Camino was — is, for its last regular dinner service Monday, Dec. 17 — a perfect realization of an impossible idea.

That idea, to operate a restaurant without compromises, belongs to Russell Moore and Allison Hopelain, who opened their restaurant on Grand Avenue in Oakland 10 years ago. It was an idea informed by Moore’s 20 years as chef at Chez Panisse, but in a way it went further than Chez Panisse.

The idea of Camino was partly an aesthetic one. No restaurant looks or tastes like it. The fireplace, which gives the food its distinctive rusticity, like an altar at the center of the open kitchen. The exuberant garlands draped over hooped chandeliers, sagging now with dried orange discs and bay leaves. The redwood planks for communal tables and church pews for seats. The bitter crunch of chicories, the smoky char of pork loin hung over the fire, the buttery indulgence of Dungeness crab in the winter.

The cocktails, which tell you everything you need to know about Camino — we’ll get to that later — unadorned, served to the brim in small tumblers, as if you were in the living room of someone who’d just moved and hadn’t yet unpacked all their kitchen wares. You can never quite believe the layers of flavors those unassuming packages unfurl.

It will never exist again — not this restaurant, not this particular idea. The last regular dinner service is Monday, Dec. 17. Then commences a “devolving” series of closing parties, Hopelain says: a final, ticketed dinner party on Dec. 20 ($200), a more raucous cocktail party on Dec. 22, and finally a staff-only blowout, to which they’ve invited pretty much everyone who has ever worked at Camino, about 180 people.

Then Christmas Eve it’s Moore’s birthday. And then he and Hopelain move on.

But there’s more to celebrate about Camino right now than the cocktails and the fireplace cooking. As much as the idea of Camino was aesthetic, it was equally an ethical one. While Moore and Hopelain might have succeeded in realizing the feel of Camino perfectly, uncompromisingly, in the end it is the restaurant’s uncompromising moral code that makes its survival impossible.

Moore and Hopelain’s commitment at Camino is to use only ingredients that are local and responsibly grown, from the salad to the drinks to the desserts. As Hopelain puts it: “to have a restaurant where the buying practices were as strict as how we purchase food for our home.”

One of the final Friday dinners at Camino, which will close at the end of 2018.

Photo: Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle

If that mission sounds commonplace in the Bay Area, in its extreme form it really isn’t. For example, “I don’t think there are any other restaurants here that will only serve local fish,” Hopelain says. The difficulty isn’t merely that local fish is expensive. It’s that sometimes you can’t serve fish at all.

So Camino’s menu is always short. Moore works in the kitchen every night, the master of the exacting art of fireplace cooking. Staff is treated like family. Even after many Bay Area restaurants abandoned the momentarily faddish tipless model, Camino stuck with it because Moore and Hopelain believe it’s best for their staff, even though it’s difficult for the restaurant to sustain financially — committing to paying their workers a livable wage even on slow nights.

You know the story. Labor costs, food costs, rent all go up. “Financially things were not great at the restaurant,” Hopelain says. “Camino’s never made a lot of money. Sometimes it’s lost money.” By the time they decided to close, earlier this year, “business had definitely slowed down.”

Hopelain and Moore did what all small business owners do when times are tough: work harder. But it started to feel like they couldn’t keep it up much longer. A decade in, running the restaurant wasn’t getting any easier.

“Russ and I are in our 50s,” Hopelain says. “How do we want to spend our lives?”

The couple would rather see Camino die than see it compromised. “We wanted to stop the restaurant when we’re still in love with it,” Hopelain says, “and before it crushed us.”

The announcement that they would close Camino at the end of the year has produced an outpouring of nostalgia and reservations. “What’s funny is that the restaurant feels like it’s the highest of the high right now,” Hopelain says. “It’s beautiful, but it’s also temporary.”

Tyler Vogel has managed Camino’s distinctive cocktail menu almost since the beginning.

Photo: Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle

It’s hard enough to steer a kitchen with Moore’s rigorous principles. But what Camino never got enough credit for is that it applied those principles just as rigorously to the bar.

Moore and Hopelain had never run a bar before. So before opening they enlisted the help of the Bay Area’s local-organic spirits guru: Thad Vogler, owner of Trou Normand, Bar Agricole and the upcoming Obispo.

“Thad threw down this challenge to us,” Hopelain says. “He’d thrown this challenge to a lot of people he’d consulted for, and I don’t think anybody understood what he was talking about. We didn’t either.” The challenge: Run your bar like you run your kitchen. Use only produce that you’d eat in a salad. Buy from small distributors, not the corporations. Seek out spirits that taste distinctively of their place and materials of origin, unadulterated by coloring or additives.

“Thad’s approach changed everything for us,” Hopelain says.

Following this philosophy, Camino has never bought spirits from big wholesale companies like Southern Wine & Spirits or Young’s Market Co. — a practice in line with the kitchen, which opts to buy food from companies like Veritable Vegetable instead of Sysco. Their refusal to pour spirits made from genetically modified crops meant that, for a long time, they didn’t carry whiskey.

Most audacious is Camino’s refusal to make drinks from any produce that isn’t organic, from California and in season. Which means, for example, that the bar frequently can’t use limes or lemons — staple ingredients in so many cocktails. “That shocked Thad when Russ was actually willing to do that,” Hopelain laughs.

Within a year of opening, the reins were handed over to Tyler Vogel, who continues to manage Camino’s bar. Soon after starting, he began asking the pastry chefs for their leftovers each night, and the discarded syrup from candied orange peels suddenly became a citrusy cocktail sweetener. Apple and quince cores, simmered for hours, became a fruit stock, which Vogel transformed into a lightly effervescent, barely fermented drink — something between a soda and a kombucha. “Camino’s little living creature,” he calls it.

In recent years, when Vogel has been unable to source organic California lemons through normal distribution channels, he has taken to walking up the street to the home of a woman who has a big lemon tree in her yard. He estimates he’s picked 10 cases of lemons from her tree this year alone. He trades her credit at the restaurant.

The beautiful, understated Camino cocktails. From left: mezcal cocktail, mai tai, rye manhattan and hot toddy.

Photo: Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle

And Camino’s bar doesn’t merely mimic its kitchen in moral code; it enacts its distinctive vibe, too. The structure of the cocktail menu is so simplistic that it almost feels twee: “gin drink,” “Armagnac cocktail,” “amaro cocktail.” (In the Camino bar-menu lexicon, “cocktail” refers to something that’s spirit-forward; “drink” is something shaken with citrus.) These creations feel like a natural extension of the food menu, rustic and minimalist, each item’s central ingredient accented with whatever seasonal produce happens to be available this month.

Take the pisco drink on a recent visit, wafting the floral aromas of Muscat wine, bright with Seville orange, creamy with egg white, hinting at a sharp herbal note. Or the dangerously poundable mezcal drink, a perfect balance of lemon and honey, warmed by rosemary. Or the deeply layered aged rum drink, tasting unmistakably of funky, earthy, savory rum — those bass notes brightened by orange and lime. (All cocktails are $14.)

Order a round of drinks, and you might not be able to tell them apart. Where many bars today appear to be engaging in an arms race for the most outlandish garnishes and the most novel serving vessels, at Camino most drinks register varying shades of neutral, and are served in that fleet of 5- or 7-ounce tumblers.

Sitting at Camino, with one of these tumblers perched alongside your braised greens or mushroom-short rib ragu or butter lettuce salad, you feel yourself starting to enter into a zone. The flavors are pure and clear — not a symphony but a hushed a cappella performance. Every bite, every sip, precious. The lighting is universally flattering. And framing your peripheral vision are the garlands with their strings of razor-thin, desiccated, brilliantly colored orange slices.

All of it, the food, the drinks, the room, the mood of service, come together to form a harmonious whole. It’s a great restaurant, and a unique restaurant, and the Bay Area’s dining scene will be a little bit less distinctive without it.

Half a Dungeness crab with kohlrabi salad and pickled chile mayonnaise.

Photo: Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle

The couple will focus their efforts on their other restaurant, the more casual Kebabery. Once they take a little break, the idea is to open more Kebabery locations. They’re looking at some food halls. Will Moore and Hopelain get burnt out on that business, too, just as they did with Camino? They don’t think so. “It’s a menu that doesn’t change much. It doesn’t have a fireplace,” Hopelain says of the Kebabery. “It isn’t based on one person’s personal vision of food and dining.”

The singular Camino space will become a location of the Zachary’s Pizza chain. The new tenant is not keeping the fireplace.

When she learned that, Hopelain called Pascal Faivre, the stone mason who built the fireplace for the restaurant back in 2008. Would he like to take his creation back, or at least salvage some of its parts? Faivre told her no; it was so reinforced that he didn’t think he could get it out without destroying it. Besides, he said, “I built it for you guys, and now that era can be over.”