The Stunning Evolution Of A Chef's Life Host Vivian Howard

Vivian Howard has a good reputation in the food and entertainment industry, people just like her and you can't blame them. She is wholesome, charismatic, driven, down-to-earth, talented, and undeniably beautiful. Howard became an acclaimed chef and reality TV star, sharing Southern cuisine, the food of her region, with the rest of the world. Through a series of missteps and unintended consequences, the renowned chef who hails from rural North Carolina, fell into a career that wove all the parts of her life together, from journalism and storytelling to farming, community, and fresh produce.

Howard wasn't planning on becoming a chef, it wasn't on her radar. She grew up on a hog farm and by the time she was 14, had decided she was going to leave, first to boarding school, and then young Howard set her sights on the Big Apple — the farm girl vowed never to return. The now award-winning cookbook author wanted to be a writer, but the universe had other plans. This is the story of one of America's key contributors of farm-to-table cuisine and her journey from mud to gold.

Growing up in rural North Carolina, Vivian Howard's life and that of her family were dictated by the farming seasons. "Summers were the busiest times," she said in an interview with Aging Outreach Services. "It was all about tobacco and getting the tobacco in and out, and the whole family worked the tobacco. Then, there was this frenzy about putting up corn and canning tomatoes. Our lives were much more connected to living in the country," she explained. Although Howard enjoyed her time on the farm, she never felt like a country bumpkin at heart. In a piece for Saveur, Howard explained that she felt like an odd duck in the rural North Carolina setting of her youth, and constantly daydreamed of escaping to someplace bigger and more exciting.

When she was 14 Howard left for boarding school, and after she graduated she headed to New York. "I had really big dreams, and I didn't think they would realize themselves in Deep Run," she told Aging Outreach Services. Howard was steadfast in her decision not to live in the countryside, it was only many years later, while in New York, that Howard found herself declaring, "I will never live here again," (here being Deep Run) and six months later — she moved back.

The acclaimed chef wanted to be a writer, and ironically, her journey has led her back to this first passion — she writes a column for The New York Times and for Garden and Gun. When she was in high school, Howard had the opportunity to travel and this ignited a desire in her to rid herself of her small-town identity, explore the world, and write about it. It was during this time that she realized she wanted to be a journalist and travel writer. After high school, Howard studied English at university and got a job in advertising. The advertising world didn't appeal to the young writer and after 18 months she quit and picked up a job as a waitress. This is when things took a turn for the better. It was here, in a West Village restaurant, that Howard's interest in food was piqued.

In an interview with Forbes, Howard describes the menu at Voyage as Southern food via Africa. She was inspired by executive chef Scott Barton's sense of food history and would come in early before her waitressing shift to help out in the kitchen. Food had come alive for Howard through chef Scott Barton's world — she was hooked. The eager young foodie worked in several other kitchens until she decided to get a formal education at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York.

It's helpful to hear the "rags to riches" stories of people who have made it in their specific field and to remember we all start somewhere — that it wasn't always glitz and glamour, that there's more to a story than meets the eye. Vivian Howard doesn't come from a low-income household, in fact her father is a wealthy man. He owns J.C. Howard Farms, and by 2018 had 14 John Deere dealerships. The chef comes from a hardworking family, but she did find herself trying to make ends meet in New York. That's how she met her ex-husband and business partner, Benjamin Knight. They were both trying to support their livelihoods by working at Voyage restaurant (Knight is an artist). According to Our State, one winter the couple decided to start a soup delivery business from their apartment in Harlem. Each week, they emailed menus to their clients, prepared soups in their cramped kitchen, chilled it in the bathtub, and delivered soup across the city on their day off.

The soup was so good, that investors were keen to support them to open a brick-and-mortar business. But fortune favored the brave and Howard's parents offered to help them open a restaurant back home in Kinston, North Carolina. "They had hoped that we would come here and open a traditional steakhouse with baked potatoes and a salad bar ... We can laugh about this now," Howard told Aging Outreach Services.

"Everyone fully expected us to fail," Vivian Howard told Eric Burnette in an interview for Our State. "It seemed like a preposterous thing to do." Howard and her husband Benjamin Knight opened the farm-to-fork restaurant in 2006. The menu was inspired by what was available seasonally on the farms around them, supporting food producers within a 70-mile radius. One of the fixtures on the summer menu of Chef & the Farmer was peaches wrapped in country ham with whipped goat cheese and balsamic honey. Yum!

Chef & the Farmer had a meteoric rise, taking Southern cuisine and giving it a fresh spin appealed to their clientele. "Over the next decade and a half, our restaurant in the middle of nowhere became a destination, a check on a lot of bucket lists, a far-flung, but worth it place to experience 'country' food in a decidedly 'un-country' way," Howard writes on her website. At the time, the duo didn't want Chef & the Farmer to be a good restaurant for Kinston or a good restaurant for eastern North Carolina. They wanted to be "the best restaurant in the state." The restaurant didn't win any James Beard awards in those early years but once the "A Chef's Life" TV show was broadcast, the awards and acknowledgments started flooding in.

In 2013 the Southern chef became the star of the PBS series "A Chef's Life." In the show, a docuseries, Vivian Howard invites viewers behind the scenes of her Kinston restaurant, Chef & the Farmer. She also takes them to local farms and into her home, where they meet her husband and business partner, Ben Knight, their 4-year-old twins, her parents, extended family, and the community of Deep Run. "The show — it isn't a food show," Howard told the crowd at Elon University when addressing them at an Elder Lecture. "It's a show about community and people. It's about all those things, told through the lens of food." The show came about when Howard reached out to her good friend, filmmaker Cynthia Hill about making a documentary about the disappearing food trends of North Carolina, which was rejected by networks. They tried again, with a pilot for "A Chef's Life" that they sent to PBS, which featured a fire at the restaurant. Hill and Howard were given the green light to make their series.

The show ran for five seasons and won a Daytime Emmy for Best Culinary Program in 2018, a James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Personality/Host in 2018, a Daytime Emmy for Best Director of a Lifestyle/Culinary/Travel Program in 2015, and a Peabody Award in 2013.

Julia Child won her first Peabody Award in 1965 for her cooking show, "The French Chef", and her second in 1992 for her career-long contribution to food and cooking on television. Over two decades later, Vivian Howard and the director of "A Chef's Life", her friend and documentary filmmaker Cynthia Hill accepted their award at the podium at the 2013 Peabody Awards. 

The Peabody Awards "honor excellence in storytelling that reflects the social issues and the emerging voices of our day," according to their official website. In the time between Julia Child's win and Howard's, the Peabodies honored male TV chefs like Anthony Bourdain, Alton Brown, and José Andrés. In her acceptance speech, Howard said she was "nervous." She thanked the community of Kinston, her husband and business partner, the production team and quoted her collaborator and director, Cynthia Hill who said "A Chef's Life" was "a love letter to eastern North Carolina, to rural America, told through the lens of food."

Vivian Howard's first cookbook, "Deep Run Roots," is accidentally a myth buster about Southern cuisine. "Most of the world has it wrong," the award-winning North Carolina chef and star of "A Chef's Life" told Build. "We think that southern food always has a big honking piece of meat at the center of the plate, fried chicken, fried catfish, ribs, something along those lines, but it's traditionally a vegetable and grain-focussed cuisine, with tons of variety." Howard describes the book as "part story, part history, part recipes." 

She worked hard to make sure the 200-plus recipes coming out of the book would work for home cooks. She implemented a rigorous testing method where an amateur chef would make a dish according to her recipe and Howard would see and taste it to ensure the result was to her standard — that her recipe worked. The cookbook received rave reviews from The New York Times, USA Today and won Cookbook of the Year at the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Awards.

Her second book, "This Will Make it Taste Good," looks at the little extras you can add to a dish to bring it all together, add texture, or elevate the flavor. "I wrote this book to inspire you, and I promise it will change the way you cook, the way you think about what's in your fridge, the way you see yourself in an apron," she said.

There's nothing like a significant breakup to bring on a big change in every way. In early 2023, Vivian Howard and her husband, Benjamin Knight finalized their divorce. The couple had met at Voyage restaurant in New York when they were wet-behind-the-ears graduates. The decision to end a long-term relationship doesn't come easily, and it took the couple a long season of turmoil to make the call. In her column in Garden and Gun, Howard wrote: "I fired people, rehired people, and to save a marriage decided I could no longer work with my husband. We moved under a tall mountain of debt that caused finger-pointing, infighting, and backstabbing, and I couldn't tell who was doing what." The parents of twins, business partners, and lifelong friends had come to a crossroads.

Knight has continued working as an artist. His Instagram feed is awash with his colorful abstract paintings. In 2024, he had a show at City Art Gallery in Greenville, North Carolina. In 2023, after a 17-year run, the famous restaurant Chef & the Farmer was officially closed. Howard took a much-needed break and in 2024 she launched her latest project, a 16-seater "up close and personal" mini restaurant of the same name.

"It's an incredibly vulnerable thing for me to even admit, but for a long time, being a chef on TV saved me from being a chef in real life. So much so that by the time I turned 40 the restaurant that once upon a time couldn't run without me — could no longer run with me," Vivian Howard wrote in her column for Garden and Gun. Today, images of the entrepreneur on her social media, show a woman flourishing. Uncoupling, closing the restaurant, and reimagining a more manageable way to share her love of Southern food are serving her well.

Howard is in the kitchen again, making food, serving clients from pan to plate and they're right there watching and interacting with her from their seat at the bar. "The energy we put into elevated service and its trappings will flow directly into the only 'program' we have chosen to keep — food," Howard shared in an interview with Chatham News + Record. Howard says she's gotten so much out of the new kitchen bar at Chef & the Farmer both "professionally and personally." Watch this space, Howard has shown she is inventive, authentic, and has a gift for sharing the story of Southern food.