Everything You Need to Know About The Catbird Seat’s New Chefs

A conversation with chefs Andy Doubrava and Tiffani Ortiz of The Carbird Seat

Last weekend, Nashville’s The Catbird Seat welcomed two new chefs to its U-shaped stage: Tiffani Ortiz and Andy Doubrava, who were most recently touring the country with their pop-up Slow Burn. They bring with them a deep larder of ingredients that they’ve mindfully sourced or foraged and preserved along their journey—it’s the first thing diners see when they enter the space. (The Catbird Seat still has plans to move to a new location; for now, the chefs are cooking in the original dining room on Division Street.) I caught up with Doubrava and Ortiz as they were preparing for their first service.

Erin Byers Murray: How long have you two been cooking together?

Andy Doubrava: We met in culinary school a little over 10 years ago, but after we graduated, we went our separate ways and stayed in touch. Then we reconnected and have been cooking on and off together since 2017. 

Tiffani Ortiz: It was around then that I was leaving my restaurant in New York City and to begin a farm tour through the nonprofit WWOOF. My plan was to essentially go on this kind of Eat, Pray, Love journey, where I was going to be reconnecting with food after working and living in a big city my whole life. I went to volunteer on a farm in Malibu, California, and at the time, Andy was working at Rustic Canyon [in Santa Monica]. Eventually, he decided that it sounded like something he’d be into, too. So, then, well, we fell in love, and he joined me on this farm tour, where we traveled down the East Coast, through the South, and then up back to California, where we were invited to stay and live on that original farm.

Erin Byers Murray: And eventually, from there, you launched Slow Burn. Tell me a little about that time. 

Tiffani Ortiz : It was a little later, during the pandemic, as we’re easing out of the really scary part, I was doing a lot of nomadic work with my own pop-up and Andy was at a point where he was ready to leave [the kitchen] and that’s when we decided to do Slow Burn, which took us around the country for two years. 

Andy Doubrava: I don’t think we’ve taken the time to count how many events we actually did accomplish in those two years. But it was a lot. We made it to, I think, 42 states. Is that correct, Tiff? 

Tiffani Ortiz : Yeah, and you know we did all of it in our car with the trailer and our two dogs. We made a lot of friends, too—we essentially met all of our Instagram chef friends in person throughout the tour.

Erin Byers Murray: And how does it feel to be rooted again? 

Andy Doubrava: I’ll be honest, the Slow Burn journey was totally out of my comfort zone, but I think coming out on the other side of it, I’m a lot happier. We’ve made a lot of really cool relationships in the last few years. So it was super enjoyable, but it’s also really exciting to be back in a permanent setting.

Tiffani Ortiz : I agree. The tour was amazing, and we got to work with fantastic chefs around the country. It was an opportunity for us to try on different hats and learn new tricks. Now we’re just really excited to put everything that we’ve learned for the past two years on tour to practice.

Erin Byers Murray: Tell me a little about your larder, or pantry of preserved products—you’ve called it your pride and joy. 

Tiffani Ortiz : We try our best to be as environmentally conscious as we can, so the larder became the ultimate solution to a lot of our issues with food waste. Anything that was edible got turned into a long-term project, whether it be miso or a shoyu or a vinegar or even charcuterie. With our farming experience, we have an appreciation of how hard it is to grow vegetables, especially in a changing climate. So the larder is an homage to local farmers, and also a way for us to keep ingredients shelf-stable for the next season. 

Andy Doubrava: When you’re running a food business and trying to get as close to zero waste as possible, preservation is crucial, and can’t really be replaced by any other practice. In the restaurant setting, we have the menu, we have the larder, we have family meal, and then the last option for ingredients is compost. We do our best to extract as much flavor out of everything as we can. We’re working with Compost Nashville and, in our opinion, compost is not a wasted product.

Erin Byers Murray: What can Catbird diners expect to taste from it? 

Andy Doubrava: We have two main charcuterie products that we make; one is nduja, which is a spicy, spreadable Calabrian sausage that we make from pork belly. And the batch that we are opening the menu with is pushing two years old, which we’re very proud of. 

Tiffani Ortiz : There are a lot of interesting ingredients that we foraged anywhere from California to Texas to Montana to here. They’re things that we’ve found when we’ve been on a hike in a new town, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and we found these beautiful wild things. We got really good at identifying wild plants along the way.

Erin Byers Murray: Can you share a little teaser for what people can expect at Catbird? 

Andy Doubrava: A lot of the menu comes as produce first and protein second. We’ll be showcasing local farms, like Bear Creek. I think the most exciting dish for us right now is one that Tiff handles by utilizing our larder and our garden at home that she has built; it’s a crudité plate. 

Tiffani Ortiz : It’s a really fun and beautiful way to tell a story about vegetables. Everything on that plate, for the most part, has been sourced within 5 to 15 miles of the restaurant, or, if not, it’s something that came from our tour and out of our larder. Also, our pastry chef Erika Chan has some amazing sweet and savory desserts on the menu, including a mixed pepper sherbet that’s a little sweet, and a little spicy—that’s one of the opening bites. When we write these menus, it’s a lot like writing a playlist—you have to decide whether you want to hit them with something fast and hard or whether you want to ease into things. And we said, You know what? This is opening week, so let’s get them with some crazy flavors right off the bat.  

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