Chef Marcus Shell takes a deep, wide-eyed breath, as if deciding where he might begin. He shifts in his chair. “Yeah, dude,” he says, settling in. “I’m grateful that Geoff was on my path because me and him evolved my life.” He’s talking about Red Clay Hot Sauce founder Geoff Rhyne, “a former boss,” Shell says, “who became family.”
Family, both biological and otherwise, factor heavily into Shell’s success. On Instagram there’s a photo in which he wears a clean, white chef’s jacket. He looks calm and satisfied. The caption reads simply, “Boy I’ve come a long way.” He’s right. Born into a large family in the Boston area—his mom is one of twelve—Marcus Shell began cooking as a boy. “I would cook with my mom,” he says. “The older I got, the more things she taught me.” She began with microwaved scrambled eggs—a safety precaution. Eventually, the student became the teacher. “There was a rice dish called Jagacida,” he tells us. “Once I learned how to make that, I started to make it better than she did.”
Soon after, he began cooking breakfast in a cousin’s coffee shop. He moved on to an Italian place during high school where he experienced the chaotic restaurant life— “real restaurant life”—for the first time. He remembers hanging with the older guys. “One day, they bet me twenty bucks I could drink a cup of meatball grease,” he says, smiling. Did he drink it? He did. “And I threw up profusely afterwards,” he says. “But I made that twenty bucks. And I kind of fell in love with the atmosphere in that moment.”
Post-high school, Shell struggled to find his footing. He attended nearby UMass Dartmouth, putting culinary school on the back burner. Away from his mother’s watchful eye, he developed other interests. “I wasn’t there for academics, you would say.” His brother, eleven years older, presented an idea. “There’s this culinary school in Cambridge,” he told Marcus. “What do you think? You can live with me and my family.” Marcus was in. His brother paid off Shell’s existing college debt, helped him get into Le Cordon Bleu, and for the first time, “probably since elementary school,” Marcus says, “I was thriving academically.”
Working his way up as a line cook, Shell eventually became Food and Beverage Coordinator at Wesley Commons Retirement Community in Greenwood, South Carolina. That’s where he met Geoff Rhyne. “There are a few people in my life that have made pivotal impacts,” says Shell, “…where you meet someone who sees more in you than you see in yourself. And they pour into you. And that’s what Geoff did.” Rhyne became his mentor, teacher and advisor—promoting him, buying him a desk and inviting Shell to share his office. Before moving on from Greenwood, Rhyne “looked at me,” says Shell, “and said, ‘I just don’t want it to be too hard for you.’ Not in the sense that he didn’t think I could do it. Just in the sense that he wishes he could make it easier for me.” We ask Shell whether that conversation strikes him as touchingly parental. “Yes,” he says without thinking. “We talk every day.”
Now six years sober, Shell, formerly Executive Chef at Charleston’s Rue de Jean, is Uptown Hospitality Group’s newest Director of Culinary Operations, overseeing three of the organization’s restaurants and acting as Executive Chef at a fourth, all while remaining instrumental in helping to evolve Rhyne’s award-winning Red Clay Hot Sauce. “This is the first opportunity for me to do some self-exploration and decide who I really am when it comes to being a chef,” he says. He already seems to have some idea. While considering the position, he consulted Rhyne, who challenged him to describe what he does. His answer? “I do what I can to evolve what exists in my own vision.” Without his team, however, “…I am nothing,” he says. “I’ve never seen one chef do it on his own successfully. You need to surround yourself with the right people.” And no one understands that better than he does.