Oct. 5, 2021

The owners of Bread & Circus Sandwich Kitchen and Pizza Cheeks have added a full-service catering company to their offerings.

En Place Catering will prepare everything from basic box lunches to wedding meals to high-end private dinners, co-owner Barry Putzke said.

“Catering is a big part of any kind of restaurant if you want to expand and have more outreach in the community,” he said.

Bread & Circus has limited space in its home at 600 N. Main Ave., “and we were turning down catering requests for a really long time unless it was a really easy one to pull off,” said Putzke, who started the restaurant in 2017 with Chef Jordan Taylor. The restaurant’s growing popularity has been pushed even further by a spot on “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”

The business partners leased space in a building on East Eighth Street that serves as the home for En Place Catering and as a prep kitchen for Bread & Circus and Pizza Cheeks, which the two started in 2020 in a small space in the back of The Hello Hi cocktail lounge.

Taylor has been doing a lot of the menu development for En Place, Putzke said. He’s joined by head chef Ben Birnstiehl, who has worked at Bread & Circus for a few years. En Place also has a catering director: Traci Hoem, previously of Plum’s Cooking Co.

“We reached out to her because we thought she’d be a great fit. We twisted her arm, and she has hit the ground running,” Putzke said.

En Place did its first catering jobs late last month, including a continental breakfast and lunch for an office meeting, a dinner for a wedding rehearsal and hors d’oeurves for a private event.

Its website features sample menus, but those serve as guides for what’s possible, Putzke said.

“We put ideas on paper so people could get a general idea, but we’re going to talk with you about all the different options you could do. We will do what you want specifically.”

The catering company will specialize in custom menus, which will give the team even more opportunity to showcase chef-driven recipes using seasonal ingredients.

After hundreds of questions about where the names “Bread & Circus” and “Pizza Cheeks” come from, Putzke is prepared for the mispronunciations that will come with the catering business’ name.

The name “En Place” – pronounced “on plahs” not “en place” – is a twist on the culinary term “mise en place,” which means “putting in place” or “everything in its place.”

“We wanted to touch on those French culinary traditions,” Putzke said. “Jordan has a culinary degree from Le Cordon Bleu – he’s French trained – and we just wanted to shorten it up a bit.”