Our Story
From office desks to 4am starts
Ember & Grain started with a question: what if we stopped designing other people's buildings and feeding other people's restaurants, and built something of our own? This is the story of how a sourdough starter, a wood-fired oven, and a stubborn belief in doing things slowly brought us to Crystal Palace.
Origins
It started, as these things often do, with a lockdown sourdough starter. Maya had been an architect for ten years — good at it, successful even — but spending her evenings feeding a jar of flour and water made her feel something her day job hadn't in a long time. James, meanwhile, had managed restaurants since his early twenties. He knew food, he knew service, but he'd been running other people's visions for so long that he'd almost forgotten he had one of his own.
They'd talked about it for years in that idle, wistful way couples do. "One day we'll open a bakery." "One day we'll do our own thing." Then one evening in early 2022, sitting at their kitchen table with a particularly good loaf cooling on the rack, James said: "What if one day is now?" Maya didn't sleep that night. By morning, she'd sketched the shopfront on the back of an envelope.
They gave themselves six months. Maya enrolled at the School of Artisan Food in Nottinghamshire, spending weekends learning the science and soul of fermentation. James took a stage in Lyon, working under a pastry chef who believed that butter was a moral issue and that you should never rush a laminate. They came back to London with notebooks full of ideas, hands that smelled permanently of flour, and a conviction that Crystal Palace was the place.
The Space
The building had been a lot of things before we found it — a dry cleaner's, a betting shop, briefly and mysteriously a "wellness consultancy" that nobody in the neighbourhood could quite account for. When we got the keys in September 2022, it was bare brick walls, a cracked tile floor, and a ceiling that leaked in three places. It was perfect.
Maya designed the fit-out herself, because old habits die hard. She wanted somewhere that felt like walking into a friend's kitchen — warm wood, open shelving, the oven visible from the counter so you could watch the bread come out. James insisted on the long communal table by the window, because he'd learned in restaurants that strangers sharing a table will always end up talking, and talking people stay for another coffee.
We did most of the work ourselves, with help from friends, family, and a very patient carpenter from Sydenham called Dave who is now a regular and gets a free loaf on Fridays. The space still has its rough edges — the original brick wall behind the counter, the slightly uneven floor by the door — and we wouldn't change a thing. Those imperfections are part of the story.
“I've lived in Crystal Palace for twenty years and Ember & Grain is the best thing to happen to this neighbourhood in all of them. The sourdough is extraordinary — properly tangy, incredible crust — but it's the atmosphere that keeps me coming back. It just feels like somewhere you belong.”
Bertha
Every bakery has a heart, and ours is Bertha — a hand-built wood-fired oven that takes up most of the back wall and has more personality than some people we know. She was built by a specialist from the Cotswolds over three weeks in the winter of 2022, and she's been the centre of everything since the day we lit her for the first time.
Bertha runs hot and she runs slow. We fire her with sustainably sourced hardwood from a woodland trust in Kent, and she holds her heat for hours, which means we can bake bread at fierce temperatures in the early morning and then use the falling heat for pastries, then focaccia, then the slow overnight things. There's a rhythm to working with a wood-fired oven that you don't get with gas or electric — you learn to read her moods, to feel the temperature with the back of your hand, to know when she's ready.
Maya says baking with Bertha is the closest thing to the creative satisfaction she used to get from architecture. James says Bertha is the most temperamental colleague he's ever worked with, and he's worked with a lot of chefs. We both agree that the bread she produces — with that deep, crackled crust and the faintly smoky crumb — is worth every 3am start.
Where It Comes From
We are obsessive about ingredients, and we make no apology for it. Our flour comes from Heron Mill in Kent, a small stone-milling operation run by a family who've been growing heritage grain varieties for three generations. Their stoneground white has a nuttiness and depth that you simply cannot get from roller-milled flour, and their wholemeal is extraordinary — it smells like a freshly cut wheat field, which is exactly what it should smell like.
Our butter and eggs come from a small farm in the Surrey Hills. The butter is higher-fat than commercial, which makes all the difference in laminated pastry — it stays pliable in the fold, doesn't crack, and gives the croissants that rich, almost savoury depth. The eggs have yolks so orange they look painted. We've tried cheaper alternatives and we always come back, because the difference isn't subtle.
The coffee is roasted by Crow & Bean, a micro-roaster run by two friends in a railway arch in Peckham. They source single-origin beans, roast in small batches, and deliver to us on their cargo bikes every Monday morning. Their house blend — a washed Ethiopian with a Colombian base — is what most of our regulars drink, and it pairs beautifully with almost everything we bake. Tom will tell you at length about the tasting notes if you let him.
“I did Maya's sourdough workshop as a birthday gift to myself and it genuinely changed my weekends. I bake every Saturday now. The starter she sent me home with is still going strong, and I've named him Gerald.”
More Than a Bakery
We didn't just want to sell bread. We wanted to be part of the neighbourhood — the kind of place where people bump into each other, where you come in for a loaf and stay for an hour, where the staff know your name and your dog's name and which sourdough you prefer. Crystal Palace has that kind of energy already, and we wanted to add to it.
The Saturday workshops were Maya's idea from the start. She remembered how transformative it felt to make her first proper loaf, and she wanted to give other people that same experience. The workshops are small — eight people maximum — and they're as much about slowing down as they are about technique. People knead dough, they wait, they talk. It's meditative in a way that surprises most of them. Everyone leaves with a starter, a loaf, and a slightly different relationship with their kitchen.
We host a monthly bread subscription for the local food bank, donate surplus to the Crystal Palace community fridge every evening, and run a "pay it forward" coffee board where customers can buy a drink for someone who needs one. These aren't marketing initiatives. They're just the way we think a bakery should work — baked into the business, not bolted on.
“The pain aux raisins are the best I've had outside of France, and I say that as someone who is extremely annoying about pastry. My daughter and I come every Saturday morning and it's become our favourite tradition.”
Looking Forward
We've been open for just over three years now, and we're still surprised every morning that this is our life. The alarm goes off at 3:30am and James makes coffee while Maya checks on the starters. By 4am, Priya is there and the oven is warming and the dough is coming out of the retarder. By 7am, the first loaves are on the shelf and the café is filling up and Tom is making someone's day with a flat white and a pain au chocolat. It never gets old.
We're not interested in scaling up or franchising or any of that. We want to keep doing this — making beautiful bread, feeding our neighbourhood, running workshops that change people's Saturdays. We're experimenting with new grains from Heron Mill, testing a spelt and honey loaf that Maya is particularly excited about, and planning a series of evening suppers where James can stretch his legs in the kitchen.
If you haven't visited yet, come and say hello. Bring your dog, bring your laptop, bring your mum. Sit at the long table, try whatever Elise has made that morning, and let Tom talk you through the coffee. We'll be here — flour on our aprons, Bertha roaring away behind us, doing the thing we love.
The People
Five people, one oven, and a shared belief that bread is worth getting up at 3am for.
Maya Chen
Co-founder & Head Baker
Maya spent a decade designing buildings before she realised the thing she loved most about architecture was the same thing she loved about bread — the tension between structure and intuition. She left her practice in 2021, enrolled at the School of Artisan Food, and never looked back. She designs every scoring pattern by hand, runs our Saturday sourdough workshops, and still gets a little thrill every time a laminated dough comes out right.
Bakes best: Croissants & scored sourdough loaves
James Okafor
Co-founder & Cafe Chef
James managed restaurants across South London for fifteen years before a sabbatical in Lyon changed everything. He trained under a pastry chef who insisted he taste every batch of butter before it went into the kitchen, and that obsessive attention to ingredients stuck. He runs our cafe menu, pairs the seasonal toasties, and is responsible for the brownies that have caused at least two neighbourhood disputes over the last slice.
Bakes best: Seasonal cafe menus & the famous Ember brownie
Priya Sharma
Baker
Priya turned up to one of Maya's workshops on a rainy October Saturday, asked seventeen questions about hydration ratios, and started volunteering the following week. That was two years ago. Now she runs the 4am bread shifts with a quiet focus that the rest of us can only marvel at, and her seeded rye has developed its own small but devoted following on the Crystal Palace subreddit.
Bakes best: Seeded rye & wholemeal loaves
Tom Eastwood
Front of House & Barista
Tom knows every regular's order before they reach the counter, and he's genuinely offended if you try to leave without seeing his latte art. He's studying environmental science part-time at Goldsmiths, works four days a week with us, and has an uncanny ability to recommend exactly the right loaf for someone who says they "just want some bread." He also makes the best flat white south of the river, and we will not be taking questions on that.
Bakes best: Latte art & knowing exactly what you need
Elise Fournier
Weekend Pastry Chef
Elise trained at a patisserie in Bordeaux before moving to London, and she joins us every Friday evening to prep the weekend pastry selection. Her pain aux raisins have a custard filling that she won't share the recipe for, even with Maya. She brings a precision to viennoiserie that borders on the spiritual, and Saturday mornings at Ember & Grain simply wouldn't be the same without her.
Bakes best: Danishes, pain aux raisins & viennoiserie
“I work from the long table most Tuesdays and Thursdays. The coffee is brilliant, the Wi-Fi actually works, and nobody makes you feel guilty for staying three hours. Also, James's toasties are a genuine reason to be alive.”