Chef Lucas Owens has cooked from the mountains to the coastal plains and won awards all along the way.

Now he has settled in Greenville and opened Native Fine Diner.

We sent Bob Garner to check it out.

[upbeat music] - [Bob] Native Fine Diner occupies a wedge-shaped corner space on Dickinson Avenue, Greenville's hottest re-gentrifying culinary destination.

Look for a lot crammed with artist John Bowling sculptures and scrap metal right across the street.

- So a diner really filled my soul as an adult and what I wanted to do with my food and my style, and I ate in diners growing up a lot, you know, a lot of blue collar food, so it filled my soul and my stomach, you know?

- Speaking of filling soul and stomach, you should know upfront that Owens was recently named first runner up as Chef of the Year by the North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association.

High praise indeed.

I'm gonna start out with a couple of small plates, the first of which will be french onion soup.

So you know this is a really thick, substantial French onion soup if they give you a fork to eat it with.

But you can see the french onion, but there's lots of Gruyere cheese.

There's actually some braised beef short rib down in there, and lots of Gruyere cheese on top.

Oh, man, look at that.

Mm.

That is fabulous.

Onions, Gruyere cheese, braised short rib.

Now, either a white wine or a red wine will go perfectly well with any of these dishes.

Since this has the Gruyere cheese and since it's soup, I'm gonna go with a nice Sauvignon blanc.

Next among the small plate samples, a bao bun, which is basically a large steamed dumpling, in this case, containing a creamy oyster pie filling.

This has something called chili crunch in it, which sort of tells you that it has a little spice to it, but it's not too much.

Mm.

And whatever else is mixed in there, it is crunchy.

Oh, that's wonderful.

Up next, a trio of large plates.

This is a sausage and rice stuffed pork loin.

Look at that.

Some people call this a pork boudin.

What actually is called a boudain down in Cajun cooking land is a spicy sausage and rice mix, and that's what we have here.

Since we have some real meat to deal with, I'm gonna go with a house cab here.

Yeah, that goes very well with the pork.

Second large plate in line, a lovely stuffed acorn squash.

Okay, this has a Mediterranean spiced rice, it has pomegranate seeds and pomegranate molasses, and it has toasted almonds.

[upbeat music] Mm.

[chuckles] That is so inventive.

It may not even be on the menu when you come, but whatever you find will be just as inventive.

I can pretty much guarantee that.

And the third of our large plates, a Joyce Farms duck confit.

Three basic things.

You have the duck, you have butternut squash there, and you have a pumpkin puree.

They do this exact same dish with chicken as well as duck.

Mm.

Either way, you will really be impressed by that.

For dessert, I sampled a marshmallow sweet potato cake with a fermented sweet potato butter and a sweet potato crunch made out of some of the skins and some other good stuff that's dried out a little bit.

Greenville's Native Fine Diner.

I can pretty much guarantee you it's worth the trip.

- Native Fine Diner is at 907 Dickinson Avenue in Greenville, and they're open for lunch and dinner daily except Sunday and Tuesday.

For more information, give them a call at 252-508-5005, or go online to eatnative.com.