Charles Gardiner has been around kitchens all his life. His father was a chef and Charles has been cooking since he was two years old. His mom took pictures of him back then standing on a stool to cook eggs for breakfast. 

"I have grown up eating fantastic food and having a deeper love for food than just what I see on TV," Charles says, "however, I didn't grow up thinking 'I am going to be a chef.'"

Now Charles is a student at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College and a cook at The Inn on Biltmore Estate in Asheville. Perhaps it's natural that he is competing in Atlanta February 19 for the American Culinary Federation's title of Southeast Region Student Chef of the Year.

Charles started cooking professionally at 16 at a country club in Greensboro. "I constantly got comments about how I was wasting my talent going to school for computers and I kept somewhat ignoring the comments," Charles says. "Then at a competition where my chef John McCracken was competing I watched him compete, and it was like something clicked in me and I knew that this was something that I had to do. The next day I was looking into enrolling at A-B Tech here in Asheville and the rest is history."

Charles says he has  been looking forward to this competition since last year when he worked with some of the past winners and one of the chefs that he will be competing against. "The national level competition is one of the biggest competitions for chefs my age to show what they have individually," Charles says. 

With a lot on the line, Charles says he has been working on his dish regularly for more than a month and he plans to practice up until time for competition. He says he hopes this competition will add an extra level of validation to his resume.

"I just hope that it will help to prove that all the experience that I have gained over the years has payed off," Charles says about the ACF event. "For me the competition is more about learning how to be a better chef than just competing."

As for his career after the competition, Charles says he wants to continue to progress, learn, and grow at Biltmore where he's been cooking for nearly three years with chef Rick Boyer, whom Charles credits as a major reason for his success.