The Culinary Revival of King Neptune

At King Neptune restaurant in Wrightsville Beach, positive energy is palpable. The restaurant is considered the oldest continuously operating restaurant in New Hanover County and has seen numerous changes in ownership since its first incarnation in 1947.

Current owners Jimmy and Keaton Gilleece purchased the restaurant in 2022, and today the dining room is adorned with captivating coastal artwork and alive with the aromas of local seafood and fresh-cut flowers. At the helm of the restaurant’s recent transformation is chef Em Ecker and wife Kim Ecker, who serves as general manager.

Em Ecker grew up alongside extended family on a farm outside of Baltimore.

“We grew our own produce and canned all of our food,” she said. “My great-grandmother was one of the first and best teachers I’ve ever had. She told me how to make butter. She showed me how to make ice cream. I was like 4, maybe 5 years old, and it was fascinating.”

But when Em Ecker got a bit older, it wasn’t always easy being the girl from the farm. Her lunches looked very different from many of her friends whose parents were packing things like Lunchables and other highly processed lunchbox items designed for convenience.

“It took me a little bit to realize that I was eating healthier than any of them, and what a blessing that really was, compared to what they were eating,” she said.

In addition to working on the farm, some of Em Ecker’s family were also in the restaurant business, and she held her first kitchen position as a dishwasher at her uncle’s Greek restaurant while still in middle school. She distinctly remembers the night her uncle launched a pan across the room, and the whole kitchen went silent.

“He looked at everyone and said, ‘This plate is wrong. We make it again. Everyone deserves the same food.’ And from that moment I could feel that passion become one in me, and I wanted to do the same thing, to have the same attitude toward feeding people,” Em Ecker said.

From then on, she was focused on a culinary career and rose through the ranks of award-winning kitchens throughout the Baltimore area before crossing paths with Kim in 2017.

Still, the path wasn’t linear. Over time, Em Ecker had begun to feel herself drifting from her culinary roots, more and more disconnected from the food she was cooking. Long hours in commercial kitchens where she didn’t have much of a say over where ingredients were sourced and how they were treated, had taken a toll. She was burnt out.

As luck would have it, meeting Kim, a Wilmington native and health coach, helped her find her way back. Together, over time, they came up with a plan to relocate to Wilmington and start a food truck and personal chef service where they could focus on serving delicious, healthy meals with local ingredients.

Kim took a side job as a server at King Neptune in 2022 and eventually, when a new executive chef was needed, she encouraged Em to apply.

“She’s just a natural leader,” Kim Ecker said. “She knows kitchens inside and out.”

But Em Ecker didn’t want to go back to a restaurant where she was serving food she couldn’t stand behind.

“I told them, if I’m the chef, we’re going local, seasonal, and completely seed oil-free,” she said. “It was going to be a lot of work, tons of staff training and public education, but they were all in.”

While it was easy to build connections with local farms such as Red Beard and Terra Vita and local seafood purveyors, becoming seed-oil free was a huge undertaking.

Restaurants have traditionally relied on refined seed oils such as soybean, canola and sunflower oil because they are inexpensive, shelf-stable and widely available. Alternatives such as olive and avocado oils as well as tallow, lard and butter are all significantly more expensive and have lower smoke points and shorter shelf lives, making them harder to work with.

Some chefs are moving away from seed oils based on health concerns.

“Seed oils are ultra-processed and packed with preservative chemicals and heavy metals,” Em Ecker said. “They don’t add flavor; they just add inflammation to the body. It’s like adding water to your gas tank. Your car might run for a while, but eventually, it’ll break down.”

King Neptune is now not only certified as seed-oil free but also as an Ocean Friendly Establishment through the locally founded and now nationally recognized efforts of the Plastic Ocean Project.

“We’re already doing more than what’s required,” Kim Ecker said. “We’re not cutting any corners.”

As for the menus, they change with the seasons and are built around what farmers like Morgan Milne, of Red Beard Farms, has available.

“He’ll call and say, ‘I’ve got something weird,’ and I’m like, ‘Great – what can I do with it?’” Em Ecker laughs. Rather than building dishes and sourcing ingredients to match, the food here is dictated by the land and sea.

Technically, Em Ecker’s cooking is low-tech by design, no sous vide machines or industrial smokers here.

“I want people to know you don’t need fancy equipment to cook great food,” she said. “We smoke without a smoker. We steam without a steamer. I teach my team how to work with what we have.”

And teaching is a huge part of her mission. Though she never went to culinary school, she takes pride in mentoring the next generation of cooks.

“My job is to teach chefs how to be honest,” she said. “You can’t learn that from TV or a textbook.”

That philosophy spills into the front of house as well.

“We don’t tolerate that back-of-house versus front-of-house divide here,” Kim Ecker added. “We’re all one team, and every role matters – especially the dishwashers. If they’re not here, we all go down fast.”

For both Em and Kim, King Neptune is more than a restaurant they get to help run together, it’s a return to traditional values that once defined food: simplicity, authenticity and care. Whether it’s serving a strawberry-forward dish at peak season or helping a first-time dishwasher find their stride, it’s done with intention.

“I don’t need awards,” Em Ecker said. “What I want is to feed people well and teach those coming up how to do it right.”