Country Strong

Since famously leaving a career in New York City to return to Kinston, North Carolina, near where her parents had raised tobacco and hogs, to open the restaurant Chef & the Farmer in 2006, Vivian Howard has dedicated herself to preserving the culinary traditions of the place she’d once most wanted to escape: the rural South. In doing so, Howard elevated local ingredients from her pocket of Eastern North Carolina, and the dishes long crafted from them—themes she also celebrated in her award-winning PBS television series, A Chef ’s Life, and best-selling cookbook, Deep Run Roots.

Those portraits of country life resonated—droves of fans pilgrimaged to Kinston, buoying the, debuts in late March; a second cookbook follows this fall; and, this spring, Howard will launch two restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina: Handy & Hot, a bakery focused on biscuit sandwiches and hand pies, and Lenoir, “a modern interpretation,” she says, “of the way we once cooked in the South.” In a recent conversation, she elaborated on how the middle of nowhere can become the center of a universe.