From the vinyl record logo plastered on the windows and the extensive sticker collection that adorns the front door and metal dining tables, to the Appalachian-tinged menu with burgers, sandwiches and other items named in honor of some of her favorite songs and singers, Black Circle Bistro (BCB) owner April Sauls has successfully married two of her life’s passions — food and music — into one funky eatery that is uniquely her own.
Sauls, a Raleigh County native, has been working in restaurants for over 25 years.
“I actually went to school to become a teacher,” Sauls says. “But, my roommate worked at an Arby’s near [Marshall University’s] campus, and she told me that they needed people. I didn’t have a vehicle, so I just started tagging along with her for a part time job, and I fell in love with restaurant work.”
Even after earning her degree in education, Sauls didn’t want to leave the food service industry. She worked in all sorts of kitchens before taking a corporate position as the Director of Food Programs for a chain of convenience stores. Around the same time, some friends of hers were putting on a music festival in Logan and asked if Sauls would be interested in preparing food for the event on the side.
“I had three menu items — three tacos: The Rooster, The Danzig and The Boris, and that’s all I sold,” she recalls. “I ended up doing that two years in a row, and that’s when I really caught the bug for creating my own menu. It was super cool to have people eating my food and raving to me about it. That’s when the brand Black Circle really came about.”
Sauls kept her corporate job for the next decade. However, the thought of having her own restaurant was in the back of her mind the whole time, and when her son, Jonas, expressed an interest in the culinary field, she suggested that they bring back Black Circle together so that she could teach him the business from the ground up. They did pop-ups for a time until Sauls got to know the owner of the former restaurant Poncho & Lefty’s on Harper Road and learned he was planning on moving out of town.
“He didn’t know what he was going to do with the building,” Sauls says. “We started a conversation. He asked if I would be interested in it, and if I would want to continue to run it as Poncho & Lefty’s. I told him that if I were to quit my very nice, corporate job that I had worked so hard to get, it had to be my own thing.”
They came to an agreement, and though Sauls admits that she “was not mentally or financially prepared for any of it,” she gave her notice and cashed in her 401k. BCB opened in September 2023.
“The first time I came here, I walked into this building, I thought, ‘This is so me.’ If I were to open a restaurant, this is what I would want it to be like,” Sauls says. “It started out as a Gulf service station. I love the vintage vibe and the history. It’s so unique.”
At BCB, Sauls and her “small but mighty” staff are cooking up what she refers to as “Y’allternative cuisine.”
“It’s not a phrase I coined, but I think it describes what I was going for. We say, ‘it’s like momaw made it, but she has tattoos and drinks her whiskey straight,’” Sauls says. “It’s a blend of all of the amazing food that I have experienced on my travels and my love for Appalachia and the food of my people. There are some combinations of familiar flavors that people haven’t seen before or aren’t used to.”
Take her Mom’s Deviled Egg Potato Salad or The Granny, for example, a burger with pimento and cheddar cheeses, hot pepper jelly and bacon.
“And everything on that, except the bacon, is sourced locally. Homemade Homegrown does the hot pepper jelly, Tabs Table does the pimento cheese, and then Tony’s Quality Meat. I’ve been getting meat and cheese from him since we were doing pop-ups,” Sauls describes. “The way I like to source is, if we don’t make it in-house ourselves, then I try to find it locally, and if I can’t get it locally, then I try to get it from West Virginia, and then regionally from Appalachia.”
There’s also the “Charleston Girl” salad — an ode to the Tyler Childers song — with lettuce, pickled beets, boiled egg, tomato, radishes, pickled red onion, house-made croutons, cheddar cheese and BCB’s signature “Appalachian Goddess” house dressing, a ranch with added ramp dust.
“We get a lot of people who aren’t from the area who have never heard about ramps, and so we get to tell that story, which is super cool,” Sauls says. “It’s just delicious, and it’s so popular that we actually had T-shirts made with the Appalachian Goddess art on it.”
Beside the dining area where customers can purchase Appalachian Goddess t-shirts and some local products used in the restaurant, is a stocked bakery case with Sauls’ signature chocolate chip cookies, Oatmeal Creme pies and pepperoni rolls.
“We do try to have some seasonal items, but there are certain staples in the bakery case that will always be there,” Sauls says. “We’re always going to have chocolate chip cookies, we’re always going to have Oatmeal Creme Pies, and we’re always going to have pepperoni rolls. Anything else is the dealer’s choice.”
Interestingly enough, desserts were a new territory for Sauls up until a few years ago.
“I did savory for 20-plus years; baking always scared me,” she explains. “But, I had a lot of extra time on my hands during the pandemic because I wasn’t traveling as much, and I like to learn new things. I’m the classic pandemic baker, but I took it a step further, taking a masterclass from Chrstina Tosi [famed chef and owner of Milk Bar]. She did two weeks of cookies, two weeks of pies and two weeks of cakes.”
Sauls started bringing cookies to her pinball league. At the time, it was hosted at a local Italian restaurant, and when the owner caught wind of her delicious treats, he asked if she would start supplying them at the establishment.
“I would get up at three o’clock in the morning and go to this restaurant an hour away from my house and leave our bakery items before I went to work,” Sauls recalls. “And I have to give credit to my husband because he ate hundreds of different varieties of my chocolate chip cookies while I was testing recipes.”
Of course, no West Virginia bakery would truly be complete without pepperoni rolls, and Sauls has her own take on the state snack.
“My pet peeve with a pepperoni roll is when, no matter if it’s stick or slice, you take a bite and you get more bread than anything,” explains Sauls. “Or, when I bite it, I pull the entire contents out. So, I use ground pepperoni in my recipe, and that way, it kind of melts into the bread when baking.”
BCB celebrated its first year in business in the fall. It may have taken a while to get here, but Sauls is living her dream.
“I have to pinch myself sometimes,” she says. “You can get so down in the day-to-day of the work that, sometimes, you have to take a minute to sit back and think, ‘I created this. People love it, and it’s a super cool place, and I get to work here.’ It’s amazing.”
