When Vicki Basnight got the call to visit the vacant home at 301 Budleigh Street, she couldn’t say no. As a child, she played football on the lawn of the home in downtown Manteo with the boys who lived there, but she’d never been inside or even glimpsed it through the windows. “Little nosy old me wanted to go take a look,” she said.

Inside the two-story brick residence, handcrafted wooden finishings stretched from floor to ceiling. “It’s a woodworker’s dream,” she said. It had a fireplace and floors still in pristine condition, protected by decades spent under rugs. Basnight asked the property owner what he envisioned for the space. A restaurant, he replied. Who’d run it? “You will,” he said. Oh, heck no! she thought. She already had a restaurant of her own.

At the corner of Budleigh Street and Lord Essex Avenue, Vicki B’s Restaurant & Market invites diners to settle in among neighbors inside a historic residence.  Photography courtesy of Vicki B’s Restaurant & Market

But the gears were already turning. “I kept thinking of all these possibilities and things that could go in there and how we could use the space to showcase more of North Carolina,” she said. Three days later, she called the owner to discuss renting the space, and in November 2025, Vicki B’s Restaurant & Market opened to the public for lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch, plus a grab-and-go cooler for all things in between.

A longtime player in the Outer Banks’s restaurant scene, Basnight opened Basnight’s Lone Cedar Cafe with her mother in 1996 and now co-owns it with her sister, Caroline. From the beginning, the Nags Head mainstay has boasted a reputation for showcasing fresh, local ingredients with the names of farmers and fishermen, plus their location, noted on the menu alongside the dish.

Basnight calls her dishes “local fare with global flair,” such as the burrata appetizer topped with local berries and mint from the restaurant’s garden. Photography courtesy of Vicki B’s Restaurant & Market

The commitment to highlighting local purveyors goes deeper than the farm-to-table movement. Basnight spent a lifetime building relationships with growers and commercial fishermen throughout eastern North Carolina, developed over years of tagging along with her dad, the late Senator Marc Basnight, when he visited constituents along State Route 64. “My father made friends with people who needed his help or people he’d stop and visit on his way to and from Raleigh, and I got to forge friendships with them, too,” Basnight said.

From appetizers to desserts, Vicki B’s menu reflects the same dedication to eastern North Carolina’s farms, fisherfolk, and everyone in between. “These are people who are hardworking and it’s a lot of their heritage that’s been passed down. It was in my dad’s heart, and it’s in my heart, too.”

If it’s soft-shell crab season, Basnight serves them her father’s favorite way: tucked into a sandwich.   Photography courtesy of Vicki B’s Restaurant & Market

You might find pork chops from Hyde County, swordfish from the Outer Banks, sweet potatoes from Columbia, and vegetables and herbs straight from the garden outside of Vicki B’s. Basnight prints out a new menu each day to reflect what’s currently fresh and available, such as crab beignets, North Carolina beet salad, or Pop’s Soft Crab Sammy — two soft-shell crabs caught by Basnight herself (read more about it here in our May issue), each served on a slice of Wonder Bread slicked with Duke’s Mayonnaise — just the way her dad would eat them.

Throughout the space, Vicki B’s maintains the warmth of a home, with different rooms acting as nooks for dining and a spacious outdoor patio for lunch in the sunshine or cocktails during the evening. Throughout the dining room, Basnight added custom wooden fixtures of her own, each one a nod to her own Outer Banks roots. The bar top was made with wood from East Lake on the Dare County mainland, where Basnight’s grandfather had a logging business. For the base of a wooden table, she used pilings from the original Jennette’s Pier. Some pieces are even flecked with wild oyster shells — a nod to her maternal grandfather’s commercial fishing heritage. “We have every little nook and cranny from Dare County in the tables and space,” she says.

Pick up smoked fish dip, fresh salads, and other take-home treats from the grab-and-go cooler at Vicki B’s. Photography courtesy of Vicki B’s Restaurant & Market

While some of the dishes skew more new school (like Korean bibimbap and tuna poke nachos), other dishes at Vicki B’s pay homage to different eras of the Outer Banks, pulling inspiration from old-time recipes. The shrimp Aristotle pasta, for example, was a Hatteras Island specialty perfected by a friend of Basnight’s. Another is Vicki B’s spin on boiled drum, which opts for baking the fish, potatoes, and onions with lots of bacon cracklings. Even the desserts — such as the 16-layer chocolate cake and salted caramel cake — come from old Wanchese recipes, contributed to the restaurant by women throughout the community.

Vicki B’s is Basnight’s personal celebration of food and recipes she has enjoyed and shared with family and neighbors over the years. “These items are special to me because I either created them on my own or they were passed down to me,” Basnight says. “Food was part of sitting down and how you came together and stayed together.” In downtown Manteo, she welcomes the community to continue the delicious tradition.

Vicki B’s Restaurant & Market
301 Budleigh Street
Manteo, NC 27954
(252) 305-8117
instagram.com/vicki_bs