Chef dinner exploring Wichita’s history through food will be eclectic, memorable
This is what happens when chefs catch the history bug.
On Saturday, Odd Fellow Hall’s occasional Chef Collective dinner series returns with a special installment titled “An Ode to Wichita.” It’ll be a nine-course meal designed by a group of seasoned chefs that features dishes that tell the story of Wichita’s history, from the first tribes to settle the land to a famous burger stand that got its start here. Each course will be paired with a craft cocktail.
A ticket to the dinner is $200, but Chef Bill Crites — who designed the event — says it will be worth the price.
“If you want people to come and spend this kind of money, you really have to deliver,” he said. “They’re going to remember this for a long time.”
Odd Fellow Hall, a venue that opened last year in the historic ballroom at 930 W. Douglas that once served as the meeting place of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, launched a dinner series in July 2021 that featured local chefs coming together to create a memorable multi-course meal served in the space.
Crites was among the team of chefs that put the first dinner on, and since then, the space has hosted four more dinners. All have sold out.
The space, which also serves as a wedding and party venue, is booked most weekends throughout the rest of the year, so its managers — Cody Lonergan and Jimmy Vo — decided to squeeze in one last Chef Collective dinner. They turned to Crites, who over the past year has become part of the venue’s team.
Crites invited two non-local chefs to join the kitchen crew for the dinner: Alan Delgado, a Brooklyn-based freelance chef that Crites worked with when he was starting his career in Austin, and Joseph Atwater, a Wichita native who now heads the kitchen at The Savoy in the 21C Hotel in Kansas City. (Vo will also be in the kitchen, and Lonergan will create the cocktail menu.)
In planning the dinner, Crites dove headlong into Wichita history, absorbing as much as he could about the earliest days of what would become Wichita to find inspiration for his ambitious menu. He said he also used for inspiration two recently produced books about Wichita culinary history: my book, “Classic Restaurants of Wichita,” and Joe Stumpe’s book “Iconic Eats of Wichita.”
He designed the courses as a chronological culinary exploration of the city’s history, he said.
The first course, for example, will pay tribute to the Native Americans who settled the land that would one day become Wichita and to the European colonialists who later arrived.
The second course will have a Chisholm Trail theme and pay homage to the cattle drivers who passed through Wichita during that era.
Other courses will reflect the Mexican, German, Lebanese and Vietnamese immigrants who made Wichita their home and influenced its cuisine. Another course will be inspired by a chapter in “Classic Restaurants of Wichita” about the Pan-American Cafe, opened by Chinese immigrants in downtown Wichita in 1917. And a surprise course will recreate the cuisine of one of Wichita’s earliest burger joints, though Crites wants attendees to be surprised by which one.
In any other setting, Crites said with a laugh, a dinner that mixed Native cuisine with Texas barbecue, Vietnamese fare and fast-food milkshakes would seem like utter nonsense, but he and his collaborators are attempting to tell a specific story with their food.
“The menu is completely insane,” Crites said. “It makes sense only through the lens of wanting to understand the culinary history that is here.”
Doors open at 6 p.m. for the dinner, and it starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are still available at oddfellowhall.com
This story was originally published August 22, 2022 at 2:48 PM.
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