There are chefs who cook to impress, chefs who cook to win, and then there are chefs who cook to belong. Vivian Howard has spent the better part of her adult life doing the last one. She belongs to eastern North Carolina and to the small town of Kinston, a place that has weathered fires, floods, plant closures, and long stretches when hope felt like a rumor. She belongs to the farms, the fields, and the families whose stories turn up in her menus with the regularity of summer tomatoes. She belongs to a generation of Southern cooks who see food not as nostalgia but as living memory, something shaped by migration, scarcity, invention, and the stubborn will to thrive.
Howard’s public biography is familiar to many. She is the chef who opened Chef & the Farmer in downtown Kinston in 2006. She is the storyteller who led audiences into the kitchens and tobacco barns of her region through the PBS series A Chef’s Life, a show that earned a Peabody Award and national attention for eastern North Carolina foodways. She is the author of Deep Run Roots, a cookbook that reads like a family album and a field guide. She later hosted Somewhere South, a PBS series that explored the cross-cultural threads running through Southern dishes. All of this is true and notable, yet the center of the story is simpler. Vivian Howard has used food to knit community, one plate and one person at a time.
This profile is not a catalog of accolades. It is a study in method, character, and consequence. It is also a celebration from elevateME Magazine, which exists to shine light on builders, givers, and renewers. Howard is all three. Her career shows how a person can lift a place without leaving it behind, and how a kitchen can become a civic classroom. As we follow her path from Deep Run to New York and home again, we invite readers across North Carolina to consider what it would mean to invest in their own zip codes with the same persistence and faith.
Origin Story, Reframed
Vivian Howard grew up outside Kinston in Deep Run, a rural community where tobacco barns stud the horizon and summer air hums with crickets. After studying at North Carolina State University, she trained at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, staging in influential kitchens and absorbing the tempo of professional cooking. She and her then-husband, artist Ben Knight, moved back to Lenoir County with backing from her parents and a stubborn idea that a destination restaurant could take root on a quiet downtown block. The idea was not trendy. It was audacious. Chef & the Farmer opened in 2006 and committed to sourcing much of its menu within a radius that respected the growers around her.
The restaurant did not simply plate food. It mediated a conversation between past and future. At Chef & the Farmer, collards could be dressed with elegance, sweet potatoes could be treated like jewels, and hogs could be honored for the flavor they brought to a table and a town’s economic memory. Awards followed, along with national press, but the more lasting triumph was local. In a state where small towns have been asked to accept a narrative of decline, Howard set a counter example. Kinston was allowed to be complex. It could carry hard history and still move forward.
The Television Years and the Power of Showing Your Work
In 2013, A Chef’s Life premiered on PBS, taking viewers on a tour of ingredients and traditions that defined the region where Howard works and lives. The series anchored itself in the relationships that make a dish possible, from seed to pot to plate, culminating in a televised body of work that won a Peabody Award in 2014, a distinction that placed Howard in rare company among food hosts. The series also earned Daytime Emmy recognition and James Beard broadcast honors, establishing Howard as a trusted guide to Southern foodways.
Television changed the trajectory of the restaurant and the town. Food tourists arrived who might never have set their GPS for Kinston. Downtown foot traffic grew. Local farmers saw demand rise for crops that were previously pigeonholed as “country.” The show’s signature was its patience. It let grandmothers talk without rush and let farmers describe weather in the terms that really matter. It also showed failure and fatigue. Viewers saw Howard’s kitchen get slammed and saw the toll of small business ownership. That honesty, paired with curiosity, made the storytelling credible.
In 2020, Howard returned to PBS with Somewhere South, a series that looked for the connective tissue that binds communities through food. She traveled the region to investigate shared dishes like dumplings or pickles and, in doing so, charted a map of the South that included Vietnamese, Lumbee, and West African influences, among many others. The show expanded her reach while keeping her center of gravity in North Carolina.
Cookbooks as Cultural Archives
Deep Run Roots arrived in 2016 not as a quick tie-in to television fame but as a rich, deliberate portrait of people and place. It was honored with multiple awards and continues to live on many kitchen counters for good reason. It offers both precise technique and memory. It explains the logic behind the dishes that anchor family tables, while giving cooks permission to improvise. In 2020, Howard published This Will Make It Taste Good, a book built on the concept of “flavor heroes,” concentrated condiments and bases that can transform home cooking with efficiency. The second book reflected a pivot many cooks made during the pandemic, when resourcefulness and pantry intelligence helped households find comfort.
These books are not cookbooks in the retail sense alone. They are public service documents. They record methods and stories that, without attention, risk slipping from common practice. They protect names for things that might otherwise be reduced to a generic supermarket label. They invite readers to value the work of producers and to remember that ingredients are not interchangeable to the people who grow them.
Entrepreneur, Operator, Builder
Howard has never been only a chef. She is a builder of concepts and teams. Over the past decade, she and her partners have launched and reimagined a handful of businesses, each with a distinct role in the regional food scene.
Her Benny’s Big Time Pizzeria in Wilmington gave coastal diners a neighborhood spot and, in recent years, transitioned to leadership under Ben Knight after the couple’s divorce, proof that ventures evolve and partnerships can be repotted to continue growing.
In Charleston, she opened Lenoir and the pastry and coffee counter Handy + Hot, widening the footprint of Eastern North Carolina flavors while adapting to a different city’s energy and traffic patterns. Her knack for translating a rural vernacular into an urbane dining room without sanding off its edges is part of her gift.
Closer to home, Howard has demonstrated a talent for iteration. After the pandemic and a season of transition, she reshaped the original Kinston footprint into The Kitchen Bar at Chef and The Counter at Chef, concepts that keep the cadence of hospitality alive on the same stretch of downtown while adjusting to new realities in staffing, costs, and guest expectations. The evolution emphasizes comfort, affordability, and conversation, with menus that distill the soul of her cooking into formats that locals can visit weekly rather than yearly.
Entrepreneurship is often romanticized. Howard’s version is more honest. It includes changing a model when margins demand it, stepping back into the line when the spirit asks for it, and telling the public what is happening in plain language. In a reflective essay for Garden & Gun, she wrote about finding renewed joy by returning to daily kitchen work in Kinston, not as a retreat but as a return to the part of the craft that first claimed her attention.
Innovation with a Neighborhood Heart
If you want to understand Howard’s mix of imagination and practicality, look at Viv’s Fridge, a network of smart refrigerators stocked with prepared meals placed around Eastern North Carolina and, increasingly, in larger markets like Raleigh. The idea solved a simple problem. Guests who loved her food did not always have the time or cash for a full night out. Farmers had product that could be translated into approachable, travel-ready dishes. Viv’s Fridge added a new pathway for both groups to meet in the middle. The expansion across the region shows how a small idea, executed with care, can knit together customers who value good ingredients and straightforward comfort.
During the pandemic, when books could not be toured and dining rooms were closed or constrained, Howard and her team also tested unusual ways to connect with audiences, from drive-through book events to pantry kits built around the “flavor heroes” of her second cookbook. That experimentation preserved jobs and taught lessons that continue to inform operations.
The Work Behind the Work
There is a habit in food writing to focus on the plate. Howard keeps pulling our view back to the people who make the plate possible. She has insisted, in every medium, that the chain of value is only as strong as its most vulnerable link. That chain includes pickers, slaughterhouses, drivers, line cooks, dishwashers, servers, and bookkeepers. The show A Chef’s Life introduced many of these voices, and Howard’s restaurants continue to employ and train workers who might not see themselves acknowledged in media coverage of “the food scene.”
The outcomes are concrete. When Chef & the Farmer first lit up Gordon Street, a thin parade of restaurants and galleries joined it. The city saw visitors arrive who left money in cash registers all over downtown. Local purveyors saw orders increase. The effect is cumulative and contagious. It also made clear that sustained renewal takes more than a single flagship. It requires continuity, apprenticeships, patient capital, and the humility to listen when the community asks for adjustments. Howard’s willingness to adjust is part of why the story has continued.
A Southern Lens that Includes the World
One of the most valuable contributions Howard has made to North Carolina’s cultural life is a wider lens on the South. Somewhere South treated the Southern table as a meeting place where migration leaves fingerprints on recipes and where memory and novelty coexist. That premise invited viewers to reconsider what “authentic” means. It is not static, and it is not a marketing slogan. It is a living conversation that honors origin and welcomes adaptation. In practice, that means dumplings can belong to Lumbee cooks and to Chinese immigrants, and both lineages can teach us something essential about resourcefulness and care.
This approach is not academic. It shows up in her menus, where a pickle is never just an accent and a pot of field peas comes with an explanation of who grew them and what season made them taste the way they do. By narrating the plate, Howard makes North Carolinians more literate in their own food system. Literacy breeds respect, and respect improves the odds that traditions will be carried forward by the next generation.
Resilience, In Practice
It is easy to tell neat success stories. Howard’s real one includes detours and reinventions. A fire once damaged Chef & the Farmer. The pandemic shuttered dining rooms and upended supply chains. Personal transitions required fresh boundaries and new leadership structures. The Wilmington pizzeria’s evolution under Ben Knight is one example of how business families can reorganize without burning down what they built. The launch of The Kitchen Bar and The Counter is another example of answering a new season with a revised model. These are not pivots for the sake of novelty. They are reminders that stewardship sometimes means pruning so that the plant can fruit again.
Howard’s voice in public has remained steady through these changes. She explains decisions without theatrics, credits her teams, and treats her audience like neighbors. That posture has earned trust. It also gives other small town founders a blueprint for speaking plainly to their communities when circumstances change.
The Outer Banks Chapter and a Statewide Map
In recent seasons, Howard’s map has grown. Her website lists Theodosia in Duck on the Outer Banks, alongside the Kinston concepts and the Charleston duo. Together, these outposts create a corridor from coastal sand to inland fields and down to the Lowcountry, each location interpreting the same core vocabulary. The network is not a chain. It is a constellation, and North Carolina gets to claim the brightest stars.
The meaning of this expansion is not bragging rights. It is the accumulation of small opportunities for North Carolinians to see their produce and their stories represented in rooms that feel special but not exclusive. When a family orders pizza at the coast and tastes a tomato that came from a farm they can actually visit, that is culture working as intended.
Leadership and the Next Bench
Another lesson from Howard’s career is the value of bench building. Restaurants are notorious for churn. People enter kitchens for many reasons and leave for many more. Within that reality, Howard has cultivated leaders who can run outlets with autonomy. The pizzeria’s evolution under Knight is one example. The continued stewardship of concepts in Kinston by on-site teams is another. The power of a shared language around ingredients and intent keeps these rooms aligned when the founder cannot be on every service. That language has been broadcast through television, captured in books, and distilled into menu notes. It is a rare three-part archive, one that future chefs can cite when they explain why a potlikker tastes the way it does.
What Elevation Looks Like
elevateME Magazine highlights people who change the altitude of a place. Howard does this in practical ways. She buys from nearby farms. She insists on a visible relationship between a dish and a field. She brings media attention that small towns rarely receive. She builds concepts that are priced for frequent visits rather than anniversaries alone. She documents recipes that traveled through hardship and joy. She invites outsiders into the conversation without making insiders feel like exhibits. When a magazine like ours talks about economic vitality and cultural health, these behaviors are the metrics that matter.
We could count awards and we will, because trophies validate impact. Howard’s Peabody Award for A Chef’s Life, her Emmy recognition, and her James Beard honors confirm that the storytelling and the cooking meet national standards of excellence. Yet the truest measures show up closer to home. They show up in a farmer’s ledger, a dishwasher’s schedule, and a family’s decision to stay in town because work exists that feels purposeful.
Mentorship by Menu
Many cooks cannot leave for culinary school. They learn by eating, by asking, and by watching. Howard’s work across media gives those cooks a curriculum. Deep Run Roots can teach a young pitmaster why sweet potato varieties matter. This Will Make It Taste Good can give a busy parent confidence to turn Tuesday pantry items into something soulful. Somewhere South can help a student understand that identity and cuisine are braided together. The restaurants can offer a first job where the produce has a last name. Together, these pieces form a quiet academy of the South.
The Joy of Return
One of the most moving chapters in Howard’s recent story is her return to hands-on cooking in Kinston. In that Garden & Gun essay, she described recovering the pleasure of daily craft, of choosing peaches, of hearing the line’s rhythm, and of watching a room exhale as plates hit the table. It was not a rejection of television or writing. It was a reminder that food is a contact sport, a choreography that requires bodies in a room. The renewed focus resonated with guests who had missed the intimacy of seeing their chef on the pass, and it provided a reset for teams relieved to find their leader choosing presence over platform.
Kinston is a fitting stage for this work. The town has known boom and bust. It has an arts district because artists saw beauty in bricks others ignored. It has a minor league ballpark that teaches kids to cheer together. It has a museum where a replica ironclad tells stories of resilience. Restaurants cannot fix everything, but they can create a nightly census of hope. Every person who decides to celebrate within town rather than drive to a distant chain is casting a vote for the future. Howard’s rooms have collected those votes for years.
What Comes Next
Howard’s public calendar continues to fill. Her website now lists The Kitchen Bar and The Counter in Kinston, the Charleston duo, the Outer Banks outpost, and the prepared meal network that keeps growing. She remains a sought-after voice in national conversations about Southern food. She has the credibility to advocate for fair pay in kitchens, sensible scheduling that respects family life, and purchasing practices that help small farms scale sustainably. As she chooses new projects, each one has the chance to bend the industry toward wisdom.
Our magazine hopes she will keep lending that credibility to conversations about rural America. When an influential chef affirms that good lives can be built outside of major metros, it encourages talent to stay home and build where their grandparents planted. That is not a sentimental wish. It is a strategy for distributing opportunity.
A Playbook for Builders
Readers often ask what they can borrow from a figure like Howard. Here is a brief playbook, drawn from her example.
Root yourself in a place, then listen. She returned to Deep Run and Kinston with open ears. Listening allowed her to see what was already present and to build with it, not against it. Document the culture that feeds you. Books, television, and online essays are not vanity projects. They are archives and invitations. Iterate the business to match the moment. The shift to The Kitchen Bar and The Counter shows respect for new realities without abandoning core values. Invent distribution that suits your neighbors. Viv’s Fridge met people where they already were, on their way home from work or the beach. Share the stage. A Chef’s Life and Somewhere South elevated farmers, fishers, and home cooks. Success is sturdier when it is shared.
Our mission is to tell stories that motivate action. We cover founders who do not wait for permission to serve their communities. Vivian Howard’s career is a case study in action. She turned a vacant building into a gathering place. She turned local ingredients into national conversation. She turned obstacles into new formats that employ people and feed families. Most of all, she turned love of place into a durable public good.
We also believe in celebrating while challenging. North Carolina needs more restaurants that pay well, more farms that sell directly to kitchens, and more media that resists caricature. We hope Howard keeps pushing the state in those directions, and we hope many others join her. Elevation is not a solo climb. It is a rope team.
Closing Scene
Picture a night in Kinston. Cars angle into parking spaces along Gordon Street. The door swings open at The Kitchen Bar and guests drift toward the hum of conversation. A cook drizzles sorghum over cornbread and hands the plate forward. A farmer pulls up a stool and orders the special, then smiles when he recognizes his peppers in the sauce. A teenager washing glasses watches the pass, waiting for a chance to move to prep. Someone at the corner decides to send a text to friends to come join them. A town collects itself around a meal.
Vivian Howard would tell you that she did not do this alone. She would name her teams and her farmers and her guests. She would also tell you that towns save themselves when neighbors show up. This is what her work teaches. That showing up matters. That food is a language for gratitude. That a plate can hold courage. That a chef can make a state feel more like home.
From our desk at elevateME Magazine, we offer thanks for the example and an invitation to our readers. Find the places in your county where people are building with the same mix of grit and grace, then choose them. If you want more of this kind of reporting, more deep dives into the people who give North Carolina its flavor, subscribe, share, and send us names. We have many more stories to tell, and we plan to tell them with the same care Vivian Howard brings to a summer tomato.
