Johnson & Wales University (JWU), once the prime source for trained chefs in Charleston, shocked the city’s bustling restaurant industry in 2002 when it announced it would turn off its stoves in the city’s old cigar factory and move to Charlotte.
For many, the decision by the Providence, R.I.-based culinary school to leave after two decades in the Lowcountry during a national recession was just as scary as the 1996 closure of the Charleston Naval Base for what it could mean for the tri-county economy.
Charleston Realtor Jimmy Bailey, a former three-term member of the S.C. House of Representatives, remembers an unexpected meeting with former state Sens. Glenn McConnell and Arthur Ravenel that led to a committee to find a culinary school to fill the pending loss of JWU.
Bailey recalls he asked the legislators, “‘You have any idea how this will affect the culinary scene in Charleston? It could be just as bad for the restaurant industry as the closing of the Naval Base.’ McConnell said, ‘Lord have mercy! We haven’t even thought about that!’ ”
The two senators asked Bailey to lead a committee to find JWU’s replacement. But without a training facility other than the culinary school’s cigar factory campus, there were no takers, Bailey recalled. With no other outside options, the committee looked local to Trident Technical College.
Bailey said he and the legislators met with Mary Thornley, Trident Tech’s president. “We told her we’d recommend the General Assembly get [her] some money.” Further, he said, the team recommended that she rebrand Trident’s two-year culinary arts program as the “Culinary Institute of Charleston,” he said. The committee believed, he said, that a new name would boost Trident Tech’s credibility within the hospitality community nationally.
“She agreed to do that, and [local lawmakers] got $7 million to pump into the new Culinary Institute of Charleston,” he said. “Mary Thornley understood the importance of why we needed to expand the school.
“She saved the restaurant industry in Charleston,” Bailey said. “I don’t think there is any question that she saved it.”
A modest reaction
The praise that Thornley has received from Bailey and others will likely grow as her June 1 retirement draws closer. When she leaves, Thornley said, she’ll have more time for her family and church, Harbor View Presbyterian.
A modest Thornley claimed it is “absolutely not true” that she saved Charleston’s restaurant industry. There were other Charlestonians, she said, such as Bailey, McConnell, former S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell, restaurant owner Hank Holliday and his business partner chef Robert Carter. They played, she said, prominent roles in getting the support that Trident Tech needed to fill the void created when JWU left Charleston in May 2006.
Bailey countered, however, that Thornley’s deflection of the praise “is typical of Mary, who wants to give credit to everyone else. She deserves 90% of the credit.”
Thornley said the committee suggested some 29 changes and upgrades to Trident’s culinary program.
“We decided that if we were going to get recommendations from top chefs, that we were going to honor every one of them, and we did,” she said.
Expanding Trident’s kitchens
Carter, a retired chef, was a 1989 JWU graduate. He was on the advisory committee that helped to expand Trident Tech’s culinary program from one that trained cafeteria workers to teaching chefs who managed kitchens in some of the city’s top restaurants.
Carter was working in the kitchen at Hank’s Seafood, a restaurant he co-owned with Holliday, when he heard that his alma mater was leaving Charleston.
“I was pissed,” Carter said.
The chef was vested in JWU, which had given him an honorary doctorate degree. “I did a lot to promote [JWU], and I felt like because of the growth of the industry in Charleston, the university should have kept a presence in Charleston.” He and others had proposed that JWU offer advanced degrees for students who would then go on to work in a city that was becoming a culinary destination.
With the city’s rising culinary profile, Holliday said he felt a rush of “panic” with JWU’s announcement and concern over how it would complicate finding skilled talent at Hank’s and his other restaurant, Peninsula Grill, both of which he has since sold.
With an accreditation from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America (CIA), JWU was nearly impossible to replace, Holliday recalled. “Trident Tech … [and] Mary were very effective. They worked hard to fill the vacuum.”
Phenomenal growth
For three decades, Thornley has guided the college’s growth from three campuses with 8,000 students to five campuses with an enrollment of 14,000 students, the third largest undergraduate enrollment in the state.
The college’s nine-member Area Commission has set Jan. 29 as a deadline to receive applications from candidates who want to be considered for the Trident Tech presidency.
Thornley became Trident Tech’s president in 1991, five years before the shipyard closed, when the college had 7,900 students. But in the following years, enrollment jumped “because the shipyard workers were coming to us for retraining,” Thornley said. “A lot of it was on their own. We were struggling to find faculty and classrooms to handle this influx [of students] three years in a row.”
At that time, the college had a small campus on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston, a campus in Moncks Corner and the Palmer campus on Columbus Street in downtown Charleston, where its culinary arts program was based.
Trident Tech began acquiring property in 1993 to expand its North Charleston campus, and that led to a strategic plan for the future, Thornley said.
“What do we, as a center of workforce training, need to be doing?” she said. “During that time, we realized the hospitality and tourism industry was a giant, and we had a fledgling program at the downtown Palmer campus that was not nearly big enough.
“So we made plans before we ever knew Johnson & Wales was leaving,” she said. The college had already expanded its culinary program by 77,000 square feet on the main campus.
“And then what happened [was] Johnson & Wales announced in June 2002 they were departing. We already had plans for our expansion. We had plans to augment what Johnson & Wales produced, but then we realized, overnight, we were now replacing them.
“We stepped up to increase our ability to turn out workers who could perform in this sophisticated hospitality and tourism arena” after the JWU announced its move, she said. The $7 million that the college received from the legislature, she said, was combined with $2.2 million from the college to upgrade the Palmer campus’ culinary program.
Changing the program’s name to the Culinary Institute of Charleston might not have been necessary, she said, but “we wanted to pay special attention to those programs, and we think it has worked.”
Thornley said it was a challenge to replace JWU’s baccalaureate degree with Trident’s two-year associates program. “We studied the program at Johnson & Wales, and we broke it into certificates, diplomas and associate degrees and advanced certificates to cover some of those competencies they had in their third and fourth years,” she said.
Today, 500 students are enrolled in the institute’s culinary, baking and pastry and hospitality and tourism management associate degree programs, said Nathan Rex, dean of the college’s Culinary Institute of Charleston. An additional 300 students are pursuing certificates in 10 programs such as hotel and event management, cake decorating and food and beverage operations.
“Enrollment has been growing since 2018,” said Rex, who graduated from Trident Tech in 2003 and 2004 with two degrees. “I don’t foresee enrollment decreasing. I think it will remain the same and slowly increase based on the demands,” he said. “With the introduction of our online programs, we are able to reach students that we might not have been able to reach.”
Thornley said the college is currently not meeting the restaurant’s industry demand for employees. She added, however, that none of the degree programs have been producing enough graduates to meet the needs for workers across all sectors of the tri-county’s economy.
“Our region is growing well above the national average. Trident Tech is growing well above the national average,” Thornley explained. “The need for skilled workers in every job sector is higher than it’s ever been, and so is the need for training. We’ll continue to step up and do everything in our power to meet local needs. Our success depends on the continuing assistance and support of the community.”
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