Siggy’s Good Food opened in a formerly closed down Belmont building, serving salads, juices, and sandwiches with quality ingredients. Kristen Wile/UP

Three years ago, Siggy Sollitto noticed something was changing in New York City. Manhattan restaurants struggled more than ever as regulations were tightened around them, and her organic restaurant, Siggy’s Good Food, was one of them. Most places saw their profit fall 20 or 25 percent each year. Sollitto fought to keep her business open.

“Me, like many others, tried to revive it every year, with more advertising, new things, but it felt like fighting windmills,” she says. “There’s no winning.”

At the same time New York’s market became too harsh for restaurants, Sollitto found herself visiting Charlotte. Two of her friends had moved here a decade ago, then her sister moved here four years ago. When she’d come to visit, Sollitto saw opportunity. She bought a house in Belmont at the urging of one of her friends, a realtor, and as New York pushed her out, Charlotte seemed to be welcoming her in.

“Being around the neighborhood, I really love the fact that there is commercial and residential mixed in,” she says. “But all the buildings were closed and shut down. For a creative person, Charlotte, at least the South, gives you the possibility to create, to dream, to build. So I got this building.”

She opened up Siggy’s Good Food here in early September, serving healthy salads and sandwiches. Her sourcing has been a focus since she moved to the U.S.; Sollitto is a native of Israel. She recalls moving here and being horrified by the waxy cucumbers, all the same size and shape, sold in her new home.

“That was really tough and I never really understood why I couldn’t get a decent tuna sandwich that wasn’t loaded with mayonnaise and all kinds of things in there,” she recalls. “I never understood why it’s so hard to get soup. All of the soup is from cans, even in restaurants it was. In Israel, for example, if you go to the supermarket you will not find canned soup. It’s a different world of food.”

Many of the products used in the kitchen at Siggy’s come through Freshlist, meaning they’re all verified local farms with quality practices. For example, Windy Hill provides a lot of the meat used at Siggy’s. You’ll also find that same quality product on the wine list, which includes a variety of small European producers and American certified organic wines, available for retail or consumption at Siggy’s.

The menu isn’t as large as it was at the New York location of Siggy’s; there are no longer plated entrees. That’s by design; beyond the hostility of the New York restaurant economy, Sollitto wanted to move to Charlotte for a different lifestyle.

“I’ve been working in kitchens for so long and I wanted to have something simpler, that I don’t have to still keep a full-on kitchen,” she says. “So it was a decision to simplify things in life.” —Kristen Wile