Crooked Pint served its last Easter brunch buffet at 3 p.m. on April 5, then went dark for a remodel inside the Chaska Curling and Event Center. The plan, according to the city's own announcement, was to reopen before the Chaska Rocks Music Festival on June 20, giving Firemen's Park a freshly renovated restaurant to spill into during one of downtown's biggest fundraising nights of the summer.
The new restaurant, a Hightop Hospitality concept called The Copperfield, opened its doors on June 23. Three days after the festival it was supposed to precede. That gap matters less than what it reveals: the timing of this restaurant's grand reopening was never left to chance, or to the ordinary rhythm of a business finding its lease. The City of Chaska owns the space. City Hall picked the calendar. And even with a three-day slip, the restaurant still landed exactly where it needed to, two and a half weeks ahead of the Curling Center's biggest weekend of the year.
The Restaurant Space City Hall Owns
Most restaurant turnovers are a landlord story you never hear. This one isn't, because the landlord is the City of Chaska itself. The Chaska Economic Development Authority approved The Copperfield's lease on March 30, a 10-year term with two additional five-year renewal options, and the city keeps 100 percent of the room rental fees generated by the attached Event Center. Crooked Pint had run that same space for a decade before its lease came up this year, and rather than simply renew, the city and Hightop Hospitality used the moment to rebuild the restaurant around what actually draws people to that corner of downtown: curling.
The remodel added tiered, stadium-style seating so diners can watch the action on the ice without leaving their table, plus new livestreaming screens inside the restaurant that zero in on matches across all six sheets. Hightop's regional manager, Zach Saueressig, told Carver County Local News that early customer reaction has centered on the physical space itself.
"People love the look of the space… how bright and fresh everything looks."
Saueressig also noted that curlers have taken to the new glass-side seating, which puts fans close enough to follow a match while eating. None of that seating existed under the old restaurant. It exists now because the city wanted a venue built for the Fire and Ice Festival crowd before that crowd showed up.
Ten Years Of Fire And Ice, On A Freshly Renovated Floor
The Fire and Ice Festival hit its 10th anniversary on July 10 and 11, and it is the one weekend a year when the Curling Center's dual identity, part restaurant, part ice sheet, part civic gathering space, is on full display. The festival runs a bean bag tournament, a family fun run around Firemen's Park, live music both nights, and a fireworks show, while the Curling Center itself hosts an international bonspiel next door. A restaurant with stadium seating aimed at the ice didn't exist for the festival's first nine anniversaries. It existed for the tenth, finished with a little over two weeks to spare.
That's the part a quick scroll through a "what's new in Chaska" roundup tends to miss. The opening date isn't just a fact to report. It's the punctuation mark on a decision the city made months earlier: build the restaurant for the festival crowd, then let the calendar do the rest.
If you're weighing when to actually go, the tradeoff is straightforward. Fire and Ice weekend gets you the full experience, fireworks across the park, a bonspiel through the glass, a restaurant built to watch both. Any other summer Thursday gets you the same menu and the same seating with a fraction of the wait.
Here's how the rest of downtown's summer calendar lined up around that same reopening:
| Event | Dates | Venue | Presented By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chaska Rocks Music Festival | June 20 | Firemen's Park | Rotary Club of Chaska & City of Chaska |
| Fire and Ice Festival (10th anniversary) | July 10 to 11 | Firemen's Park & Curling and Event Center | Chaska Parks and Recreation |
| River City Days (50th celebration) | July 24 to 25 | 1300 Crosstown Blvd. | City of Chaska |
| Summer Concert Series | Thursdays through late summer | City Square Gazebo & Firemen's Park | Chaska Parks and Recreation |
The Chaska Rocks Music Festival, which shared the same park and drew from the same Rotary-city partnership as Fire and Ice, put its 2026 proceeds toward a specific goal: a Miracle League Field and Universal Playground designed to be fully accessible. The same civic machinery that timed a restaurant reopening to a festival weekend is also the machinery raising money for a ballfield every kid in Chaska, disability or not, can actually play on.
Three Blocks Over, A Different Kind Of Opening
Not every new restaurant in downtown Chaska got that kind of backing. A few blocks from Firemen's Park, at 232 Pioneer Trail, Bellows Bistro shares a wall with The Forge, a tabletop and role-playing game store. Both are owned by Robert Cormican, who opened The Forge first and then, when the Quiznos next door closed, converted the vacated space into a Dungeons & Dragons themed restaurant. There's no city lease here, no Economic Development Authority vote, no guaranteed cut of rental income flowing back to a municipal fund. It's one owner's private bet that Chaska had room for a place where dinner and a dice game happen in the same booth.
The bet worked well enough that Cormican wanted to go further, literally, by cutting a doorway straight through the shared wall so customers could move between the restaurant and the game store. He told KARE 11 and, in more detail, Carver County Local News exactly why that hasn't happened.
"It'll cost me $120,000 in Met Council sewer access charges."
He's said city staff have tried to help, but the fee itself hasn't moved. There is no city ownership structure absorbing that cost for Cormican the way one absorbed the Curling Center remodel for Hightop Hospitality. He's paying Metropolitan Council sewer access charges out of his own restaurant's revenue, on a timeline the city can offer sympathy for but not shorten.
Two Restaurants, Two Different Economies
Put the two stories side by side and downtown Chaska stops looking like a single restaurant scene and starts looking like two of them, running on different rules. The Copperfield exists because the city owns the building, chose the tenant, funded the remodel timeline around its own festival calendar, and keeps the rental income. Bellows Bistro exists because one owner absorbed the risk, the buildout, and now a six-figure utility fee, entirely on his own.
Neither model is better. They're just different answers to the same question: who decides what a downtown restaurant looks like and when it opens. At the Curling Center, the answer is City Hall. On Pioneer Trail, the answer is whoever's willing to take out the loan.
For residents, that difference is the reason the two restaurants feel so different to walk into. One was built, seat by seat, around a festival calendar the city controls. The other was built around a wall Cormican still can't afford to cut through. Both are worth your Thursday night. Just know which system got you the table.
If you're the kind of Chaska resident who tracks these openings because you're also weighing whether historic downtown or one of the newer developments fits your next move, The Hancock Group has put together a closer look at what's actually different about Chaska's historic downtown blocks versus its newer neighborhoods. And if this is the year you finally want a professional read on what your own Chaska home could sell for in a market this active, request a free home evaluation anytime.
