For most students, college starts off with a dining plan. This provides prepaid access to a wide variety of food options.
Nate Skipper, head chef of historic Columbia Italian restaurant Villa Tronco, said too many options at one's fingertips can make eating a healthy and balanced diet more difficult.
When students make the move off campus, as 66% of USC students do according to a 2023 report from US News, those options are chopped down to two.
Students can either spend a fortune on fast food, or know their way around the kitchen.
For beginners, learning to cook can be a complex task, said Robbie Robinson, owner and pitmaster of West Columbia’s City Limits Barbeque. But, there’s advice out there. Among those offering guidance are experienced chefs working at some of Columbia’s many restaurants.
A former CPA, Robinson joined the restaurant business in 2016 with a food truck, which eventually evolved into a permanent brick and mortar location in 2023. Last fall, he was recognized by the James Beard Foundation as a Best Chef: Southeast finalist.
Robinson, who has been cooking since his teenage years, loves to cook for simple, but deeply personal and fulfilling reasons, he said.
“When you cook good food, it makes people happy,” Robinson said. “It’s an added benefit if we can hear something from somebody where they tell us that this reminds them of how their mom did, how their grandma did it."
Robinson said trial and error is key to mastering the sometimes tricky technical skills needed to become a confident cook. While it can be frustrating to make the inevitable rookie mistakes, it is a valuable experience, he said.
"Finally unlocking — not secrets — but unlocking some of the challenges to getting it executed properly, and then settling into consistency with that execution is probably the favorite part,” Robinson said.
Fellow veteran chef Brandon Edmiston, who has been the kitchen manager of popular Mexican spot Cantina 76 on Main Street for a decade, had similar sentiments. He said good preparation is key to start building skills so you can get creative later.
“It just makes everything more efficient, a lot faster," Edmiston said. "And then, once you get comfortable with items, you can play with more ingredients and then update your flavor profiles.”
When the cookbook doesn't provide quite enough information to get a recipe down, Robinson and Skipper both had the same suggestion: look up a video.
“YouTube University is very helpful,” Skipper said. “Anytime I have an idea about something or I don’t know how to make something, I look on there, see if somebody has done it before.”
Skipper said his day-to-day diet depends on finding gaps in his busy schedule.
“It comes down to what kind of time I have, what I’m in the mood for,” Skipper said. “Main thing is, we eat quick in the kitchen.”
While some of Robinson's busiest days end with a late-night stop at Waffle House, he said the most important part of maintaining a healthy diet is planning one's meal's ahead of time, often as easy as remembering to have salad at the end of the day.
Skipper said managing buying healthy ingredients with all of the other costs of college isn’t an easy task, but achievable one, citing Trader Joes as a healthy, affordable grocery store.
Edmiston said that at the end of the day, eating like a chef isn’t a lofty goal or complicated puzzle, it just takes a bit of research and persistence.
“Honestly, eating like a chef, it doesn’t have to be complex or expensive,” Edmiston said. “Experiment flavors, be mindful what you’re eating and y’all just have fun with it."