GWARbar Serving 'Gourmet Junk Food' Slated to Open in Richmond

Heavy-metal satire band GWAR, known for donning spectacular costumes and drenching crowds in fake bodily fluids, will soon offer audiences a toned-down culinary experience with its very own restaurant in the band’s hometown of Richmond, Virginia.

GWAR will transform a building at 217 West Clay St. in Richmond’s historic Jackson Ward into a “GWARbar,” featuring a menu of “gourmet junk food,” plenty of GWAR-B-Q sauce and a beer GWARden with “endless flagons of liquid glee.”

46-year-old guitarist Mike Derks, known by his stage name “Balsac the Jaws of Death,” happens to be an experienced chef who has worked in the restaurant industry for more than thirty years.

Derk’s longtime dream of opening a GWAR-themed restaurant and bar came to fruition in 2013 after joining forces with Richmond restaurateur Travis Croxton and venture capitalist Jonathan Staples.

The existing bar space will be ready to accommodate as many as 50 patrons by mid-August and possibly several hundred after patio renovations, reports the Washington Post. Though the GWARbar’s Indiegogo campaign earlier this year raised less than $22,000 of its $50,000 goal, donations will go toward designing the bar’s second floor kitchen, bar, dining room and outdoor beer garden.

The bar is scheduled to open sometime this summer around the time of the band’s fifth-annual GWAR-B-Q at Hadad’s Lake Saturday, Aug. 16. A public memorial will be held the day before for Dave Brockie, GWAR’s charismatic frontman and co-founder who died earlier this year from a drug overdose.