Technical College of the Lowcountry cooking up new courses for Hilton Head
The Technical College of the Lowcountry is cooking up a plan to open a culinary institute on Hilton Head Island.
Once fully operational, college and island leaders hope the program could graduate 100 new cooks each year to help staff island restaurants and resorts hungry to hire trained kitchen personnel.
TCL is turning up the heat on the idea later this year with a pilot program to put 16 students through a four-month culinary course with chefs at some of the island's premier restaurants, said college president Richard Gough this week.
Should that November-to-February course prove successful, Gough and his staff hope to expand the program over the next three to four years into a new associates degree offering inside a new, state-of-the-art TCL kitchen, he added.
The pilot program is "a short term Band Aid that we will have in place this fall, but the longer vision is to build a first-class culinary arts facility on or near the island to support the needs of the culinary community," Gough said. "Of my time here at TCL, I haven't done anything that's more exciting than getting this going. I really feel like we're contributing to the workforce needs here in Beaufort County and throughout our area."
The idea for a new TCL culinary institute was born several months ago, when Gough sat down with resort leaders and island restaurateur to discuss their most pressing employment and training needs, said Hilton Head Town Councilman John McCann, who helped facilitate the meetings and is a former board chairman of the TCL Foundation. The group included leaders from SERG Group restaurants and the Marriott, Sonesta and Sea Pines resorts.
Through those discussions, it became clear the demand for trained kitchen workers during Hilton Head's increasingly busy summer tourist seasons far exceeds the pool of local talent available today, Gough and McCann said.
The resorts alone bring in more than 400 foreign interns to help each summer and local restaurants hire even more, said McCann and SERG Group founder Steve Carb, whose company owns nine local restaurants.
"We have openings right now in the back of the house for trained skilled workers, and that's what this pilot program is designed to create," Carb said. "All of us at the meeting were anxious and excited about getting this thing rolling. We're positive it's going to prove that the need is there and the demand is there. It's just logistics -- can we reach out to enough people."
But TCL doesn't have existing facilities or staff to support such a demand for training, Gough said. The college's culinary program at its Beaufort campus became a credit certificate program in 2007, with students working out of a short-order grill there, but it's enrollment has dwindled since the economic downturn, said Gina Mounfield, TCL vice president for academic affairs.
That's where the resorts stepped in, Gough and McCann said.
The Sonesta and Sea Pines resorts have offered the use of their kitchens and help of their chefs to host and teach this year's pilot program during the winter off-season, Gough said. To help with supplies, the resorts brought in Sysco foods, which has agreed to provide necessary food items, textbooks and even kitchen uniforms for the program, he added.
"It's a perfect pilot program," Gough added. "It's a win for students, it's a win for the employers and it's a win for the suppliers."
With those partnerships in place, Mounfield has crafted a curriculum for the program to cover safety and sanitation, food preparation, nutrition, production kitchen operations, culinary management and human resources, she said. The courses will include extensive labs and a capstone class in which students will work as a team member in a real kitchen, she added.
And don't confuse the course with the gimmicks of shows like "Chopped," she added. Tests will be written and competency based, including recalling safety measures and preparing ingredients to a chef's specifications, Mounfield said.
"The students in the program will be vying for jobs," she said. "One learns through constructive criticism; the TV shows are for entertainment."
Mounfield has submitted the course curriculum for approval from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, which oversees accreditation, she said. Once that is approved, the school will open enrollment for the limited spots, but a specific date has not been set, she added.
Should the pilot's students succeed next spring, Gough hopes to grow the program over the next several years to include building TCL a new kitchen facility. Such a building could be constructed at a new location on Hilton Head Island or it could take a spot at the college's New River campus off U.S. 278, he said.
Either way, the college does not yet have a plan to fund such construction, Gough added.
A TCL culinary institute on Hilton Head Island would not be affiliated with the new University of South Carolina Beaufort hospitality management campus planned for Office Park Road, Gough and McCann said.
The curriculum at each school also would not compete, they added. The USCB program focuses on "front of the house" managers and the TCL culinary program will teach "back of the house" line cooks and sous-chefs, McCann said.
"We've already got people asking about joining up with this class, and we've got some outstanding chefs to work with," Gough said. "It's going to catch fire and take legs."
Follow reporter Zach Murdock on Twitter at twitter.com/IPBG_Zach and on Facebook at facebook.com/IPBGZach.
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This story was originally published September 13, 2015 at 7:25 PM with the headline "Technical College of the Lowcountry cooking up new courses for Hilton Head."