Natoncks Metsu serves up Indigenous cuisine to the Puget Sound region

Published 1:42 pm Wednesday, March 25, 2026

When it comes to everyday meals, it often goes unnoticed that some of the most delicious foods and beverages can be found right in our own verdant backyards — from stinging nettles to foraged mushrooms, the ancestral Duwamish lands we live on are abundant with food right in plain sight.

Chef Jason Vickers of Natoncks Metsu, an Indigenous catering company, wants to bring this traditional abundance to your front door.

Based in Renton, Natoncks Metsu is actually one of a handful of Indigenous kitchens in the area (like Liiv For Flavor) that are dedicated to serving Native-inspired meals to tables throughout the Puget Sound region.

“We’re like the epicenter of Indigenous cooking in Seattle now,” said Vickers, who is of the Hassanamisco Band of the Nipmuc Nation based in current day Massachusetts where he was born. Vickers moved to West Seattle when he was six years old with his family, where he took his first steps into a career where he was feeding others.

“I grew up in Seattle and I grew up at Pike Place Market. It was so exciting, I just grew up in that part of the world, watching farmers move their food,” said Vickers.

Vickers worked a lot of different restaurant jobs, which included being a dishwasher at an Italian eatery in Ballard, working in restaurants around Pike Place, and working for prominent chefs throughout the area.

“As a person in recovery, I like to share stories like this so other chefs know that they’re not alone,” said Vickers, who added that substance abuse is common in many restaurant kitchens.

“As a cook, I abused drugs, had spent time as an unhoused person and that all ended with a period of incarceration,” he said. “While I was incarcerated, I was taken in by the Indigenous men inside and I was given a lot of love by the cultural community. Those guys saw there was something that I could do and they would say, ‘This isn’t for you, you have a skill.’”

When Vickers returned home, he worked for a re-entry organization in Seattle. During the height of COVID, he worked to bring food “from farm to folks in need” with Farmer Frog, a Snohomish County-based nonprofit that once served food to an estimated 1.5 million Washington tables before officially shuttering its doors in early March from federal and state funding freezes, budget cuts, county regulations and the devastating December floods in Snohomish Valley.

Vickers said that when he was working with Farmer Frog, his bosses told him that they saw his passion as a chef. He decided to strike out on his own, leading to the creation of Natoncks Metsu, which means “Feeding My Cousins” in Nipmuc.

However, Vickers is never on his own.

While his Indigenous roots come from his father, he is Italian on his mother’s side and learned how to make Italian meals early on, all skills that he still uses in his cooking today. Vickers said that, having grown up as an urban Native, he didn’t have a lot of knowledge of his Indigenous history and culture. As his career grew, so did his passion to learn how to make traditional Indigenous meals, especially as he began to experience a more healthy lifestyle.

“I’ve been given the gift through my elders and it’s been exciting to me as a chef, midway through my career, to be exposed to hundreds of new ingredients because everything has a story,” he said.

Natoncks Metsu opened in the spring of 2023, and it has been full speed ahead since then, said Vickers, whose catering and meal prep business continues to grow.

The menu offers Indigenous ingredients that are as local as possible, though Vickers said he likes to marry traditional foods from across the country. “I use a lot of plant medicines and roots, I harvest in-home territory from back east, like sassafras root and Navajo blue corn from the Navajo reservation, and grains and flowers harvested in the Midwest,” he said.

The menus also offer tribal-caught salmon meals, bison stews, creamy nettle dressings, Wojapi waffles and truly inspiring beverages like chilled Elderberry Rosemary Indigenous Kool-Aid, Lumminade, Cedar Cider or Nettle Mint Tea. Vickers said that he not only likes to source his ingredients from as many Indigenous sources as possible throughout the country, but he also forages in his own backyard.

Recently, Vickers and his team foraged through parts of West Seattle, bringing home a bounty of fresh, green nettles to make teas, dressings and pesto, which he said is inspired by his Italian side and his Indigenous side.

“I’m passionate about leaning into traditional family things and adding Indigenous things to it,” said Vickers.

Along with catering, meal prep services and gift boxes, Natoncks Metsu has recently introduced its own line of soda syrups. Designed with mocktails, cocktails, sodas, teas, marinades, dressings and desserts in mind, these syrups come from creating special handmade sodas at Pow Wows and Indigenous events throughout the Pacific Northwest — and now Vickers wants to share them with all of his cousins, i.e. everyone.

The syrups include “Indigie Kool-Aid,” made from dried hibiscus flowers, fresh press lime juice and sugar, and “Salish Style,” which is made from tangerine juice, sugar and “fresh young cedar tips.”

With an expanding menu, Natoncks Metsu not only serves clients and customers throughout the Greater Seattle area, they are also the in-house caterers to the Seattle Torrent, Washington’s Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) team.

Vickers said that his team will cook the Torrent’s meals in their downtown Renton kitchen and then deliver the food and beverages to Climate Pledge Arena for the team.

“It’s so cool to be in the facility space and watch the players practice and hear them talk about their experiences in the league,” he said. “Some of them won at the Olympics this year, so it’s been great seeing them get a lot of attention.”

Vickers said that as his business grows and more people get introduced to Indigenous meals, his goals in the next few years are to continue sharing stories, teaching cooking classes and more.

“Ultimate dream, my ultimate goal is to create, in the Greater Seattle area, a longhouse devoted to sharing Indigenous food culture from all over the place,” said Vickers. “A place for tribal foragers, hunters and fishermen to come and process their catches. I want to support those things in our community.”

For information on catering, meal prep, buying soda syrups and more, visit natoncksmetsu.com. To keep up with where Vickers and his team are sharing their meals next, follow them on Instagram @natoncks_metsu.