Dean Neff
American chef and restaurateur
Dean Neff is an American chef and restaurateur based in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Chef in 2024 and was a semifinalist in 2026. He was a semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast in 2019 and 2023. His work and restaurants have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Garden & Gun, and Forbes. He is the chef-owner of Seabird and Zora’s Market & Kitchen.
Early life and education
Neff was born in Columbus, Ohio and moved at the age of five to Savannah, Georgia. He was the youngest of four siblings. During his childhood, he developed an interest in cooking, often experimenting in the kitchen while his parents worked.
At the age of 18, Neff moved to Atlanta where he studied at the School of Culinary Arts. He later earned a business degree from the University of Georgia.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dean Neff” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.