A little more than a year ago, on February 12, 2023, Edip Sigl invited people to one of these “Four Hands Dinners”, where two chefs cook a menu together. His duo partner that evening was Christian Jürgens, then a three-star chef at Tegernsee. The encounter took place in Sigl’s restaurant Es:senz, for which Sigl and his team had achieved two stars in the Michelin in a very short time. Since Tuesday there have been three: at the Michelin Gala in Hamburg he received the most coveted award that top chefs can achieve.
The dinner a year ago was the meeting of two very different characters. The impulsive showman Jürgens on the one hand, whose plates are often structured according to the principle “people, animals, sensations”. On the other hand, the quiet, modest-looking Sigl, whose dishes are characterized by a deeply thought-out precision. Like so many top chefs, he also loves surprising twists and turns. He makes the “Chiemsee pebbles”, which actually look like stones, but are actually a gelatinous, liquid-inside sphere made of smoked fish and the finest vinegar. One could understand this as a reference to Jürgens’ “Filled Pebbles” made from potato dough, a famous dish of his. Similar, but completely different: even more sophisticated.
Born in Cologne in 1985, Sigl began his apprenticeship in the golf restaurant Gut Lärchenhof (one Michelin star) in 2002. He then worked for Heinz Winkler in Aschau im Chiemgau and spent four years with the three-star chef Juan Amador – one of the few German chefs who worked intensively with molecular gastronomy. In 2012 he went on a year-long trip around the world, during which he gained “countless insights into all kinds of culinary styles,” as he says. He then worked at the small Munich star restaurant Les Deux, for which he already received two stars in 2020.
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After that, he says, he wanted to reorient himself. In 2016 he married his wife Melanie Sigl and took her name. It’s much easier to spell than his Turkish birth name, and he also wanted to document “that I’ve arrived in Bavaria.” When he resigned from Les Deux, his second daughter was on the way; the young family had bought their own home in Chiemgau.
The rest almost sounds like a fairy tale. In Chiemgau he met Dieter Müller, the founder and owner of the budget design hotel group Motel One, which includes more than 90 hotels. Müller and his wife Ursula Schelle-Müller also own the Achental golf resort in Grassau. It is decorated in an extremely luxurious yodel style and has six restaurants. For the most demanding of these, they were looking for a head chef at the end of 2020.
This is how the Müllers and Sigl came together. Only gradually, Müller once said, did they realize that there was more to the Achental than just a good restaurant. It was now tailor-made for Edip Sigl and called Es:senz because of his initials. Sigl now focuses his kitchen style on a strictly regional basis; guests do not expect a multitude of different components, but rather a clearly recognizable star on the plate.
The concept worked perfectly. Now Sigl is one of only ten German three-star chefs. “It makes me proud,” he says on the phone, “to put such a pin on the culinary map in Grassau.” On stage in Hamburg you could see that he could hardly believe his luck. Christian Jürgens, who had been a kind of co-moderator of the gala the previous year, was missing that evening and was not mentioned at all. He has lost his stars and his job since allegations of inappropriate behavior towards subordinates were made against him last year.