Vivian Howard

Howard grew up in Deep Run, North Carolina, as the youngest of four daughters born to John and Scarlett Howard. Her parents operated J.C. Howard Farms, managing thousands of acres of cropland and forest alongside commercial hog production. Her older sisters are Leraine, Currie, and Johna. Farming ran deep in the family. Both her grandfather and great-grandfather farmed tobacco in Lenoir County.

She attended Salem Academy in Winston-Salem at age 14 and later graduated from Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg, Virginia. In 2001, she earned a bachelor's degree in English from North Carolina State University, spending one semester studying culinary arts in Argentina.

Howard met Ben Knight while both worked at Voyage restaurant in New York City. They married and later had twins, Florence and Theodore. The family resided on Howard's ancestral homestead in Deep Run. Howard confirmed that she and Knight divorced in early 2023.

Howard started out in advertising at Grey Worldwide in Manhattan. She left after eighteen months to wait tables at Voyage in Greenwich Village. Executive chef Scott Barton took notice and became her early mentor in professional cooking.

She enrolled at the Institute of Culinary Education, graduating in 2004. Rigorous kitchen training followed. She interned under Wylie Dufresne and pastry chef Sam Mason at wd~50. She then joined the opening line as chef de partie at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Spice Market. In their Harlem apartment, Howard and Knight launched a small soup delivery service, occasionally using their bathtub to chill large batches.

Howard and Knight moved to North Carolina in 2005 after her parents offered financial backing to purchase a restaurant space in Kinston. They opened Chef & the Farmer in 2006 inside a former print shop and mule stable. The menu drew on regional recipes from local elders, sourcing the majority of ingredients within a short driving radius. A fire struck the building in 2012. Howard rebuilt and reopened the dining room.

More ventures followed across the region. In 2013, she opened the Boiler Room, a burger and oyster spot in Kinston that operated until May 2020. She launched Benny's Big Time Pizzeria in Wilmington in December 2017. In 2021, she expanded into Charleston, South Carolina, opening Lenoir and an adjacent café called Handy + Hot. She also introduced Viv's Fridge, an automated vending concept for prepared meals. In late 2024, Howard reorganized Chef & the Farmer into two concepts: The Kitchen Bar and The Counter. She followed this in 2025 by opening Theodosia on the Outer Banks.

In 2011, Howard teamed with eastern North Carolina filmmaker Cynthia Hill to record rural culinary traditions before they faded. PBS picked up the project as A Chef's Life, which aired nationally from 2013 to 2018. The series earned a 2014 Peabody Award, making Howard the first woman since Julia Child to receive the honor for a cooking show. Howard won a 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Culinary Host, while the show earned a Daytime Emmy in 2015.

She returned to PBS in 2020 with Somewhere South, a six-part documentary looking at dishes shared across cultural boundaries. In October 2025, she debuted Kitchen Curious with Vivian Howard on Create TV.

Her first cookbook, Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South, came out in October 2016 and spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It won four awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals, including Cookbook of the Year. In 2020, she released her second volume, This Will Make It Taste Good: A New Path to Simple Cooking, and began writing a column for Garden & Gun.