Road Trip!

There is a famous restaurant in Kinston, North Carolina, about 90 minutes from Raleigh, called Chef and the Farmer. The chef, Vivian Howard, has a PBS show and a recent award-winning cookbook. I've been hearing about this place for years - it opened around the time we moved here - and finally looked into going. When I made the reservation in February, the first available Saturday night was Memorial Day weekend. Insanity! 

We decided to make a mini-trip out of it, and drove out to New Bern to see some North Carolina history things beforehand. New Bern was the first state capital and this building, the Tryon Palace (governor's mansion), is also featured in the fourth Outlander book. I spent a lot of time on the tour imagining Claire wandering around listlessly thinking about how she was going to get back to Jamie.

I accidentally left my phone in the car so we are reliant on Benjamin for documentation. He likes to really focus in on small details.

Historic New Bern was really interesting and definitely something we should have done sooner, given our propensity for touring old houses and buildings.

We headed back to Kinston and checked into an amazing boutique hotel down the block from the restaurant. When I originally booked the dinner, the hotel didn't have any availability, so we were going to stay at a Hampton Inn out on the highway. At the last second I checked again, and hooray! A room had opened up.

The O'Neil Hotel is in an old bank building, and they've retained a lot of the original infrastructure in the room design.

Our room had an original vault that had been turned into a small bunk bed room.

The lobby was great, too. Impeccably decorated and with another original vault.

Inside the vault is free coffee and beer! The hotel owners also own a microbrewery.

There was a little balcony lounge where we hung out for a bit.

Downtown Kinston is like the small towns where I grew up in Northwest Missouri. Like most rural areas, many storefronts were empty. However, Kinston has really undergone a revitalization that began with Chef & the Farmer. Vivian Howard has another restaurant there too, and I'm sure the boutique hotel wouldn't exist without the demand created by the restaurant.

The restaurant was very unpretentious.

And the food totally and completely lived up to the gype. We had the grits to start, then the asparagus and poached egg. I had the mahi as my entree and Ben got the pork. The greens that went along with his pork were incredible, and caused me to buy the cookbook immediately in hopes of finding out how she made them taste like that.

After eating all that food, we walked around downtown Kinston for a while, which was mostly deserted. There was a park with this weird art installation but no signage explaining what was going on.

All in all, it was a fun way to spend part of our holiday weekend! I would go back any time.