By Dathan Kazsuk
As the NCRLA Chef Showdown just celebrated its 10th year, Greenville chef Luke Owens reflects on the competition, Eastern North Carolina’s culinary identity, and why the state’s best food stories aren’t limited to its biggest cities.
With the 10th annual NCRLA Chef Showdown Grand Finale coming to a close on Wednesday, Sept. 2, we wanted to talk with someone who understands the competition from more than one perspective.
Someone who has stood behind the plate under pressure, experienced what it takes to make it through the competition, and then carried what he learned back into his own kitchens.
So we reached out to Greenville chef Luke Owens.
Owens finished as first runner-up for NCRLA Chef of the Year in 2023, an experience that ultimately helped lead to his role as a Got to Be NC Culinary Ambassador. Today, the chef behind Native Fine Diner in Greenville has also become one of the more recognizable voices championing Eastern North Carolina food and the farmers, fishermen, and producers behind it.
“The Chef Showdown has helped give North Carolina chefs a shared stage,” Owens says. “Winning matters, but the larger impact is the community that has formed around the competition.”
That community came together once again Sept. 2 at Bay 7 at the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, where 26 finalists competed in the Grand Finale following a season that began with a record 102 competitors from across North Carolina.
Owens discovered that firsthand while competing in 2023.
“You have to communicate who you are as a chef through one plate, under pressure, in an unfamiliar environment,” he says.
And somewhere in that process, Owens realized something about his own cooking.
“I learned that I’m at my best when I stop trying to cook what I think a competition dish should be and cook something that is honest,” he says. “The closer the food was to my Eastern North Carolina upbringing and the way I actually like to cook, the more confident and successful I became.”
That connection to place has continued to shape how Owens cooks.
At Native, a dish might begin not with a recipe, but with a phone call from a farmer saying there is too much of something—or that something particularly good has just come out of the ground.
Instead of deciding on a dish and searching for ingredients to complete it, Owens says the process can work in reverse.
“Then our job is to find the clearest, most respectful expression of that ingredient,” he says.
The Chef Showdown’s emphasis on North Carolina-grown and North Carolina-made ingredients has helped build those connections across the state. But Owens believes geography is another key part of its importance.
“Eastern NC chefs should not have to permanently leave ENC to be included in the conversation,” he says.
Native Fine Diner has hosted Chef Showdown events in Greenville, bringing visiting chefs and guests into a culinary community Owens believes doesn’t always receive the same statewide attention as larger markets.
“There is extraordinary talent here, but attention often collects around the state’s larger cities,” he says. “They see our restaurants, meet our producers and understand that serious, progressive cooking is happening east of Raleigh.”
That matters beyond recognition.
“I want young cooks in this region to believe they can build meaningful careers here,” he says. “They should not feel that recognition requires abandoning the place that shaped them.”
That statewide representation also tells a more complete story about North Carolina food.
A chef in Wilkesboro doesn’t experience the same ingredients and traditions as someone in Wilmington. Greenville’s agricultural surroundings differ from Asheville’s. Coastal fishing communities, Piedmont farms and mountain traditions each contribute something different.
Those differences, Owens says, are the point.
“North Carolina does not have one culinary identity,” he says. “Its strength is the tension and conversation between many identities.”
That identity has also grown beyond the image outsiders may once have had of North Carolina cuisine.
Barbecue remains one of the state’s defining traditions, Owens says, but it isn’t the entirety of North Carolina food. Indigenous, African, European and immigrant influences exist alongside commercial fisheries, farms, mills and a new generation of food producers.
As the Chef Showdown enters its second decade, Owens would like to see that statewide approach pushed even further.
More preliminary events in Eastern and rural North Carolina. More opportunities for attendees to learn not simply the names of farms and producers appearing on a menu, but their stories. And mentorship programs pairing former competitors with first-time participants and younger cooks.
“Its legacy should not only be a list of winners,” Owens says. “It should be a pipeline for the next generation of North Carolina culinary leadership.”
That may ultimately be the larger story behind 10 years of the Chef Showdown.
But Owens sees something happening beyond the competition.
“Another chef’s success does not diminish mine,” Owens says. “It gives the world one more reason to pay attention to this state.”
