The improvement of the adsorption performance of adsorbents to the target substance plays a crucial role in the actual sample pretreatment. Here, a convenient, sustainable and efficient strategy was developed for the fabrication of the monodispersed porous carbon material. It was derived from the direct carbonization of zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8) with controllable pore size and uniform morphology without any additional carbon source. The Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) surface area of carbonized ZIF-8 (C/ZIF-8) was as high as 1463.20 m² g⁻¹ and pore volume was 0.5608 cm³ g⁻¹, and the adsorption capacity of the C/ZIF-8-based solid phase extraction (SPE) column greatly enhanced to 640.88 μg g⁻¹ compared with the adsorption capacity (93.36 μg g⁻¹) of original ZIF-8 towards ethopabate (ETP), achieving an improvement of about 7 times. Highly efficient ETP extraction was achieved with C/ZIF-8 under pH 3.0–7.0 for 16 min, and nearly 100% desorption efficiency was obtained when eluted with methanol for 12 min. The ETP enrichment on C/ZIF-8 and coupled with the high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) detection provided a feasible method for the analysis of ETP in chicken samples. The recovery and the relative standard deviation of the method were 89.66–99.58% and 0.31–1.77%, respectively.