Strategic Hospitality announced Thursday that Andy Doubrava and Tiffani Ortiz will join The Catbird Seat as the chef’s table-style restaurant’s next executive chefs this summer.
The couple, known for their nomadic restaurant series Slow Burn, have traveled the country with a mobile cupboard, cooking tasting menus and creative fast-casual dishes in kitchens across the country. In Nashville, they’ve shown up at Catbird and, earlier this week, at June.
Catbird Seat has always strived to be more than a high-end restaurant. The formula for serving as an incubator and a place for chefs to experiment allowed the teams to bring something different to the table. Many of those chefs stuck around after their Catbird stints and helped shape Nashville's culinary scene. Matthew and Ryan Poli are making pasta and cocktails at iggy’s Nashville. Josh Habiger created Bastion and now partners with brothers Max and Benjamin Goldberg in Strategic Hospitality. And Trevor Moran wows diners at Locust.
Doubrava and Ortiz are known for their emphasis on sustainability (their self-published book was carbon neutral) and reducing food waste, a goal that aligns with Metro Nashville’s Zero Waste Master Plan. That plan, approved by Metro Council in 2021, has a goal to reduce all waste sent to landfills by 90 percent. The plan specifically identifies food waste and construction and demolition waste as top priorities to achieve this goal.
“Andy and I have been in the unique position of cooking throughout our travels for the past 18 months,” Ortiz says. “Our goal has always been to leave ourselves open to new cooking techniques and methods of tackling food waste as we move into new kitchens and communities. We are by no means spokespeople for the zero-waste movement, but accountability and respect for the ingredients we work with is very important to us. Through our larder, we are able to be more self-sustaining as a restaurant, while making our menus unique to each region in which we cook. We’ve already begun working closely with farmers, foragers, and fishermen in the region and are so excited to explore all the flavors that Tennessee and the greater Southeastern United States has to offer.”
Doubrava and Ortiz will join The Catbird Seat when it and Strategic’s Patterson House bar move to the historic Bill Voorhees building this summer. The Catbird Seat remains open with Brian Baxter at the helm in Midtown until the move.
“I couldn’t be happier to have Andy and Tiff in town, taking the reins at The Catbird Seat in its new location,” Baxter says in a statement. “We share a lot of similar philosophies on food and sustainability, and I can’t wait for everyone to see what they will bring to this community of great chefs and restaurants.”
The restaurant seats just 32 people; reservations are required.
