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Two Guys, Daniela Moreira, and a Pizza Truck
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.
For Moreira, being outdoors and cooking with fire brought back memories of growing up in Argentina. When she was seven, her parents bought a piece of riverside land in the central province of Cordoba and turned it into a public campground. Most of the year, her mother was a teacher, and her father ran a business supplying fiberglass for racecars. But every summer, the entire family headed to the campground and lived in tents. Not that they were really roughing it: Moreira and her sister had beds and all their toys, while her two brothers lived in a treehouse complete with a TV and Nintendo. “Glamping really didn’t exist. I could say that I started that,” she teases.
Soon, visitors started asking for food, and so Moreira’s mom began preparing empanadas, grilled meats, and other simple dishes from a palapa-shaded grill, which over the years turned into an actual restaurant. Moreira, her grandmother, and her three siblings all worked there. While other kids were playing in the river with their friends, Moreira was tasked with making empanadas. “I kind of hated cooking. I hated the whole thing,” she says.
After graduating high school, Moreira’s dad wanted her to go to college, but she resisted. She compromised on culinary school in Argentina, which left her plenty of extra time to work in restaurants and save money for the thing she actually wanted to do: travel. Among her jobs was a bartending gig in a nightclub that offered pizza to late-night revelers. One day the cook didn’t show up, so Moreira volunteered and was soon making pizzas every weekend. It fueled a rivalry between her and her brother over who could make a better pie. (He still refuses to concede.)
It was during those culinary school years that Moreira realized she actually did love cooking. She spent a brief stint eating through Italy and entertained a work offer in Dubai but realized all the jobs she wanted required English. So, at age 20, she decided to move to the U.S. to learn. She signed up with an au pair program and ended up living with a family with two young kids in D.C. Harry Potter books and Friends reruns were her language tutors.
After a year, Moreira enrolled in a D.C. charter school that teaches immigrants culinary skills, which led to a scholarship for the CIA, and eventually, Eleven Madison Park. She spent five months at the New York fine dining institution as a commis picking herbs with tweezers and helping with prep work. She returned to Argentina for a while, running her parents' camp and cooking every day. But when she thought back to where she was happiest, she decided to come back to D.C.—the journey that would lead her to Timber.
The Timber team calls its pizza “Neapolitan-ish.” Rather than the traditional flour, yeast, water, salt recipe, they add a little olive oil and sugar and let the dough ferment for two days to build flavor. Another secret? High gluten flour dough typically used in bagels.
That dough recipe hasn’t changed much, but almost everything else has since Moreira became a partner in the business. In the early days, Timber was using store-bought salad dressings and plastic-wrapped pre-made meatballs from a local Italian market. After all, Brady and Dana had no professional kitchen experience. “It’s really scary to think about in hindsight, but we were just going to be the chefs and figure it out,” Dana says. “It became evident pretty quickly that [Moreira] was incredibly talented and could help us get to another level and allow us to do us some things that we had no clue how to do.”
Today, everything 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.
At Timber’s permanent Petworth restaurant, the kitchen is what you see when you walk in the door, which is to say not much. There’s no grill, no fryer. Everything revolves around a copper wood-fired pizza oven in the middle of the cozy, picnic table-filled dining room. It’s the kind of simple cooking she grew up with.
That oven turns out cones for gelato sundae platters and beautifully blistered empanadas. (Moreira, thankfully, no longer hates making them.) A loyal brunch crowd arrives on weekends for wood-fired biscuits, pastries, and bagels.
Recently, Moreira has been fine-tuning that bagel recipe for a new “Jewish-ish” bagel/deli concept the team is looking to open in Washington’s historic Georgetown neighborhood. It’s a challenge: she didn’t grow up eating bagels, and everyone has an opinion about them. Still, her current versions taste promising.
Some day in the future, Moreira would also love to return to her parents’ campground in Argentina and open a Timber outpost there as well.
“When I was younger, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to live everywhere!’” she says. “And right now, I don’t want to do that. I just want to live in Argentina or here. I want both.”
