Chef and the Farmer

Nationally acclaimed farm-to-table restaurant — the centre of Kinston's downtown revival

Chef and the Farmer is the restaurant that put Kinston on the national food map. Vivian Howard and Ben Knight built it around the produce and meat of eastern North Carolina farms — pole beans, butterbeans, collards, fresh sausage, slow-cooked pork — treated with the technique of a fine-dining kitchen. The PBS series A Chef's Life turned it into a destination.

The dining room is in a converted warehouse on Queen Street. Reservations are essential; the menu rotates with the seasons and what the farmers brought in that week. There have been periodic closures and reopenings over the years — call ahead. Even if Chef and the Farmer is not serving when you visit, the surrounding stretch of downtown owes much of its revival to the restaurant.

eating out restaurant
A story
Vivian Howard and Ben Knight opened Chef and the Farmer in 2006, in a downtown that was largely boarded up. The restaurant — eastern North Carolina cooking taken seriously, with local pigs, corn, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes given the same care as ingredients at a New York tasting menu — became the subject of the PBS series A Chef's Life, which ran for five seasons and made Kinston unexpectedly famous. The restaurant has had to close and reopen several times since, including during the pandemic; check current status before planning a visit.

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