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.

Photo by Dayo Kosoko

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.