Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel was born and raised in Houston. After graduating from the University of Houston\u2019s Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management, she moved to Spain, where she fell in love with ingredient-driven cooking. Upon her return stateside, she packed up her car and drove to Chicago, spending a couple of years cooking at Lula Caf\u00e9 before heading off to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY.<\/p>\n
With a formal culinary education under her belt, Tracy went on to cook her way through award-winning restaurants across New York City, including Cru, Del Posto, and Blue Hill New York, before becoming a sous chef at Danny Meyer\u2019s Gramercy Tavern under James Beard Outstanding Chef winner Mike Anthony. In 2015, she was tapped to be part of the opening team at Untitled at the Whitney. It was there that she met her husband and business partner, Arjav.<\/p>\n
In July 2021, Tracy and Arjav opened Birdie\u2019s, a small restaurant and wine bar in East Austin with a fine dining-caliber menu and counter-service format, marking the couple\u2019s first solo venture and Tracy\u2019s first crack at running her own kitchen. In homage to Tracy\u2019s longstanding love of fresh ingredients, its menu consists of simple, seasonally inspired food that takes heavy cues from French and Italian cooking. Birdie\u2019s represents their shared vision for a reimagined restaurant model that places sustainability and equity at its core. Its team-centric business model, which includes a 3.5% health and wellness fee on all checks and generous paid time off, has established it as a leader in Austin. In 2023, Birdie\u2019s was named \u7f8e\u98df\u8207\u7f8e\u9152<\/em>\u2019s Restaurant of the Year; Tracy was later nominated by the James Beard Foundation Awards for \u201cBest Chef: Texas\u201d (2024). Before that, in 2022, Birdie\u2019s was named one of Bon App\u00e9tit<\/em>\u2019s and Esquire<\/em>\u2019s \u201cBest New Restaurants in America,\u201d and it was on \u300a\u7d10\u7d04\u6642\u5831\u300b<\/em>\u2019 \u201cRestaurant List\u201d 2021. Tracy is honored to be a member of World Central Kitchen\u2019s Chef Corps and when outside the kitchen, enjoys spending time with Arjav, their baby boy, and their dogs, Wally and Lola.<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":8250,"template":"","class_list":["post-5331","chef","type-chef","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southernsmoke.org\/zh_tw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chef\/5331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southernsmoke.org\/zh_tw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chef"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southernsmoke.org\/zh_tw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chef"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southernsmoke.org\/zh_tw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southernsmoke.org\/zh_tw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}