HGTC’s International Culinary Institute set to open restaurant featuring students’ wares

The public will get its first taste of Horry-Georgetown Technical College’s new International Culinary Institute of Myrtle Beach when it opens its doors for lunch service on Tuesday.

The institute’s invitation-only grand opening was Wednesday night and local restauranteurs, hoteliers and former students and alumni got a first look – and a first taste – at the new institute.

Beef carpaccio with bone marrow mayo, braised short ribs, lobster risotto with seared scallops and candied bacon were among the dozens of dishes available, served to guests mingling inside the school’s six kitchens. All the dishes were prepared by current and former students and chefs. One room was devoted to dessert, one to sushi and another to bread.

“This has been a dream that goes back to the recession,” said HGTC President Neyle Wilson. “We were trying to figure out what does our program niche look like? And we sort of fell back, like we often do in life, we fell back to the basics. What’s our basic economy? It’s tourism.

“And what’s the basis of tourism? One of the major components is food. We started looking around and saw, gosh, there’s 2,400 restaurants in the Grand Strand that employ 23,000 people. That’s what we need to be doing.”

Wilson said the size of the new institute at the school’s Grand Strand campus will allow the school to more than double its enrollment capacity from 150 to 400 students. Besides the culinary program, the school is also adding a two-year degree in baking and pastry arts.

“We have some of the most modern equipment you can find in a kitchen,” said Wilson. “We have a wine cellar. We have two pastry labs and two training kitchens and then a production kitchen. We’re really excited about the fact that we were smart enough to get two very talented architects to help design this. And then we got a real good construction management guy and good construction company. We just couldn’t be more pleased.”

The building

The interior of the $15 million 30,000 square-foot building designed by architecture firm Mozingo and Wallace has a high ceiling and large windows.

The dining room is furnished with a bar and tables with white seats. It holds around 100 people.

“When we designed the building, we wanted to build a crisp, cleanliness to the building,” said Derrick Mozingo. “The building is white, off-white, soft colors; representative of chef’s attire. It has somewhat of a symbolic architectural chef’s hat on the corner that’s illuminated at night. It has a sense of aura, a sense of articulation.”

The building took a year to design and 16 months to build.

“It’s got a lot of natural light,” Mozingo said. “I’m a big believer in infiltration of natural light. I believe natural light uplifts the human spirit and I think it enhances the learning process. Pretty much all the rooms including the kitchen and bakery labs have an infusion of natural light through solar tubes, through skylights in the lobby or glass walls.

“The lobby has decorative glass, green, yellow and blue, which you’ve probably seen at night. It’s an artistic expression to the exterior to the building. The building architecturally is illuminated at night, which tells a different story than the building in the daytime.”

The new institute contains two teaching kitchens, two pastry labs, an outdoor barbecue area, a green house, a room for canning and curing, a small student-run bakery and eventually a hydroponic garden.

The teaching institute

“This building is unreal,” said instructor Chef Eric Wagner. “Every corner is something new and shiny, brand new and sharp. It makes teaching so much easier.”

Each kitchen has a camera (and in some cases, cameras) that can focus on whatever the chef is doing so students from anywhere in the kitchen can observe.

“We have TVs in each corner that will highlight what we put on the screen,” said Wagner. “We’re hoping the students gain a better education using more modern tools and be able to go out in the field and take what we teach them to use in restaurants.”

Executive Director Joe Bonaparte said the kitchens in the institute are designed specifically for teaching.

“They’re not working kitchens adapted to teaching,” he said. “We have a working kitchen for the restaurant and it’s an open kitchen so students can learn at a very high level working neat, clean, professionally.”

Bonaparte hopes the school will give students the education and level of professionalism they need to go to work anywhere in the world.

“In my mind, what I’d like is for them to go off and work all over the world and come back to Myrtle Beach in a few years and start to cultivate a real locally-based, high-quality, chef-driven food scene,” he said.

The dining room

The school’s Fowler Dining Room will serve lunch starting Nov. 15 through Dec. 8, closing for Thanksgiving week Nov. 23 through Nov. 27. It will reopen next year on Jan. 19.

Lunch will be served Monday through Thursday with reservations being accepted for 11:30 a.m., 11:45 a.m., noon, 12:15 p.m. and 12:30 p.m. meal times.

Menu items include appetizers like posole or charcuterie and cheese, chorizo and margherita pizza, main courses like wood-fire miso-glazed salmon or a burger with bacon jam, and for desert, an apple galette or Belgium duo chocolate mousse torte.

The four-course meal costs $13.95.

Dinner service will begin next year.

Reservations are available by calling 843-349-5334 Monday through Thursday 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. Callers are encouraged to leave a message if no one is available to answer the phone.

This story was originally published November 10, 2016 at 10:05 AM with the headline "HGTC’s International Culinary Institute set to open restaurant featuring students’ wares."