"We wanted to try something different here," said Zach Saueressig, regional manager for Hightop Hospitality, when Carver County Local News asked why Crooked Pint left the corner spot at the Chaska Curling Center after a decade behind the bar. What's different now sits behind the same glass wall overlooking six sheets of ice. New sign. New menu. And for the first time since the building opened in 2015, a breakfast plate before noon.
Crooked Pint served its last Easter brunch buffet on Sunday, April 5, then closed for a remodel timed to the facility's slowest stretch of the year. The Chaska Economic Development Authority had approved a new operator at the end of March, and by June 23 the space reopened as The Copperfield, a neighborhood diner and bar concept Hightop had been running in Mendota Heights since 2021. The turnaround brought the space back just after the Chaska Rocks Music Festival, the Rotary Club of Chaska's annual fundraiser at Firemen's Park on June 20.
A Kitchen With a View of Six Sheets
The features that changed are the ones regulars will notice first. The old bar area now has tiered stadium seating pressed against the glass, giving spectators a close, direct view of the ice. Screens inside now stream live coverage from all six sheets, so a table in the back no longer means missing the shot that matters. Near the entrance, a grab-and-go market sells bakery items and coffee, and the kitchen now runs breakfast and lunch service alongside dinner.
The business terms behind the swap say as much about the city's confidence in the venue as the menu does. The Copperfield's lease runs 10 years with two five-year renewal options, the same structure Crooked Pint had. The city keeps 100 percent of the Event Center's room rental fees regardless of who's cooking, and The Copperfield becomes the exclusive food and beverage caterer for rentals there, with outside vendors still available for religious or ethnic food needs. City Administrator Matt Podhradsky framed the move simply: after ten years of watching what worked, the goal was to go "from great to greater."
The Building the Restaurant Sits Inside
None of this is a rescue plan for a struggling venue. The Chaska Curling Center opened in December 2015 as the anchor of the Firemen's Park renovation, built on ground once mined for brick clay, and it has run close to capacity ever since. The center's own numbers put membership around 1,000, among the largest curling memberships in the country, spread across six sheets with a locker room and player's lounge. Olympian Jeff Isaacson manages the facility, which USA Curling itself has called one of the busiest curling centers in the country, the kind of track record that keeps the sport's governing body coming back for marquee events.
The restaurant swap reads less like a fix and more like a renegotiation from strength, an operator with ten years of foot traffic data deciding the next ten could support more hours and a bigger footprint.
The Home Ice Advantage Showed Up in March
The timing matters because of what happened at the same address shortly before Crooked Pint served its last brunch. The 2026 USA Curling Men's and Women's Club National Championships ran at the Chaska Curling Center from March 25 through 29, with fields of 12 men's and 12 women's teams that had advanced through regional playdowns. As tournament host, Chaska received an automatic entry in both brackets, a courtesy extended to whichever club puts up the ice.
The host club made it count. Team Caldwell, curling under the Chaska Curling Center name, won gold on the men's side, edging past clubs from across the country on the sheets its own members skate on every week. The women's title went to a Madison Curling Club rink skipped by two-time Olympian Nina Roth. The Sun Patriot reported that USA Curling CEO Dean Gemmell credited the week to more than the ice, pointing to "the connections that the club culture of our sport fosters." By the time the trophies left town, the building had a national championship banner to hang and a restaurant lease about to be rewritten.
What's Back on the Calendar
League play at the Curling Center runs Sunday through Friday evenings from October into April, with a shorter spring and summer session for anyone who doesn't want to wait out the off months. Learn to Curl classes and corporate team-building sessions run year round, and the junior program keeps developing the next wave of Chaska curlers.
The next multi-club event on the books is the Big Spiel, an annual charitable bonspiel that rotates teams through five Twin Cities clubs including Chaska, scheduled for January 7 through 10, 2027. This season, that weekend comes with stadium seats along the glass, a screen tied to every sheet, and a market case selling coffee before the first rock gets thrown.
For anyone who's watched the Curling Center's parking lot fill up for a national broadcast or an NBC Curling Night in America taping, October doesn't bring anything unfamiliar. It just means the lights come back on, the home team defends a banner it earned in March, and there's finally a place inside the building to get breakfast before the first draw.
Chaska's downtown keeps changing shape one lease at a time, and the Fowke Weber Team is usually the one tracking which corner moved next.
