Cat Cox’s breadmaking adventure began in her home kitchen. Less than six years later, she stood in a velvet-draped ballroom in Chicago, James Beard medal around her neck, repping her hometown.
This week, Cat Cox, owner and head baker behind Country Bird Bakery, stepped onstage in Chicago to accept her James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker. The James Beard Awards—often called the Oscars of the food world—represent the highest honor in American culinary arts.
Cox’s journey in and out of the restaurant biz follows a familiar culinary loop, a la “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” In Marfa, Texas—by way of NYC—she bartended and eventually took a job in the kitchen of one of the only nice restaurants in town, fast-tracking through the ranks to chef de cuisine. Growing weary of the late-night restaurant grind, she returned home to Tulsa, briefly pivoting to garden education (for elementary school kids, no less).
But another kitchen beckoned, this time at the much-beloved Living Kitchen Farm & Dairy, led by culinary dynamos chef Lisa Becklund and her partner, Linda Ford. While Cox was baking loaves for guests at Living Kitchen’s farm dinners, she started experimenting—smoking grains, fermenting porridges, and dreaming up whimsical concoctions. Guests clamored for her unforgettable loaves and momentum began to build. She stored dough in her garage and baked in her home kitchen to fulfill orders for a monthly bread club that soon became a weekly ordeal. She hosted popular sourdough breadmaking classes, and provided her signature baked goods to Tulsa’s finest restaurants. Finally in 2022, Cox secured her own little storefront along Studio Row where Country Bird Bakery hatched.
A micro-but-mighty sourdough-focused operation that’s open just two days a week, Country Bird bakes like a classic Parisian boulangerie, sells out like a trendy Brooklyn bakery, yet bursts at the seams with Oklahoma soul. Throngs of baked good enthusiasts show up and wait in queue each of those days, buying out every crumb of the bakery’s gloriously laminated pastries and deep-flavored, long-fermented loaves. Cox’s breads, pastries, and hearty confections have an easy precision buoyed by unexpected flavor combinations like hot honey ricotta bear claw with lion’s mane mushrooms, or classics like the robust honey oat porridge loaf. For all its popularity and national acclaim, this humble little bakery has heart.
Cox is now one of just three Oklahomans and the only Tulsan to ever win a James Beard award. (Florence Kemp, owner of Florence’s Restaurant won in 2022; Andrew Black executive chef of Grey Sweater in 2023, both from Oklahoma City.) But she isn’t the only one putting Oklahoma on culinary radars this year. The James Beard 2025 semifinalists include Tulsa's Elliot Nelson and Noche Woodfired Grill & Agave Bar. Lisa Becklund, the convivial gourmand behind Living Kitchen, FarmBar, Il Seme, and Cow & Cabbage, was also a finalist for Outstanding Chef, her third such nomination. Even though Becklund didn't snag a medal this year, it’s not an overstatement that Tulsa’s growing culinary spotlight owes much to the foundation she’s helped build by nurturing new chefs, championing local foodways, and showing what’s possible when talent and tenacity meet.
