Chef Ricky Moore

Ricky Moore is a James Beard Foundation award-winning American chef, entrepreneur, speaker and author with decades of restaurant and hospitality experience. Moore believes that ordinary, simple food can be extraordinary when executed at the highest level.

Moore was born and raised on the inner banks of North Carolina in the coastal town of New Bern, where catching and eating fresh fish and shellfish is a way of life. He served as a cook in the US Army for seven years before graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1994 and working in some of the world’s most prestigious kitchens.

Moore opened SALTBOX Seafood Joint® in Durham, NC in 2012. Accolades in Garden & Gun, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Forbes followed. In 2019, Moore debuted the SALTBOX Seafood Joint® Cookbook – with 60 recipes celebrating his coastal culinary heritage.

In 2020, as one of the region’s most admired chefs, Moore received his first James Beard nomination. In 2022, he was awarded the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Southeast. In 2025, Moore was named a semifinalist of the James Beard Foundation's national Outstanding Chef Award.