Come and run away with the circus!
After running away himself in 2013, Ols Halas is head chef of a unique dining experience – Circus Sauce. It is a travelling restaurant, accompanying Giffords Circus on its yearly summer tour, set in a vaudevillian circus tent embedded with entertainment and showmanship. It is the life of this restaurant and the circus with it that inspired Ols’s book, Giffords Circus Cookbook, co-written with Nell Gifford and published in 2020.
Circus Sauce’s menu changes weekly, featuring ingredients from an extensive network of cultivated local connections. The restaurant depends upon in-season produce coming from farmers, butchers, or even foraged from gardens and allotments, the attentiveness to sustainable food-sourcing shows. The class menu promises to be unmissable, with the opportunity to make smoked ham hock ‘en-croute’ with piccalilli and toast and Spring chicken with wild mushrooms, asparagus and potato croquettes. Sweet Nancy will follow, this summer on a plate dessert is the Circus Chefs’s spin on the classic peach melba and a homage to the Circus’ wonderful ring mistress. There will be plenty of other recipes to conjure up the magic of life in the circus.
The food is akin to the circus that usually surrounds it: full of life, character and sparkle.
Ols’s class promises to be unique, educational and entertaining (with the potential for some special guest appearances). Please bring a bag with you to take home some of your wondrous creations. Roll up, roll up!
Photos by David Loftus from Giffords Circus Cookbook
