Chef Miles Huff came out of retirement to launch the Culinary Institute of the South at the Technical College of the Lowcountry.
Photo by Mic Smith
Chef Miles Huff
AGE: 64.
HOME TURF: Currently lives in Beaufort, but home is—and always will be—Summerville.
CLAIM TO FAME: Founding dean of the Culinary Institute of the South (tcl.edu/culinary-institute).
LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: With meager roots in rural South Carolina and from a family of farmers, Huff was the first college graduate in his family.
WRITE IT DOWN: In 2017, he published South Carolina Schools Cook!, a training manual for school nutrition service professionals. His next project? Taking the concept national with United States Schools Cook!
CO-OP AFFILIATION: Berkeley Electric Cooperative.
Before he went to culinary school and became one of South Carolina’s top teaching chefs, Miles Huff served as a U.S. Air Force medic for 26 years and took care of his grandparents—and then his mother—in their final years. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that Huff has devoted his culinary career to preparing young adults for service to others.
It’s just his way to take life’s ingredients, let them marinate (or some might say, rise) and help produce the next generation of chefs, cookbook authors, caterers and artisan food creators in his most-recent position—dean of the Culinary Institute of the South in Bluffton.
Due to his humble beginnings in rural Berkeley County, he never thought he’d be where he is today. “I used to be embarrassed about how poor we were. I tell people, ‘I’ve eaten so much squirrel, I have a nut allergy today.’ As a barefooted boy living on a dirt road, I would have never imagined that one day I would be a dean of a college.”
After teaching at his alma mater, Johnson & Wales in Charleston, and assisting in the creation of the Culinary Institute of Charleston at Trident Technical College, Huff came out of retirement to launch the Technical College of the Lowcountry’s new Culinary Institute of the South, which opened earlier this year, complete with a “grab and go” cafe and The Bistro, a 24-seat teaching restaurant. He designed the building, wrote the curriculum, and welcomed the first 80 students. Future plans call for growing enrollment to 400-plus students and opening the Foodseum, the country’s only museum focusing on the food culture of the South.
Now that Huff has announced his second retirement, launching the Culinary Institute of the South will be delicious part of his legacy.
“This place has my fingerprints all over it,” Huff says proudly. “I love teaching students because their future is ahead of them. I love knowing where they can go. I love opening up their world.”