Vivian Howard is hanging up her toque on “A Chef’s Life” in style and with flavor by holding a celebratory dinner for family and friends in a cornfield against the backdrop of a setting sun.
The transformative PBS series, which puts the spotlight on the food traditions and people of Eastern North Carolina, will conclude with a one-hour harvest special at 9 p.m. Monday. It will feature chowchow and pawpaws and include flashbacks from past episodes.
After five seasons, it was the host-cum-chef-cum-restaurateur-cum-cookbook author who pushed to end the part cooking show, part documentary that has aired 60 segments in total, including holiday specials. “I have shared every personal triumph and tragedy for the past seven years and it has been exhausting. It has been difficult on my family, especially my 7-year-old twins,” she says.
Also, she felt she has covered every ingredient in the American South that makes sense and so it was time to wrap up the show. In fact, even the last season was a stretch, she admits. The first two seasons had 13 episodes while the last two had 10 each.
That’s not to diminish what the series represents, she adds, and what it means to her. “I was trying to paint a honest portrait of Eastern North Carolina,” she says. She wanted to show that “the people are multidimensional and not mystical fairies or bumbling idiots. And the farmers are tenacious, resourceful, smart and hardworking.”
She’s an owner of three restaurants — Chef & the Farmer (serves modern expressions of regional ingredients) and Boiler Room (an oyster bar with burgers), both in Kinston, N.C., and Benny’s Big Time (a pizzeria) in Wilmington, N.C. So with “A Chef’s Table” she also wanted to erase the myth that the restaurant business is all glamorous and instead convey what it really is all about and the hard work it entails.
Ms. Howard grew up in Deep Run, N.C., and moved to New York City after college to work in advertising, which she quit after 18 months. She then found a job as a waitress and later worked in a few kitchens and along the way met her future husband, Ben Knight. When her parents offered to help her start a restaurant in Kinston, the couple moved south. They opened Chef & the Farmer, which turned 12 this year.
“A Chef’s Life” premiered nationally in 2013 and practically won an award every year. It picked up a Peabody for its first season and won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Culinary Program this year. The show’s director and founder, Cynthia Hill, received an Emmy in 2015 and Ms. Howard got a James Beard for Best Host or Personality the following year.
The one ingredient that Ms. Howard had wanted to but never got to highlight in “A Chef’s Life” was sorghum, which is typically pressed into syrup this time of the year. The timing of it all didn’t come together, she says, between finding a farmer, finding someone to press the sorghum and filming it. She hopes to give sorghum a shout-out in a new PBS show, which will air next June.
Ms. Howard will have more breathing space as the coming show will not solely focus on her. Also, instead of being about a single ingredient, it will be about a single dish that every culture shares such as dumplings, chicken and rice and how to cook grains, and it will paint a picture of what the South looks like today.
The title of the series is still being developed. Ms. Howard had suggested “South by Somewhere” but PBS turned it down saying it was too similar to South by Southwest, the annual festival that takes place in Austin, Texas. The broadcaster and distributor came back with a couple of titles that Ms. Howard didn’t favor and so now it is back to the drawing board.
Amid her hectic schedule, she still finds time to cook at home for her family. That’s because she gets a lot of help, she says, including from her parents who live across the road from her. “At best, I can do two things very well at the same time,” she says.
Arthi Subramaniam: asubramaniam@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1494.
First Published: October 17, 2018, 12:00 p.m.