The Sixth Love Language: Chef Marianne's Culinary Passion

Chefs Tobin, Linda, Marianne, and Leah with student Ercion Anderson.

Believe it or not, the pink hair might be the least radiant thing about Chef Marianne Harris. If you ask any of her culinary students about her, common refrains include:

Chef Marianne is great. She’s amazing. She’s fantastic. She’s patient with me. You don’t feel judged by her. She implements how she does things without making you feel run over. She answers all of your questions and takes time out for you.

And then, “Oh, and she’s a great chef.”

Indeed, Chef Marianne is a great cook and has wowed many with her food truck menus and Community Dinners, but what seems to stick with people about her is her capacity to meet each individual where s/he is with a genuine kindness and grace that’s rare.

This certainly tracks with Chef Marianne’s philosophy of food. “I believe that there are six love languages and that the sixth love language is feeding people. That’s just been how I’ve shown love my whole life. Food brings people together.”

This sense of cooking as an expression of love comes from early on in Chef Marianne’s life:

Photo by Derek Eckenroth

“I have always loved cooking. My grandfather calls me Cookie to this day because I started out at grandma and grandpa’s playing restaurant. I would make up the menu as I went, and then I would go in the kitchen and make whatever I had told them I was going to make. Also, my mom passed when I was younger. My earliest memories are of standing on a stool next to the stove with her, and cooking is one way that I feel very close to her and that I’m doing something she would’ve loved.”

Chef Marianne took that childhood passion and made it her profession. “When I found out that I could cook for a living, that was it for me.” She studied Culinary Arts at Bob Jones, and after a brief return to Ohio, decided to make Greenville her home on a leap of faith.

“I loved Greenville when I was here for school. I was coming down from Ohio for a wedding in 2016, and as I was riding a train, I was reading Anna Kendrick’s Scrappy Little Nobody. There was a line where she said she doesn’t think she would’ve gotten where she is today if she hadn’t jumped without a net. So I decided it was time for me to jump without a net. Six months later I moved down here and haven’t looked back.”

Chef Marianne started out working at Swamp Rabbit Café and Grocery, which is where she first heard about Project Host, and then she went on to Wolfgang Puck at the airport and worked her way up from line cook to sous chef to de facto running the kitchen in short order. Work was enjoyable, but exhausting, and Marianne decided she needed some time away from the food service industry, taking a job as a live-in nanny with some close friends.

But she couldn’t stay away from the kitchen for long. Through mutual contacts, she arranged a meeting with Tobin Simpson, who oversaw all culinary operations at the time. The meeting was ostensibly for Tobin to meet Marianne and connect her with some of the many people in the restaurant industry in Greenville, but after two hours of conversation, Tobin offered Chef Marianne a job running the HostMobile food truck.

“I said, ‘Oh, ok, can I think about it?’ I could not sleep that night, couldn’t stop thinking about it, and then, as I was taking my friends’ kids to school the next morning, I knew I had to do this.”

For over a year, Marianne ran the food truck and channeled her creativity into her food, but in fall 2020, Chef Tobin thought it was time to see how Chef Marianne performed in the classroom. She became Project Host’s Teaching Chef in the CC Pearce Culinary School, and it was there that Marianne truly flourished.

Her recipe for success? Special focus on each student as an individual, a healthy dose of humility, and the passion to always learn.

“Each class is different. I don’t think I started getting the hang of it until I taught my third class. I’ve learned a lot from each and every class I have taught, including that no class is the same. I strive to cater each class to what the students would like to get out of it. I want them to get out of it what they put into it. If I include something they are excited about, they are going to want to come back and give it their all.”

For Marianne, attention on the individual goes beyond just discovering what students’ interests are in the culinary field:

“Each person has a story, and some of them are heartbreaking. I am so honored that I even get to meet our wonderful students and have a relationship with them. The resilience of my students is incredibly humbling. They’ve all been through so much, whether its abuse or never being given a chance or constantly struggling and never ever having a leg up or addiction—the list goes on and on. If I can be the person that says yes, that shows them love, that encourages them in a way that helps them move on to the next step and that is an upward step, I will have served every purpose that I ever wanted to serve.”

Ultimately, it’s the unique combination of her passion for food and service to other human beings that makes Project Host Chef Marianne’s dream job.

Chef Marianne with students Ashley Daniels and Trina Gambrell.

“Project Host is it for me. I have never ever worked somewhere where I felt so at home, as challenged, or as fulfilled as I do here. I can’t imagine going anywhere else. If I never got to do anything else ever again and this was it, I’d die incredibly happy. 

The most beautiful thing is that Chef Marianne inspires that same passion for Project Host in all the students she teaches. After each of the classes taught by Marianne has ended, almost every student has said, “I don’t ever want to leave here.”

While the wider organization would love to take all the credit for why students want to stay, there’s little doubt that what they’re feeling and responding to is the love and individualized attention that Marianne infuses into every moment and every morsel. They want to bask for just a little longer in Chef Marianne’s radiant presence.

By Claudia Winkler