Vivian Howard hints at ‘cafeteria style’ reboot of Chef & The Farmer in NYT essay

In a guest essay for The New York Times, North Carolina chef Vivian Howard is hinting at what her celebrated Chef & The Farmer restaurant could look like when it reopens “in the next year.”

The opinion essay, published online Friday, focuses largely on the challenges and problems contributing to the “multicourse menu of the rotting state of the restaurant business” — among them, thin margins and behind-the-scenes employees who feel “slammed.”

Howard, who is also known for her PBS shows “A Chef’s Life” and “Somewhere South,” details her own experiences with such challenges, saying she closed her flagship Kinston restaurant last June “in large part because the inefficiencies, stress and fatigue brought by an unsustainable business model became impossible to ignore.”

“Our industry needs to evolve or else more full-service, cuisine-driven restaurants like mine will languish their way to extinction,” she writes.

For fans of Howard and her Kinston restaurant, though, the essay could bring some hope and excitement for what’s next and how the business model could be changing.

Changes to business model

Toward the end of her essay, Howard says she plans to reopen Chef & The Farmer “in the next year,” going on to list notable changes she plans to make in the restaurant’s new chapter, which will “suit both the guests and the people who feed them.”

▪ First, she writes, how food is served at the restaurant will be different. “We won’t rely on the diners to pay servers; the chefs will serve, cafeteria style, at our retrofitted kitchen bar,” Howard writes.

▪ The restaurant’s “programs” beyond food — like the beverage program Howard writes about earlier in the essay — will be gone. “The energy we put into elevated service and its trappings will flow directly into the only “program” we have chosen to keep — our food,” she writes.

▪ The restaurant will have different hours. “Most important, we will open to diners just four days a week, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., because that’s the kind of schedule that nurtures staff retention,” Howard writes.

Will four days a week be enough? Howard writes that the kitchen will actually be making money seven days a week “because we’ll be cooking for people whose butts are not in our dining room.”

Viv’s Fridge will boost new model

That’s thanks to Howard’s growing Viv’s Fridge concept, a collection of smart fridges sprinkled around the state, stocked with meals prepared in-kitchen by Howard’s team of chefs.

“Chefs who have graduated from nights on the line to quiet days in the kitchen will cook meals to stock the restaurant’s small collection of free-standing, strategically located smart fridges,” Howard writes. “Covid gave us many horrible things, but it also birthed a new and relatively inexpensive way to enjoy food tapped by a chef’s magic wand at home. Next-level take-and-bakes, chef-prepared assemble-and-eats and pasta deliveries, when coupled with an already operating kitchen, will help make us whole.”

Howard has four Viv’s Fridge locations in the Triangle — one in Durham and three in Raleigh. Other fridge locations include Emerald Isle, Kinston, Wilson and New Bern.

In her essay, Howard does not give a more specific time frame for reopening Chef & The Farmer beyond saying that she plans to do so “in the next year.” When she first announced the closing last June, she said the restaurant, which had then been open for 16 years, was in need of a “refresh.”

Howard also owns restaurants in Wilmington and Charleston, South Carolina.