Cork 'N Cleaver: the chain that shrank to three, and Fort Wayne kept one

1974 — present

A survivor of the steakhouse era: The Cork 'N Cleaver concept was born in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1964 — exhibition cooking, menus printed on cleavers, a limited steak list, and a then-novel salad bar. The chain grew to some eighty locations. Fort Wayne's, at 221 East Washington Center Road, opened in 1974 by Indiana Connection magazine's account (a business-directory listing gives 1977; the magazine's date is followed here and the variant recorded). What kept it alive when the chain collapsed around it was the salad bar built into an institution in its own right — fifty-two items by the magazine's count, praised on the record by a state representative as the best salad bar in Indiana — and the room's refusal to change: the adobe-style building, the cleaver menus, the mud pie. The chain's remnant is three privately owned restaurants: Fort Wayne's, Evansville's (also opened in 1974), and Fargo's. Fort Wayne's is the dining room two generations of the city's families have used for the occasions that required a steakhouse, and it has now outlasted its own chain by decades.

Sources:

1. Indiana Connection magazine, "Cork 'n Cleaver: Setting the bar" (September 2019) — the Fort Wayne opening in 1974, the eighty-location chain, the three survivors, the 52-item salad bar and the "best salad bar in the state" quotation.
2. Cork 'N Cleaver, house history (via its menu and directory listings) — the Scottsdale origin of 1964, the original concepts; the Fort Wayne "year started 1977" directory variant is recorded in this section's note.