There might be a new place to have a few laughs and eat some top-notch grub in northwest Arkansas.
The Grove Comedy Club is scheduled to reopen next month in a remodeled complex in Lowell. The club, on its Facebook page, said its complex will cover 4 acres with activities such as outdoor concerts, beach volleyball and a sports bar.
It also announced that the club’s new head chef would be Michael Kuefner, a German-born expert butcher best known for his many years spent as an instructor in the culinary school at Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville.
Kuefner taught at NWACC for 10 years before resigning late last year. It seemed odd that he stepped down just as NWACC’s Brightwater Culinary School was taking off, but Kuefner said he just got burned out on teaching.
“I am enjoying my time off,” Kuefner said. “I won’t work with them as an instructor, but I will still work with them as an independent consultant.
“I will continue to make sausages over there. I will have fun [now] that I don’t have to teach over there anymore. After 10 years of going through the grind, I was ‘meh.’”
Kuefner wasn’t out of work for long. His new boss is an old student, Woodie Adams, who runs the Grove Comedy Club.
Kuefner said he had offers to work or teach from several sources, and the comedy club kitchen sounded best.
“I called him and said, ‘Hey, I am tired of teaching, you want to hang out?’” Kuefner said. “He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll hire you.’
“We are working on some concepts of what we can do here. It’s actually a lot of fun.”
Kuefner said the club will model itself after Jody Thornton’s JBGB, the beer garden-restaurant-concert venue in uptown Fayetteville.
“It’ll be like a JBGB on steroids,” Kuefner said.
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