He’s not open today. Won’t be open tomorrow, either.
Nope, you and your palate will have to wait until 4 p.m. Wednesday for the Vagabond Kitchen to re-open at 4 p.m.
“We used to be open for 13 services per week, and now we’re open for five, and I am still working 60ish hours per week,” said Matt Welsch, otherwise known throughout the Upper Ohio Valley as the Vagabond Chef. “We are doing very well with five services per week because we’ve really focused on what we do very well and very right. That has increased the proportion of our profit, and that absolutely needed to happen.
“In the beginning, I was trying to do something to please everyone, and that just didn’t work, but I guess that was a necessary process to get to where we are now,” he said. “But now is the time for what works, so that is what we are doing.”
His eatery, the Vagabond Kitchen, initially opened in the McLure Hotel before circling the west side of the city of Wheeling before finding its final resting place directly across Market Street at the former Thom McAn, the former Domino’s, the former Nogales, and the former Tiki Hut Restaurant.
And all the while, Welsch has entertained a particular conversation with a number of local residents, and it always goes a little something like this:
Hi Vagabond Chef, my name is Pete, and I really want to open a restaurant.
“Do you really like to cook, Pete?”
I do.
“Then you should keep enjoying cooking and not open a restaurant.
“That is my advice to everyone who says anything close to me, and that is because it is the hardest thing that you could ever do, and you have to be willing and able for it to take over every aspect of your life,” Welsch said. “And I tell them that it’s going to be the most difficult thing they have ever done, period. When they don’t seem to believe me, I repeat it. And if they come up with something else, I repeat it again.
“I am so fortunate that I get to have my family now that I am eight years into the Vagabond Kitchen because it would not have worked at any other time in my life. I could not have sustained it both at an earlier age with everything I was trying to do with the restaurant when it was just me in this world,” he said. “I believe I lived in Wheeling for five years before I did anything in Wheeling, and that’s not an exaggeration.”
Place to Place
His roots are in Marshal County, and he tried to be normal.
Following high school, he did college, and then Pittsburgh, and then he tried other things to remain home, close to his parents and to his friends. And then?
Idaho. A ski lodge. And a plethora of stops between here and there and there and here.
“I was looking for something, and I wasn’t sure what or where it was, to be honest,” Welsch said. “Turns out, it was here all along.”
But it was the “what” that was the biggest question Welsch still needed to answer, and yes, of course, the focus was on his food.
“It’s been a back-and-forth discussion between me and everyone else about what they want to eat and what I want to offer, but a part of this that I am doing has always involved what I have experienced throughout the country,” Welsch said. “But what really dialed it in for me was that I realized I wanted to filter everything through an Appalachian palate. I didn’t realize that until the last couple of years, and I didn’t have the courage to lean into that until the pandemic.
“That’s when I said to myself, ‘Well, we can’t have any fewer customers than what we do now, so we might as well really go for it.’ That’s when I got into doing some things that I really have wanted to do for years, and I took some safe things from the menu because all of a sudden there wasn’t room for them,” he said. “One of the things I’ve done is start to concentrate more on our entrees than the burgers, and we’re being more aggressive culinary-wise. And I haven’t looked back, and I feel really good about it.”
Welsch even hasn’t looked back at Feb. 22, 2018. That is when he appeared on the Food Network’s “Guy’s Grocery Games” and prepared a pork chop topped with a grilled green apple and veal demi-glace blue cheese mac and cheese with crumbled bacon, and cheesy mash potatoes. Now, immediately following the airing of Welsch’s $20 000 prized entrée, the meal was featured on the Vagabond Kitchen’s menu.
And then it was removed.
“Ya know, it probably should be on our menu every single day, and if I were simply a business owner, it would be. But, since I am a chef, too, I want to do different things, and I want to make space for different things,” Welsch said honestly. “I just can’t keep doing the same things if I am going to do this the way I want and need to do this. I would love to bring back our Pork Porterhouse, too, because that meal was very, very popular, but there’s only so much space, and we’re making this stuff fresh every day.
“You never know, day to day really, what we’ll develop next for the menu, but one thing is for sure is that I and my crew are always thinking about the next best menu item because that’s the goal,” he said. “Sure, we have burgers on the menu, but they are not the typical burgers, and the same can be said about everything on the menu because that’s the goal.”
Moving Mountains
Getting free advertising hasn’t been an issue for Welsch since his Wheeling venture began in 2015, and that’s because he’s a pleasant person with a lot of tales to tell who has a way of always appearing a little odd in the most desirable ways.
Plus, the possible headlines?
“Vagabond Finds New Home …”
“Wheeling Chef Fills Plate …”
“Welsch Gives Hollywood a Taste of Wheeling …”
The guy has made it easy, really.
That’s why, just about five years ago, the Vagabond Chef believed his biggest problem was the fact the Greyhound bus dropped passengers in close proximity to his front doors because, far too often, they would pass time until their connection would roll through by camping out along his 12th Street walls.
But then something called a “streetscape” was to combine with a massive, three-year interstate project to shutter downtown Wheeling until, of course, a coronavirus pandemic closed everything suddenly in mid-March 2020.
“I remember being worried about how the Interstate 70 construction was going to affect our business, and then that became nothing because the virus shut down everything, but yet we survived. We had some help, sure, but I guess I’m too stubborn, too,” Welsch said. “I’ve been very determined from the very beginning, and that’s why, when there was the one time when I didn’t have enough cash for payroll, but I had some CDs, so I cashed them, and everyone got paid. But now I know I can’t do that again because I don’t have any more CDs.
“But now I have my family, and if you want to talk about finding a way to make everything work, there it is. Now I know I have to work even harder so I can provide for my son and his mother,” he said. “There’s the motivation right there.”
That’s why, most likely, the Vagabond Chef snorted a quick, two-word retort when asked, “What about this two-year streetscape project?”
“Bring it! I challenge the world to bring us any challenges that we cannot surmount at this point. We have been through so much,” Welsh insisted. “The Vagabond Kitchen has been through so many things, and we’re still here churning out better food than we’ve ever churned out before. I fully believe in what we are doing right now.
“So, this streetscape? Bring it, man. We’ll get through it because people are just going to be that hungry for what we have to offer.”
