There’s no dearth of small talk when the 67-year-old server known as Vitantonio is working the floor at Genki Sushi’s Kapahulu restaurant.
"I enjoy talking to people," he says. "And I really enjoy working with young people. I’ll never recapture my youth, but being around them makes me feel young."
Yet, for all of the menu tips, clever quips and other pearls that slip his lips, there is much more to the man behind the fancy name tag than there appears.
For starters, his name isn’t really Vitantonio. He copped that exotic nom de guerre from Formula One driver Vitantonio Liuzzi. His real name is Beau Cox, and what he’s experienced in a life spent on far-flung shores is at least as interesting as the Wikipedia-worthy life of a celebrity race car driver.
Cox was born and raised in New York, moving from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to rural Ithaca as a young child. He recalls his childhood on the family farm as both idyllic and instructive.
"You learn a lot about responsibility when it’s 30-below outside and you’re lugging buckets of water for the horses at 6:30 in the morning," he says.
In college Cox studied physics. After graduation he decided he wanted to do something completely different. So he joined the Marines and spent 13 months in Vietnam.
Cox described his tour of duty as "99 percent boredom and one-half of 1 percent sheer terror."
After returning home, Cox began working with computers — "these unwieldy things the size of a Starbucks," he recalls — eventually landing in Hawaii in 1974.
Cox built a career providing computer services to financial institutions and other businesses. He retired nine years ago, but not for long.
Cox got a job at Genki, a place he and his wife frequently visited.
Cox says he enjoys the friendships he’s made with longtime customers, treasures the hugs he gets from tots and savors the "exhausted elation" he feels after he and his young co-workers power through a long, hard shift together.
"As long as I can keep up and do my job, I’m happy," he says.
