Vivian Howard Makes a Cooking Show for the Everyday Person Navigating a Confusing Food Landscape

Kitchen Curious with Vivian Howard airs on WTTW Saturdays at 3:30 pm and is available to stream. 
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When Vivian Howard’s son had to write a poem about his mom for a fifth-grade assignment, he defined the North Carolina chef and restaurateur with deadly precision, in the way that only kids can. “My mom goes to the grocery store every day,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter if we need anything; she finds a way.” 

So it’s no surprise that Howard’s newest show, Kitchen Curious with Vivian Howard, includes trips to a grocery store in almost every episode. That’s because Kitchen Curious focuses on the practical questions and preparations the average person faces as they go about feeding themselves day in and day out. 

“There's so much food content out there and so many experts with opinions on what you should be eating, how you should be cleaning your kitchen, how you should be shopping and preparing,” Howard says. “I felt like, if I'm confused, then a lot of other people must be really confused. So I wanted to hone in on a lot of the questions that we all have right now.”

Those questions concern things like the role of different fats in cooking and health, ways to incorporate complete proteins into everyday meals, and whether whole grain pastas are worth it. Howard visits grocery stores with a nutritionist to draw on her expertise.

Whereas Howard championed local produce and farmers markets in her breakout PBS show, A Chef’s Life (available to stream by WTTW Passport members), in Kitchen Curious she focuses on the stores that most Americans actually shop at in their daily lives, places like Walmart and Piggly Wiggly. She offers recipes for shelf-stable pantry staples like rice and beans and devotes a whole episode to the freezer, reflecting her own shift in recent years towards cooking at home instead of her restaurant more, as well as general economic uncertainty and inflation.

But that doesn’t mean she has revoked her homestyle Southern roots. There’s still an episode on root vegetables, and one on pickling; she just brings those values into more time-strapped, pragmatic households feeding families, for instance using bagged salad to make kraut.

The recipes in Kitchen Curious are meant to be simple, adaptable, and accessible, geared towards weeknights and pantry commonplaces. “You want people to be like, ‘I basically could do that right now,’” Howard says. “You don’t want them to be like, ‘Oh wait, let me write down everything she just said.’”

That approach meshes with how many people shop at the grocery store, getting some stalwarts every trip and then picking up other things that sound good in the moment rather than planning out every single recipe and ingredient. “Every time I go to the grocery store, I basically get the same things, plus some things,” Howard says. “These are the things that are my pantry, and they’re building blocks. I don’t necessarily know what I’m going to make with them, but I always have them.” 

And if she sets her heart on a meal and there’s something missing, well, that’s why she goes to the grocery store every day. She’ll find a way.