BENTONVILLE -- Northwest Arkansas Community College's new culinary facility is close to fully baked and will open to students when the spring semester begins Tuesday.
Brightwater: A Center for the Study of Food is the first tenant and anchor of the new 8th Street Market, which occupies a former Tyson Foods chicken processing plant.
Glenn Mack
Glenn Mack was hired as Northwest Arkansas Community College’s first executive director of culinary arts following a national search in 2015. Before entering the culinary field, he worked as a photo editor for Time magazine in the Soviet Union. He trained and worked in food service in China, Italy, Russia, Uzbekistan and the United States.
Source: Staff report
Staff members were busy unpacking boxes and equipment Friday. Jason Paul, a local chef and restaurateur who will teach two classes this semester, was among them. The culinary program is moving to the space from the Center for Nonprofits in Rogers.
"It's really exciting," Paul said. "It's going to be a game changer for Northwest Arkansas. I think it's going to be a new beacon for Northwest Arkansas and attract some really interesting people to the area."
Glenn Mack, the college's executive director of culinary arts and hospitality management, shares that vision. Once Brightwater is up and running, Mack said, "I have no doubt we'll draw students from all over the state and from across the country."
Brightwater will offer classes for the college's students as well as programs for the public and culinary professionals, Mack said.
Other tenants of the 8th Street Market, 801 SE Eighth St., will be focused on food, drink and hospitality. Bike Rack Brewing will be the first retail tenant to lease space in the market.
"We're going to have a lot of interaction with the other tenants," Mack said.
Brightwater, named for a variety of apple that used to be grown in the area, is leasing 27,500 square feet of what will be a 66,000-square-foot building. The culinary program had 18,000 square feet in Rogers.
Mack described the new facility as "industrial chic." The building maintains remnants of its past life while equipped with the latest in culinary technology and decorated with unique, eye-catching artwork.
"You can see it still looks very rough," Mack said, pointing to a concrete floor left over from the facility's days as a Tyson plant. "But we wanted to keep it that way, again to harken to our industrial heritage of food processing."
The main culinary kitchen has four cooking stations large enough to accommodate four students each. They have space to do their food preparation, then can turn around to access an oven or range top. The sight lines allow an instructor to easily observe what students are doing and step in to correct them if they're doing something wrong, Mack said.
"This will be our real workhorse kitchen for the basic culinary skills class, where they're learning the basics of knife cuts, cooking techniques, sauces, soup preparation, and so on. It's a gorgeous layout," Mack said.
At the center of the facility is a large commons area where students can eat, study and relax. An artwork of 950 plates hangs above the commons area, arranged in an undulating form to mimic the Ozark Mountains, Mack said.
Another feature of Brightwater is the Ozark Culinary Theater, which offers space for up to 54 people in a lecture hall-type setting with a cooking demonstration area at the front.
"I think this is going to be one of our most used public spaces," Mack said. "We can certainly do classes and lectures and demonstrations here, but from a public point of view, we can do lunch meetings, dinner meetings, dinner and a movie."
Attached to the theater is a prep kitchen and a wine storage room that can hold about 1,000 bottles.
Other features of Brightwater include a meat locker, a library with individual study rooms, and special kinds of equipment, such as a grain mill.
"We're going to have a lot of fun experimenting with [the grain mill]," Mack said. "It really gives a sense to our students about how you go from a seed or grain to a flour and work through that process."
Whereas many culinary schools focus purely on workforce training, Brightwater will take a broader approach to culinary education, Mack said.
"We're going to teach you those fundamental skills, but if you want to go into a school of nutrition, if you want to work with a nonprofit, if you want to produce your own food product, be a food entrepreneur, we want to encourage you in those directions as well," he said. "We want to take all comers and build on their passion for cooking and baking and hopefully make those connections for them in the industry and the community so they can follow their career dreams."
Culinary nutrition, food entrepreneurship, reduction of food waste and whole animal butchery will be four areas of focus at Brightwater, with special programs related to each area, Mack said.
Anita Tenney of Farmington is entering her fourth semester of studies in hospitality management at the college. She will take two classes at Brightwater and another three classes online this semester.
Tenney, while visiting Brightwater on Friday, said she's excited to see the building open.
"It's beautiful," Tenney said. "It's going to give us more space and a better environment. They have equipment here I've never seen anywhere else."
Sixteen unique classes and a total of 25 sections will be offered at Brightwater this semester. Another nine classes will be offered online or off site, Mack said.
The visioning for Brightwater began in 2013 when the college engaged Karp Resources, a New York-based national food and agriculture consultancy, to produce a long-range plan for the culinary program, which identified how best to address the growing region's needs.
A food assessment study done by Karp found nearly 30,000 jobs related to the food and hospitality sector in Northwest Arkansas.
Grants from the Walton Family Foundation totaling more than $15 million spurred development of the 8th Street Market facility and helped the college develop its culinary program.
NW News on 01/15/2017