What would it take to get you to move from the sandy beaches of a Caribbean paradise to snowy, slushy upstate New York? For chef Marc Alvarez, it was the chance to create an all-new restaurant from scratch.
The Riverdale native had been living with his wife, Natalie, and two daughters in Anguilla, a tiny island in the West Indies, since 2014. But when he got a call from a restaurateur friend who wanted to give him free reign to develop and execute a completely new concept near Natalie’s hometown of Niskayuna, the opportunity was too good to pass up.
“Andy was ready for a new concept,” Alvarez says of his friend Andy Zheng, who had run the restaurant Zen Asian Fusion Lounge on State Street in Schenectady for more than a decade. “And Natalie and I always wanted to end up back here closer to family. It was time to come home.”
This past fall, Zheng and Alvarez transformed Zen into Ember & Cork, a wood-fired restaurant that draws on global influences—specifically, those from Alvarez’s beloved Anguilla.
“We wanted to bring the West Indies concept here and use local ingredients,” says Alvarez, a Culinary Institute of America grad who has worked with restaurant industry bigwigs Charlie Palmer, Danny Meyer and Frank Crisp, and cooked for A-listers Barbra Streisand, Demi Moore, Sir Paul McCartney and others. “I like to do everything in-house, including the butchery, because it not only allows me to ensure the quality is high, but it allows me to use more of every cut. It ends up being less expensive. Butchery is a lost art.”
In addition to wood-fired strip steak, leg of lamb and suckling pig, Ember & Cork’s dinner menu boasts tons of fresh seafood—some of which is raw, like kombu-cured hamachi crudo and Hudson Valley steelhead salmon ceviche, and some of which is cooked on the wood grill or in the wood oven, including grilled big-eye tuna and wood-roasted lobster. There are also plant-based options, such as the Romanesco cauliflower shawarma, and a whole host of sharable small plates, from the Okonomiyaka Japanese pancake to the grilled Spanish octopus. For Sunday brunch, Alvarez serves up some of the same dishes, plus eggs ranchero, a full Irish breakfast and a Montreal-style bagel with smoked salmon. Nothing lands on a guest’s table unless it is rigorously sourced and passes Alvarez’s quality, presentation and flavor tests.
The chef’s insistence on the best applies to his restaurant’s drink menu, too.
“I really believe that wine needs food and vice versa, so I work hard to get the best wines I can, and I don’t mark them up like most restaurants do,” Alvarez says. “I want people to enjoy a bottle of great wine, so I put Plumpjack, Domaine Faiveley, Chateau Beychevelle and Jacque Prieur on the list for about half the price that you’d find them at any other restaurant.”
Indeed, at Ember & Cork, all of these wines are less than $300, whereas most restaurants list them for upwards of $550. For those who want a great wine for an even lower price point, there are less dear but equally excellent options, from Valentin Leflaive Blanc de Blancs for $125 to Vidal Fleury for $38.
But Alvarez is equally excited about rum.
“No one drinks rum in upstate New York,” he says, wonderingly. “Everyone drinks bourbon and tequila. Well, I’m getting them started on rum. Now, when people try it once, they come back for more—both aged sipping rums and rum punch.”
So what exactly is Ember & Cork? Is it a wood-fired chophouse? An island-inspired seafood joint? A classy wine bar with a rum problem? According to Alvarez, there’s no right answer.
“It can’t really be pigeon-holed,” he says of the restaurant. “It’s global. It’s the way people want to live, eat and drink now, with the best things presented together. It’s fine dining, without the attitude.”
