A chef’s life on Hilton Head: Popular restaurant team Mike and Shirley Sigler retire
I asked chef Mike Sigler if he’d read Anthony Bordain’s book, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.”
“I lived it,” he said.
For 51 years he worked in a kitchen — 32 of those years in the wildly changing restaurant scene on Hilton Head Island and Bluffton.
For the past 21 years, Sigler had his own restaurant in Bluffton. He ran the show in the open kitchen at Sigler’s Rotisserie & Seafood, and his wife, Shirley, greeted everyone at the door.
They sold the restaurant this summer, and a new husband-and-wife team, Tony and Candy Alessi, are now in charge.
The Siglers raised two sons, Christian and Josh, on Hilton Head, but this Thanksgiving was the first time they all shared that traditional feast together at home.
The boys are grown, and their father is 67.
That relentless grind gets to the heart of being a chef on Hilton Head, or anywhere, according to the old man.
“The restaurant business is tough, physically and emotionally,” he said.
He’s not sure kids entering the trade today get that.
Competition has never been stiffer. The public has never been more demanding, and when they get home, they can spew venom about you on social media.
And, yes, there is that underbelly of a nocturnal industry that drives the local economy.
The Omni and the Westin
Sigler’s call to the professional kitchen came from his dad’s friend, Joe.
“Joe needs a dishwasher,” he was told back home in the Catskills, in Glen Spey, New York.
He started making pizzas, then sandwiches.
He studied the business at Sullivan County Community College. In the second year, the students learned in Europe. He went to Palermo, Sicily.
But Sigler’s primary training came as an apprentice to Swiss chef Manfred Schauble in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then the historic Cavalier Hotel and Beach Club in Virginia Beach.
“He was a real chef,” Sigler said.
Very demanding. No nonsense.
“That really schooled me,” he said.
And that’s where he met his bride-to-be, a waitress named Shirley. She was raised in the restaurant business. She knew what it demanded. They’ve been married 42 years.
Sigler said he was at the right place at the right time in getting jobs as executive chef at the Omni International Hotel in Norfolk, Virginia (15 years) and then, in 1987, at the Hotel Intercontinental on Hilton Head, which soon became the Westin. He was there for nine years.
That’s where you learn what no school can teach, he said. No matter how short-staffed you are, or what equipment breaks, the show must go on in a gourmet restaurant, a “three-meal-a-day restaurant,” the employee cafeteria, the pool, pastry shop and bakery. Not to mention the banquets, where 600 to 1,000 people are served a hot meal at once.
The show goes on while others are at home on Christmas Eve, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, weekends, and every night.
“I always thought you work hard, you’re going to get it back,” Sigler said. “You do extra things to make yourself more valuable. What most kids don’t understand these days is that you’ve got to put the work in.”
Sigler started a three-year apprenticeship program at the Westin. He needed the workforce. It was good for the hotel. It was good for the industry.
Then a parent fussed at him, saying he didn’t pay $20,000 to a culinary school for his child to peel carrots.
You do what you have to do, Sigler said. He said the most valuable person in the house is the dishwasher. Chefs carve egrets from a block of ice with a chainsaw — not because that’s what you learned in school but because the job demands it.
“They get out and think they’re a chef,” Sigler said. “They don’t know anything about what it really takes to be a chef.”
The first question they ask is how much money they’ll make.
Workforce
Cash in hand after a high-stress night at work can lead to one of the underbellies of the industry that Bordain wrote about.
Food and beverage workers need to unwind. Bars would be foolish not to stay open for them. They tip well, they eat well and they drink well.
But that’s “the hook of it,” Sigler said. “The money.”
Sigler said he was lucky to have a great kitchen staff, including chefs Todd Elliott and Greg Elmquest.
But getting and keeping a restaurant workforce has become harder as the industry has soared. In 2016, a check by The Island Packet showed the SERG Group of locally owned restaurants to be Hilton Head’s largest employer, and it has expanded since then.
Today, some fast-food restaurants have been known to close early, open late, or offer drive-through only because of a lack of help.
Sigler said workers can’t afford to live here, but he thinks it’s a problem nationwide.
He said the new hospitality school at the University of South Carolina Beaufort — and the culinary school the Technical College of the Lowcountry is building in Bluffton — are steps in the right direction.
The students will need to learn that everybody’s a foodie these days. They’ll ask for special treatment. Extra vegetables, no potatoes, no salt. They may say they will die if seafood touches their plate.
“Nobody orders from the menu anymore,” Sigler said. It slows the line down, but you’ve got to to it.
“If a restaurant says, ‘No, you can’t get it,’ they aren’t going to last,” he said.
Nobody expected the Siglers to last when they set up shop in Sheridan Park. The market was too small, they were told. Cattails and the Cafe at Belfair were among precious few restaurants in town.
But Sun City Hilton Head made a huge difference. Early-bird dining and catering helped.
Sigler said he was lucky to experience a heyday for chefs, when owners asked for quality first, rather than the bottom line. Offer quality and the bottom line will take care of itself, they thought.
In retirement, Sigler has recently made chili for 600 at the Boys & Girls Club of Bluffton. On Thanksgiving day, before eating at home with the family for the first time, he boned 97 turkeys for the community Thanksgiving dinner sponsored by his church, St. Andrew By-the-Sea United Methodist, and the host, Hudson’s Seafood House on the Docks.
Sigler is confident the Hilton Head and Bluffton market will always support fine dining.
“The strong will survive and the weak won’t,” he said. “You’ve got to be there. You’ve got to live it. Owners who are there will rise to the top.”
This story was originally published December 3, 2019 at 8:41 AM.
