Vivian Howard

Vivian Howard is an American chef, restaurateur, author and television host.

In 2001, she earned her BA in English Language from North Carolina State University.

During her time at NCSU, she studied abroad for a semester in Argentina, as part of a culinary-themed program.

After graduating, Howard moved to New York City and began working in advertising for Grey Worldwide.

She quit after 18 months and started working as a waitress at Voyage restaurant.

Scott Barton, the restaurant's executive chef, became her early mentor.

Howard graduated from the Institute of Culinary Education in NYC in 2004.

She completed an internship at Wylie Dufresne's wd~50 and trained as Chef de Partie at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Spice Market.

Howard married Ben Knight, one of her coworkers at Voyage, and the two started a soup delivery business out of their apartment in Harlem, an effort that included chilling soup in the bathtub.

Despite offers from investors to open a brick and mortar location in New York, the couple agreed to accept Howard's parents' offer to buy a restaurant in Kinston.

Howard and Knight moved to North Carolina in 2005 and opened Chef & the Farmer in 2006 in a downtown building, previously a print shop — and before that, a mule stable.

More than 60% of the ingredients used in the restaurant come from within a 90-mile radius.

The restaurant creates modern interpretations of traditional southern dishes, often collected from members of her family's Eastern North Carolina community.

In 2011, after being concerned that certain food traditions would be lost without documentation, Howard contacted her friend Cynthia Hill, a filmmaker from Eastern North Carolina.

Together, Howard and Hill filmed a pilot.

In 2012, the Chef & the Farmer building caught fire and was rebuilt.

In the summer of 2022, Chef & the Farmer closed with plans to reopen with a different conception.

From 2013 to 2018, Howard hosted the PBS television series A Chef's Life focusing on the ingredients and cooking traditions of eastern North Carolina — using the backdrop of the Chef & the Farmer restaurant in Kinston, North Carolina, which Howard co-owned with her then-husband and business partner, artist Ben Knight.

In 2013, Howard and Knight opened the Boiler Room, which served oysters and burgers catty-corner from Chef & the Farmer, until its closure in May 2020.

Howard authored the cookbook and memoir Deep Run Roots - Stories and Recipes from my Corner of the South ISBN 0316381101, released in October 2016.

The book remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for 3 weeks.

PBS and South Carolina Educational Television picked up the show, and Seasons 1 and 2 aired nationally from 2013 to 2015.

In 2014, Howard was the first woman since Julia Child to win a Peabody Award for a cooking program.

In 2017, she authored the cookbook-memoir Deep Run Roots, and in 2020 This Will Make It Taste Good: A New Path to Simple Cooking.

In 2023, Howard wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, outlining the foundational problems with the current restaurant business model, many that contributed directly to the post-pandemic temporary closure of The Chef and the Farmer — which she plans to reopen in late 2023 in a re-envisioned format.

Howard grew up in Deep Run, North Carolina, a small community near the town of Kinston.

Her parents, John and Scarlett Howard, were farmers who raised hogs and grew tobacco, cotton, soybeans, wheat, and corn.

Her father owns J.C. Howard Farms, Inc., a pork production company with 27,000 pigs, and owns 5,000 acres of row crop farmland, 5,000 acres in forestland, a timber production company, and fourteen John Deere dealerships.

Howard's grandfather and great-grandfather were also tobacco farmers in Lenoir County.

At age 14, Howard attended an all-female Moravian boarding school, Salem Academy, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she was classmates with Adrian H. Wood.

She then spent two years at Virginia Episcopal School, a boarding school in Lynchburg, Virginia.

In 2017, the book won four IACP Cookbook Awards including: Cookbook of the Year, Julia Child First Book Award, Outstanding Restaurant Cookbook, and Outstanding Cookbook in the General Category.

Howard and Knight opened a restaurant called Benny's Big Time Pizzeria on December 12, 2017, in Wilmington, NC'sWarehouse District.

Season 5 premiered in October 2017.

After five seasons, the show ended with a one-hour finale, "Harvest Special."

In 2018, Howard said "Older folks in our community teach me how to make something very simple. One of the things I like about A Chef's Life and dislike about modern media, in general, is that [our culture is] very young-person-new-ideas driven, and I don’t think people call on the wisdom of older folks very much. To learn from them and share has been wonderful."

In 2020 Howard released her second cookbook This Will Make It Taste Good: A New Path to Simple Cooking ISBN 9780316241908.

The cookbook is built around a core collection of flavorful bases that become key components in the section of recipes that follow.

She also began to write a column for the southern magazine Garden & Gun.

In 2021 Howard opened Lenoir, her first restaurant in Charleston, SC, which includes a sister café Handy + Hot.