Vivian Howard, a TV Chef, Offers Hope for Her Rural Hometown

KINSTON, N.C. — Just before Christmas, in the soup kitchen that serves this small town built on tobacco, textiles and hogs, the chef and cooking show star Vivian Howard finished stirring a pot of pork and sweet potato stew and turned to a local television reporter.

How does it feel, the reporter asked, to know that she had saved her hometown?

“If I had saved Kinston,“ she replied, “we wouldn’t need a food bank, and all these people wouldn’t be waiting for lunch.”

Ms. Howard, 38, has been called many things. Her mother calls her the life of the party. Her father calls her Big Time, a nickname from her childhood. A few of the 80 people she employs call her a control freak. But “hometown hero” may be the label that makes her most uncomfortable.

“Saving a town was not what I was trying to do,” she said. “I’m just a storyteller. A storyteller who cooks.”

Still, Ms. Howard, the girl who spent her childhood plotting an escape from this rural eastern North Carolina county, has become an unlikely engine in its economic and cultural revival.

Twelve years ago, when her family talked her into coming home to open a restaurant, she thought that somehow she had failed. Now, Ms. Howard is five seasons into “A Chef’s Life,” her popular public television show. Her restaurant, Chef & the Farmer, attracts talent from the best professional kitchens in the South; traveling food celebrities drop by to learn about the region. New restaurants, galleries and a brewery have come to town. The lady who taught her how to make biscuits can charge tourists $100 for a private lesson.