RSS Feeds
• Metro • Sports |
BLUFFTON — Thanks to the ballooning popularity of a TV network devoted to food and the escalating celebrity status of chefs, life inthe kitchen can seem like a piece of cake.
But as 28 kids from the Bluffton Boys & Girls Club are discovering, the ingredients for running a successful fine dining restaurant aren’t so easy to swallow.
“In reality, it’s pretty hard work on a daily basis,” chef Todd Elliot of Sigler’s told a batch of the club’s members visiting the Bluffton restaurant recently.
The students are getting a taste of the sweet and sour aspects of operating a restaurant — from buying to preparing to cooking to serving the food — through the Boys & Girls Club’s “Show Me the Money” summer program. The eight-week crash course in making, managing and saving cash puts teens at various job sites in and around Bluffton for half a day.
The program also includes several Friday field trips. At Sigler’s, they watched staff prepare meals for both a wedding and the usual dinner menu. In the process, they caught a lesson in some of the budgetary aspects of food service.
This Friday, the students will return to the Sheridan Park restaurant to put their observations to work as they prepare and serve a meal for each other in the professional kitchen and dining room.
“When you get your food at the table, you eat with your eyes first,” chef and owner Michael Sigler told the youths at their first lesson. “If it looks good and tastes good, you’ve done your job.”
Sigler and Elliot explained why they already were cooking food for a wedding reception that would not start until 7 that evening. The crew had to get a head start and put finished dishes in a refrigerated space if the wedding meal was to go smoothly, Sigler said. “As a caterer, you have to be very, very, very organized.”
A third of every dollar spent is used to cover the cost of food alone, Elliot told the students. Gas prices have raised the price of the delivery of groceries, which already are at an all-time high, the chef said. Add in the cost of rent, employees’ salaries and insurance, and a restaurant’s budget can get pretty tight.
But that’s not deterring John Williams, a rising sophomore at Bluffton High School, from wanting to be a chef and restaurant owner someday. When Elliot asked who might be interested in a career in the food and beverage industry, the 15-year-old’s hand shot up.
John’s “day job” for this summer’s “Show Me the Money” program is to assist Elliot with cooking in the kitchen at the Boys & Girls Club, where the Sigler’s chef also is a volunteer. John said he’s learned a few tricks of the trade from helping Elliot — how to cut a pineapple, use a gas grill and organize a refrigerator like a pro — and mastered a few dishes, including taco casserole.
