at 5pm and the playlist gets louder as the night goes on. No tablecloths. No dress code. No one will ever describe the cutlery to you.
Seasonal, local-ish, low-intervention.
We buy from a tight network of small suppliers — Wild Country Organics for veg, Swaledale for meat, Flying Fish for the day-boat catch. The menu changes every Tuesday, sometimes mid-service when something stops being good.
The wine list is exclusively low-intervention — from growers who farm without chemicals and don't mess about in the cellar. We compost everything we can, reuse our linen, and split tips evenly across the whole team.
None of this is on a chalkboard. It's just how we want to run a restaurant.
