Gourmet grit

Underground dining with Joshua Vitt

Chef Joshua Vitt is the guy other caterers call when a client wants unconventional cuisine for their party guests.

“If someone wants a crawfish boil for their wedding reception, or a whole hog cooked in the ground for their birthday, other caterers will refer them to me,” said Vitt, owner of Vitter’s Catering in Tulsa. “I’m the guy just crazy enough to do it.”

Vitt has been in the restaurant world’s orbit for 22 years, and his journey has been almost Homeric in scope. Facing a full-range of challenges, fate-twisting opportunities and plenty of chances to give up, Vitt has always followed his passion for cooking. 

He came from a family that loved to cook and grew up in the kitchen. He took Home Economics in middle school – and not just to hang out with girls. 

At 15, he knew he wanted to work in a restaurant. One night while working as a dishwasher at Western Sizzlin’, his fate as a future chef was sealed.

“Their cook quit and they asked if I wanted to take a run at cooking,” Vitt said. He was a natural, so they moved him from dishwasher to cook. “At 16 years old, I was cooking 90 steaks to order on a Friday night.”

His experience at “the sizzler” set him up for a serious gig at a five-star restaurant. In those times, the chef world was a little different.

“They didn’t care about your feelings then,” says Vitt. “It was OK for the guys to smack you around in the walk-in a little. You had to earn your stripes and do your time.”

But Vitt, as a high schooler, navigated the regimented back of house politics while also learning how to really cook like a chef. After graduation, though, he was done with the food business; but it was not done with him. All of his friends got jobs at the local grocery store, so he decided to do the same. He ended up in the butcher department.

“I learned how to cut meat, back when they still cut meat. The experience taught me so much about fabrication of meats. It’s funny the lessons you learn that you never think you’ll use.”

Next, he added bartending to his repertoire, but he still couldn’t stay out of the kitchen. 

“Even though I was bar managing at night, I was always cooking in a kitchen somewhere,” he said. “I even waited tables. So at a young age, I had been exposed to all areas of a restaurant—from food production and back of house, to bartending and front of house.”

After leveling up for years, he hit a wall while working for a hotel catering department.

“The hotel management told me I couldn’t get any more raises without a degree,” he recalled. “They even offered to pay for school, but I decided to do it on my own because I thought there could be new avenues for me.”

He attended the prestigious Florida Culinary Institute, where he happened upon a new restaurant looking for a sushi chef. 

Vitt wasn’t the only contender for the position, but he made the cut and started training. The young owner was new to being a restaurateur, but had been trained for years by a Japanese sushi master. 

“The way he trained us was the way he was trained by this old guy. Very meticulous, very repetitive, very intense. He taught me everything there is to know about sushi, about Japanese cooking.” 

After only a couple of years, though, the sushi restaurant went belly up. Vitt was again on the hunt for work in Florida, which led him down some unconventional paths. 

He landed a gig as a personal chef for a New York Mets center-fielder during spring training. “I never met the guy. I put the food in the refrigerator and they deposited money into my account.”

Then, Vitt became a personal chef at a wellness and healing center, where energy healing, reiki and special diets were sought out by people battling serious illness. There, he learned about macrobiotic cooking, juicing and vegan diets. 

The wellness center was perhaps ahead of its time and closed its doors in March of 2006. Vitt found himself homeless and jobless. Tired of treading water in Florida, he headed back to Oklahoma, put everything he had learned into practice, and did what he needed to do to survive.

“I ran an illegal, renegade catering out of my house,” he said. 

Every Thursday and Friday, he put his couches out on the front lawn and set up plastic production tables in the living room. He had four home refrigerators in the garage. He washed sheet pans with a garden hose. 

“My wife had had enough of this shit,” Vitt laughed. “I wasn’t legal, so I was losing jobs. It was going nowhere, fast.”

But one strategy for Vitt was working. He and his wife started doing underground dinners in their home every Friday and Saturday. 

Vitt’s most popular dinners featured his sushi, but the dinners began taking on a life of their own. 

“Every dinner, the guests got to choose what the theme would for the next dinner,” he said. “For the last dinner of the year, I would have them vote for their favorite dishes, and we’d do a 22-item buffet–an all around the world collection of all the dishes I had created from all the dinners.”

Vitt got legal and took over operation of the Sun Building’s cafeteria downtown. His catering business began to really take off. That’s when the underground dinners got more extravagant. 

“I think we are the only ones to have done dinner and show pop-ups,” he said. “One time we did a Thai boxing match with Thai classical dancing and Thai buffet.”

The events have toned down a bit over the years, but their sushi nights and Oktoberfest dinners still sell out. However, Vitt has slowed down with the underground dinners. 

“There are so many of these pop-ups, the market is sort of saturated right now,” he explained. “I will still do my sushi nights and private sushi parties. But, for now, it’s time to allow other chefs to take a crack at it.”

For more from Angela, read her article on Livasay Orchards' 50th peach season.