Bon Appétit magazine has a really awesome write-up of Timber Pizza chef Daniela Moreira, looking back at growing up in her native Argentina to how she ended up taking a chance and becoming a pizza chef at Timber. (See also DC Eater's write up on Daniela for her winning the 2017 Eater Young Guns award.)

From the article:

Daniela Moreira was supposed to go into fine dining. She’d worked at Eleven Madison Park and attended the Culinary Institute of America with Top Chef contestant Kwame Onwuachi. So when she moved to D.C. in 2015, she planned to help him with the debut of his ambitious, tasting menu restaurant, the Shaw Bijou. But the much-hyped restaurant was delayed by nearly a year, and Moreira found herself biding time as a personal chef for multiple families, hitting up local farmers' markets six days a week. That’s where she first encountered Timber Pizza Co., a mobile pizzeria with a wood-fired oven hauled by a baby blue 1967 Chevy truck.

Timber founders Andrew Dana and Chris Brady had left jobs at an education technology startup to launch the business and never really intended to hire a chef. They were winging it themselves. But after bringing Moreira on part-time for two weeks, they begged her to join them full-time. The now-27-year-old was torn: Should she hold out for the prestigious gig assembling pretty plates of Alaskan king crab with uni bottarga for $185 a head? Or should she join a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation making caprese skewers in the passenger seat of a truck?

Her gamble on two dudes and their pizza oven ended up paying off. The Shaw Bijou opened and closed within three months. Timber Pizza, now with a restaurant in Washington’s increasingly hip Petworth neighborhood, is one of Bon Appetit’s 50 best new restaurants in America.

Today, everything [at Timber] is made from scratch, and Moreira relies almost exclusively on the farmers' market for her seasonally changing salads and pizza toppings. Whatever the farmers don’t sell, she will find a way to use — often in some unique combination. One summer pie comes with pea shoot pesto, asparagus, snow peas, greens, sesame seeds, and a lemongrass dressing. Another is dressed with a rotating spicy fruit jam, using peppers grown in Dana’s rooftop garden. Among the most popular staples, though, is the “Green Monster” with pesto, feta cheese, zucchini, and kale.

Read the full article on Bon Appétit >

(See also DC Eater's write up on Daniela for her winning the 2017 Eater Young Guns award.)