One second, Cat Cox was sitting in an opulent banquet corridor stuffed with essentially the most embellished names in meals and beverage, simply grateful to be sharing airspace with icons within the enterprise. The following, she was on stage, accepting the James Beard Award for Excellent Pastry Chef, earlier than getting whisked off to a refrigerated truck for a walk-in interview with Eli Sussman, who requested her the way it all felt.
It felt like so much. Cox was taking house the trade’s most prestigious award for her comparatively new enterprise, Nation Chook Bakery (which she describes as a “Euro-country bakery: European inspiration, with Dolly Parton vibes”). However she had additionally notched the primary ever James Beard win for her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. That put her amongst an infinitesimally small membership of Oklahoma winners that features legends like cooks Florence Jones Kemp, Andrew Black, and Rick Bayless (who all gained from Oklahoma Metropolis). All of the sudden, Nation Chook was now not only a small-batch bakery with a cult following, however the metropolis’s most validated reply to a constant query amongst outsiders: “Is there even a meals scene in Tulsa?” (These of us who dwell right here know the reply is a powerful sure.)
“I assumed, There’s no means this tiny little area in Tulsa that’s solely been open for 2 and a half years would win,” Cox says. “It’s not simply an award for me and my crew. It’s an award for Tulsa. I wouldn’t have been standing up there with out the people who find themselves so devoted to our enterprise, and who present up and draw consideration.”
And present up supporters do. The bakery, which is open Saturdays and each different Thursday, can solely match a snippet of the road of bleary-eyed patrons, which often stretches across the constructing like an SNL parody. With simply 4 small fridges and one bread oven, the crew seems roughly 1,500 pastries and 150 loaves throughout a typical service. Savvy Tulsans know to drive by to see when the road is getting shorter and textual content buddies close to the entrance to snag an additional one thing.
The trouble is price it for cinnamon sumac knots, butterscotch blondies, cacio e pepe monkey bread, rye chocolate chip cookies as large as your face, and pecan twice-baked croissants that take 4 days to make (perfected by Nation Chook baker Abby Burton). The store has particularly grow to be identified for hand-churned butter and sourdough breads made with Oklahoma-grown grain, in addition to objects that includes garden-grown produce, native eggs, and buttermilk made in-house.
This dedication to that includes the terroir of the heartland is as a lot a inventive alternative as an moral one. Take the Farmer’s Danish: a shell that’s completely flaky, buttery, crispy, and juicy, full of a rotating roster of native produce like corn, okra, or tomatoes.
“You may see proper inside it what we bought that week. It’s like an edible substrate, or a portray, and showcases the farmers so properly,” Cox says.
Cox is a lifelong baker, and although her 15-year restaurant profession began in Marfa, Texas, she too is a product of Tulsa. After returning to her hometown, she took workshops with bakers like Sarah Owens and Tara Jensen, ran a seminal bread program at Residing Kitchen Farm & Dairy (co-owned by Cox’s fellow James Beard nominee, chef Lisa Becklund, together with Linda Ford), and finally launched her personal lessons. After a Thanksgiving break-up left Cox with loaves to do away with, she launched her first unbiased bread sale from her porch. In 2022, an Instagram follower in close by Bartlesville messaged her a couple of secondhand bread oven, which grew to become the earliest inkling of Nation Chook.
“I like that I could possibly be a part of her leaping off,” says Becklund, who, in a full circle second, attended the awards alongside Cox as a finalist within the Excellent Chef class. “However she did the work. She did the analysis and had the eagerness. I like seeing her success.”Tulsa has been constructing momentum towards a Beards win for just a few years now. Town has produced no less than 15 nominees since 2022, as inventive eating places have pushed arduous to evolve the native palate — not a lot “elevating” it, however increasing what’s doable in a spot like this.
“Tulsa’s meals scene has actually come a good distance,” Cox says. “Once I first moved again 11 years in the past, individuals would rave a couple of restaurant, and I’d go strive it and be like, actually? Now there are eating places I like to recommend to individuals wholeheartedly.” She rattles off locations like Il Seme, Cow and Cabbage, India Palace, Mandarin Style, Tina’s (which serves Cox’s fried pie), Espresso at Heirloom, Ava June, Farm Bar, and the brand new meals truck startup Previous Canine.
“Lots of people from the coasts have moved inland, and I feel their expectations for meals have been increased, and they also have allowed the cooks and restaurateurs right here to enhance,” Becklund says. “The opposite factor that can’t be overstated is that Instagram opened up the world to cooks and cooks in remoted areas. I feel it form of shut down the gatekeepers.”
However the metropolis’s success can’t be attributed to outsiders. Because of its agrarian roots, Tulsa is imbued with a sure form of “prairie populism.” Cooks like Becklund are pleased to assist the following era succeed, whereas locals are wanting to assist homegrown ideas, whilst they break molds.
“I actually assume it’s concerning the coronary heart,” Cox says, evoking a definition of “heartland” that describes far more than Tulsa’s place on the map. “In Tulsa, individuals are drawn to that feeling of coronary heart and drive, and making one thing and placing it on the market to be shared and seen.”
Cox has felt empowered by assist from her neighbors since bringing house the town’s first James Beard Award, however the second additionally comes with a sure weight.
“You understand, the additional up individuals construct you, the additional down it’s important to go,” she says. “It does really feel like lots of stress, and I’m only a human.” She doesn’t know some other cooks who’ve introduced house their metropolis’s first James Beard, but when she did, she says, “I feel I’d ask them, ‘How lengthy is it going to really feel like this?’”
Even earlier than the win, demand was overwhelming. “Anytime we get any little little bit of media, like after the New York Occasions point out, and after the [James Beard] nomination course of, we get an inflow of latest individuals,” she says. New guests may really feel annoyed after touring to the bakery to strive an merchandise, solely to seek out it offered out. “They won’t essentially know what we’re all about. And we’re not for everyone; we will’t be, and we shouldn’t be.”
To date, she’s navigated the inflow of consideration with equal components pleasure and trepidation. “Proper now, we’re simply centered on sustaining our high quality.” Whereas some cooks’ first intuition could be to scale, Cox’s is to attend and see. In a tradition that too usually insists that enterprise homeowners obtain demand with open arms, scrambling to create extra provide, the tiny Nation Chook retailer itself retains the crew in verify with actual manufacturing limitations. “It’s by no means about making extra,” she says. “It’s all the time been about making higher — and that expectation is what provides me anxiousness.”
To the locals who fear this could be the tip of their entry to Nation Chook, Cox encourages them to be affected person, and factors to on-line ordering as a means across the line. “It’s going to be arduous for a minute,” she says. “But it surely’s not all the time going to be like this.”
Cox is correct — in additional methods than one. With the best way Tulsa’s eating scene goes, Nation Chook gained’t be the one James Beard winner for lengthy. She’s already wanting ahead to seeing what “inventive, enjoyable, scrappy issues pop up” within the subsequent couple years. Within the meantime, after a well-earned summer time break, Cox will buckle down once more.
“Whereas engaged on the farm, Lisa and I used to say, ‘The reward for arduous work is simply extra arduous work.’ I’ve been occupied with that so much this week.”
