Camino

Our verdict

A central hearth dominates the dining room at Camino, and everything on the menu answers to it. Russell Moore, who spent years cooking at Chez Panisse before opening this Grand Lake address with partner Allison Hopelain, built the kitchen around wood-fired grills, fire pit cooking, and wood-burning ovens, a format that shapes the menu from first course to last rather than serving as a decorative flourish. The room itself reinforces the approach: long communal wooden tables seat guests in a space scaled more like a hall than a conventional restaurant, with the hearth visible and working throughout service. Dishes reported by Bay Area food writers include wood-oven-baked whole petrale sole, grilled local king salmon, duck breast, and a smoked oyster frittata, each item a direct product of the live-fire kitchen rather than a concession to it. Brunch extended the same logic, with stoneground oats and French toast sharing a menu built around the same heat sources that drive dinner. Pricing sits at the upscale end of Oakland's dining range, and the restaurant operated on a service-included model, folding gratuity into menu prices rather than leaving it to the table. That structure, combined with the communal seating and open kitchen, positioned Camino as a specific kind of destination: a place where the cooking method is the concept, and where the Grand Avenue neighborhood setting kept the register grounded rather than ceremonial. For fire-driven California cooking with a documented lineage back to Chez Panisse, few addresses in the East Bay offered a more direct expression of that tradition.