Story by Alexandra Mortati | Photos courtesy of Aimée McElroy
This article is part of PMQ Pizza’s “12 Women to Watch“ series, in partnership with Women in Pizza and in celebration of Women’s Pizza Month. It’s an expanded version of the profile on Aimée McElroy featured in PMQ’s March 2026 issue.
Aimée McElroy, owner of CatBird in Asbury Park, New Jersey, didn’t plan to build her life around pizza. In fact, when she began her career, she was firmly rooted in the art world, working in museums and galleries in New York City and pursuing her own creative work as a sculptor. But the intense pace and pressures of gallery life eventually pushed her to look for another outlet for creativity—one that would engage her hands as much as her imagination.
And one that would bring her joy and empower her to spread that joy to others.
“I started my first career in the art world,” McElroy recalls. “I’m a sculptor and an artist, and I worked in museums and galleries. In the mid-2000s I was working at galleries in New York, and it was incredibly stressful. I started feeling frustrated. My job involved taking care of people and creating exhibitions, and at some point I realized I wanted to be creative on a different level—on the artist’s level.”
That search for a new kind of artistic expression led her to the kitchen. McElroy enrolled in cooking classes at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan, curious to see where the path might lead. Then she signed up for a bread-baking course at the International Culinary Center—the institution that had grown out of the French Culinary Institute.
By the second day of that course, something clicked. “I knew I wanted to quit my job and become a bread baker,” she says. “I knew I found it.”
Soon after, McElroy left the gallery world behind. She landed a job at Il Buco Alimentari in New York as an assistant bread baker. And as often happens, bread eventually led her to pizza.
Discovering the Fire
McElroy had already become fascinated with wood-fired baking years earlier. During travels around the United States in 2007 and 2008, she visited bakeries on the West Coast that used brick ovens and wood fire to produce rustic breads. “I spent a year at Porta and learned how to cook pizza in their oven while continuing my bread baking path.” And that experience opened the door for her next big move. In 2016, she co-founded Medusa Stone Fired, a small restaurant with seating for just 25 guests. It soon developed a fiercely loyal following for its wood-fired pizzas and creative menu.
“I had a female business partner who was more of the chef-de-cuisine, while I was more the breadmaker and pizzamaker,” McElroy says. “I’d rather be behind the line than anywhere else.”
Medusa was tiny, but it became an important creative outlet for McElroy—her culinary studio, in a sense. “Those first six years were very much about me creating my own thing and my art,” she says. “Medusa was my studio.”
That restaurant survived one of the toughest periods the industry has ever seen. During the pandemic, McElroy’s team pivoted quickly and kept operating. Then, just as the restaurant world was beginning to reopen, everything unraveled. “Our landlord wouldn’t renew our lease,” she says. “We’d made it through such a wild, crazy time and to have to close it at the end—when everything else was reopening—it was heartbreaking.”
At the same time, McElroy received another devastating piece of news. “I was also diagnosed with breast cancer,” she says. “The timing was wild. I ended up having a double mastectomy.”
A Forced Time-Out
The simultaneous loss of her restaurant and the demands of cancer treatment forced McElroy to pause and reflect. “It helped me see all the things I wanted to focus on,” she says. “It was a forced time-out where I couldn’t cook and I didn’t have a restaurant.”
For someone accustomed to working constantly—often directly in front of the oven—being sidelined was disorienting. “If I can’t stand in front of a pizza oven, what am I going to do?” she remembers thinking.
But an unexpected opportunity soon appeared. McElroy’s former boss from the New York art world had about a year and a half left on a gallery lease and asked if she could come help close the space. Returning to that environment after more than a decade was eye-opening. “I hadn’t been back in 10 years, and it felt like I was a kid again,” she says. “There were all these new pizza places and new cuisines. People were taking everything to the next level.”
For McElroy, the time away from her own kitchen offered a fresh perspective. “What I say about Medusa is that I was the artist who never came out of her studio,” she explains. “When I finally came out, I realized I was ready on a different level. I was ready to take the next step even though I didn’t know what that next step was. I said, ‘I’m going to explore as much as I can.’”
Climbing into the CatBird Seat
Less than a year after Medusa closed, McElroy received a call that would shape the next chapter of her career. An acquaintance had purchased a building in Asbury Park and wanted to build out a restaurant inspired by the spirit of Medusa. McElroy was invited to lead the project.
The new restaurant would become CatBird.
But starting over brought new challenges. The economic ripple effects of the pandemic had driven costs sharply higher across the industry, and McElroy was now responsible for every aspect of the business—from payroll to sourcing ingredients.
Despite those pressures, she remained committed to the food that had built her reputation. The menu includes a lot of the greatest hits from Medusa, she notes. “I can’t lose sight of the food component because my former customers have an expectation of what they want my menu to be,” she points out. “I spent six years really honing that, so it’s not like I want to let go of everything, but I’m reinventing the pizza side of it.”
The Fire That Keeps Burning
For McElroy, the heart of the restaurant still lies in the oven. “In my journey as a pizza maker and small-business owner, my mentality is very much about constantly evolving while doing what makes me happy,” she says. “That’s why I’m cooking on the line every night in front of the oven. Without it, I’m just sad. I just love the fire and the challenges.”
But even a familiar oven can behave differently in a new space. “It’s the same oven, but now the chimney goes straight up, and we’re right by a lake now where the wind changes,” she explains. “Everything has affected [how it bakes].”
Learning the nuances of a wood-fired oven all over again has been humbling. “Once you figure it out, it seems so easy,” she says. “And you can really take for granted how beautiful and wonderful it is because you have this oven that never stops and never turns off. You feed it, and it’s a beautiful circle. That’s why I’m in love with it. It’s a passion that has not faded at all.”
CatBird represents more than just a second restaurant for McElroy—it represents a shift in how she sees her role as a business owner. “Medusa was my studio, and the difference now is that I own a restaurant. You have to prioritize every aspect of the business and your time,” McElroy says. “Those are always the biggest challenges for small business owners.”
Even installing and maintaining equipment has become part of the job. “I’m not just in the food side of things,” she says. “I’m in the contractor side of it, too. I’m building it, painting it, putting the lights in. Learn how to fix your own refrigerator—that is, hands-down, the biggest thing. Learn how to service your equipment, but be humble enough to know when you need to call someone and then leave it to the professional. That’s what I learned the first six years of Medusa—what I could bite off and what I couldn’t.”
‘We Just Want to Spread Joy’
With sole ownership of Catbird comes a different sense of responsibility. “It’s huge and overwhelms me, [sometimes]” McElroy says. “When Medusa closed, I was so heartbroken and angry that my landlord was so uncaring to put all those people out of work. You’re responsible for paying your employees’ rent and your rent. I understand how they all feel. If you do the best that you can and you show up every day and immerse yourself in this thing that you love, then the grand ideas will turn around and be successful. So I have to think positive all the time, even days when I don’t feel like thinking positive.”
That’s why balance is so important, she believes. “You have to make sure that you cultivate yourself. We have to stay strong physically, and that’s the real challenge. I stretch every day. There’s a lot of physical stamina that does not get talked about enough.”
But in the end, McElroy’s prime directive is, simply, cultivating joy. “If I am not joyful and I’m not spreading joy, that’s when I know it’s time [to quit],” she says. “On Halloween, I was a rainbow because I believe that’s what it’s about. At the end of the day, we just want to spread joy, although we can be very serious at the same time. That whole tagline, ‘Made with Love,’ is true. Not only is our food made with love, but it’s made with passion. It’s saying, ‘This is who I am, and I want to share a piece of me.’”
She adds, “Anyone with a restaurant is very unselfish because you take a risk every time you put yourself out there. I have an open kitchen, and that’s the whole point. I’m saying, ‘Welcome to my house. This is my dining room, and you’ve been invited to join us for dinner. You don’t have to come back, or you can return as many times as you want. Let’s just have fun along the way.’ Fun is underrated.”
Alexandra Mortati is the marketing director for Orlando Foods and founder of Women In Pizza, a not-for-profit organization that empowers women in the pizza industry to share their stories, display their talents, inspire innovations, and connect with one another and the world. The article has been edited from the original version that appeared on the Instagram account for Women In Pizza. Click here to learn more about the organization.
