This month, one of North Carolina’s most famous restaurants launched its latest evolution.
It’s been 20 years since the Chef & the Farmer first opened in Kinston, bringing fine dining ambitions to the small Eastern North Carolina town.
Chef Vivian Howard’s flagship restaurant has evolved in major ways over those two decades, but remains one of North Carolina’s most adored dining destinations.
This month, Howard brought back regular dinner service to Chef & the Farmer, reopening the restaurant weekly on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
“When we closed Chef & the Farmer after the pandemic, I said that if I were to reopen it, it would be thoughtful and would be based on what made sense for people who worked here, and made sense for the moment in time,” Howard said in an Instagram announcement. “That has taken several phases.”
Howard has nicknamed this latest iteration of the restaurant “Chef New.”
Chef & the Farmer menu
The format will be three courses for around $60, with the menu changing each week. Howard handwrites the menus, which will generally include three starter options, five entrees and three desserts. For now, the new Chef & the Farmer is reservation only.
A recent menu included smoked and fried North Carolina oysters, a pimento cheese-stuffed pickled pepper, a seafood tagliatelle and duck breast with Howard’s famous blueberry barbecue sauce. Desserts included a Carrot cake and a lemon pie borrowed from Howard’s Outer Banks restaurant Theodosia.
Chef & the Farmer had closed in 2022 during the COVID pandemic.
For more than a year, Howard has been operating “The Kitchen Bar,” a one-weekend-a-month dinner series for around 20 people. Tickets are $300 for seven courses, with Howard herself introducing and serving the dishes and swapping stories with guest. The Kitchen Bar is sold out through May and will continue.
Howard also added the casual restaurant The Counter in the space, which has been serving many of the classic dishes from Chef & the Farmer. That concept will change in the near future as a kind of counter-service fast casual restaurant.
‘A Chef’s Life’
Chef & the Farmer rose to prominence and acclaim with help from the Emmy-winning PBS series “A Chef’s Life.” The show followed Howard and her family as they operated the restaurant and highlighted distinctive ingredients and foodways in Eastern North Carolina, like sauerkraut made from collard greens and the creation of the blueberry barbecue sauce.
Through the success of the restaurant, Howard ascended into the ranks of the celebrity chef, putting a spotlight on Kinston and Lenoir County. While her restaurant has evolved to meet a changing moment, she said it was important that Chef & the Farmer continued in some way.
“If you watched A Chef’s Life, you saw that running Chef & the Farmer was an all-consuming, really stressful proposition,” Howard said. “I think it’s not surprising to people that I didn’t want to carry that burden the rest of my life. But at the same time, I feel a real responsibility to this community and Eastern North Carolina. Chef & the Farmer is not just a restaurant for people.”
The Kitchen Bar
With the Kitchen Bar, Howard said she’s drawn so much inspiration from interacting with diners.
“I’ve gotten so much out of it, professionally and personally,” she said.
While Kitchen Bar is a fine dining blowout meal, the new Chef & the Farmer mirrors the same structure, but at a more accessible price point.
“It’s kind of like dinner and a movie,” Howard said.
Howard’s parents John and Scarlett Howard, who featured prominently in the run of “A Chef’s Life,” can still always get a table.
“They have a standing reservation whenever they want,” Howard said.
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