Vivian Howard is perhaps best-known as the founder of the restaurant Chef & the Farmer, the hidden gem of all hidden gems tucked away in Kinston.
Since the restaurant’s founding in 2006, it’s been given a AAA Four Diamond Award seven times; awarded the Wine Spectator Award for Excellence; and Howard herself is a six-time semi-finalist for the James Beard Best Chef in the Southeast.
She’s a beloved television personality as well: A Chef’s Life, the award-winning PBS documentary series centered on the cooking traditions of eastern North Carolina, ended last year after a successful five-season run.
Now she’s turned her attention to storytelling.
Her upcoming PBS series, South by Somewhere, will feature Howard traveling:
through the South meeting with restaurant chefs and home cooks to learn about their specialties and culinary traditions. The chef/TV host will head to North Carolina to eat collard sandwiches with native Lumbee home cooks, she’ll sample convenience store pepperoni rolls in West Virginia coal country, she’ll eat grits and rice middlins with Gullah chefs in South Carolina, and will break bread with Chef’s Table alum Mashama Bailey at her restaurant The Grey in Savannah, Georgia.
It is, as the INDY says, “in-depth” Southern Storytelling, discovering the recipes (and stories) that connect us all.
Howard’s most recent book is Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South. In it, she celebrates the flavors of North Carolina’s coastal plain in more than 200 recipes and stories.
Look for South by Somewhere in the winter or spring of 2020, on PBS.