Cindy Hutson stood in the cockpit of the charter boat Priority off Islamorada on Tuesday, taking instruction from captain A.J. Stewart on the finer points of detecting the bite of the yellowtail snapper.

“You don’t feel the bite; you see it,” Stewart told her. “Keep your rod tip low so you can see your line, and wait for it to take off. Then close the bail.”

Hutson, five-star chef and co-owner of Ortanique on the Mile in Coral Gables, listened patiently, not bothering to remind the captain that she once had stood in his deck shoes in the same marina where Priority is berthed. A few minutes later, she reeled in a legal-size yellowtail.

Smiling broadly, she sat down and turned the cockpit over to son Justin Cox, 32, and Delius Shirley, her partner of 18 years.

“Justin can do all the fishin’, and we can do all the cookin’,” Hutson told Shirley.

Tuesday’s half-day outing was a bit of a homecoming for Hutson. Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s — long before she became one of South Florida’s top chefs — Hutson and her ex-husband operated the charter fishing boat Ace Sea out of Miami’s Dinner Key Marina, and later Islamorada’s Holiday Isle Resort, now renamed the Postcard Inn Beach Resort & Marina at Holiday Isle. The Ace Sea specialized in offshore fishing for sailfish, dolphin, wahoo and tuna.

Hutson rigged bally hoo for trolling, deployed kites, and gaffed customers’ fish — even while pregnant with Justin.

“When it was tuna season, we’d bring wasabi out on the boat and we had a grill we used to attach and cook it out here,” she recalled as the Priority motored past Alligator Reef light.

After her marriage broke up, Hutson left charter fishing behind and began a career importing coffee and food products from the Caribbean. A lifelong, self-taught cook inspired by television’s Galloping Gourmet and Chef Tell, she showed South Florida chefs how to use her spices and seasonings. But she never considered becoming a chef herself.

“I had never even worked in a restaurant,” she said.

That changed abruptly in 1994 after she met Shirley at a food expo in Washington, D.C. Shirley, whose mother, Norma, was widely regarded as the Julia Child of Caribbean cuisine, persuaded Hutson to go into the restaurant business with him. They opened Norma’s on the Beach, and many customers assumed Shirley’s mother was the chef.

But it was Hutson, and at first she didn’t feel up to the job.

“I cried every single day,” she said.

But after a favorable review in USA Today, she decided to stick it out. Accolades followed, and Hutson and Shirley opened restaurants in Baltimore and Destin, Fla., which they later sold. Twelve years ago, they launched Ortanique on the Mile, then followed up in 2010 with Ortanique on the Crescent at Camana Bay on Grand Cayman Island. The restaurants are named for a hybrid orange that grows in Jamaica and Cuba, and is a primary ingredient in one of their fish sauces.

“I call it, ‘cuisine of the sun,’ ” Hutson said of Ortanique. “I didn’t want it to be specifically one kind of restaurant. I wanted to be able to change it up. It’s pretty ethnically diverse. No matter where you come from, you’ll be able to identify with something on the menu.”