Flashback Friday: Wichita celebrated birthdays, ate with grandparents at this steak chain
.jpg "Wichita’s second Mr. Steak restaurant opened in the River Bend Shopping Center at 21st and Hood in 1968. The building now houses a bingo parlor.")
Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that runs Fridays on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants that they once loved but that now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.
This week’s featured restaurant, Mr. Steak, was part of a national chain that landed in Wichita in the late 1960s, and the city’s three restaurants became destinations for birthday celebrations and family dinners.
If you lived in Wichita in the 1970s and 1980s, there’s a good chance you had at least one free birthday dinner at Mr. Steak.
If not, you probably ate there with your grandparents, went there with your family after church, or held a weekend job there.
Mr. Steak, a Denver-based chain that was founded in 1962, entered the Wichita market in May of 1967, when franchisee James J. Aboud opened a restaurant at 4722 W. Kellogg — right next door to Town & Country. Two more restaurants quickly followed. A Mr. Steak opened at 1504 W. 21st St. in late 1968, and another at 7008 E. Kellogg in 1969.
Wichita’s three restaurants were popular with locals, who loved that the chain served a free steak dinner to people celebrating birthdays. Though diners remember the inexpensive steaks as a tad leathery, other menu items still live in Wichita’s culinary memory, including Mr. Steak’s homemade blue cheese dressing, its teriyaki chicken, its cheese-and-mushroom-stuffed Continental burger, and its Finger Length sandwich, featuring a seasoned ground-beef patty on a toasty finger-length roll.
When the Wichita Eagle announced in 1967 that the Mr. Steak chain — whose founder, Jim Mather, had attended high school in El Dorado — was targeting Wichita, it said that the first two restaurants would serve as Mr. Steak training centers for the Midwest.
The 128-seat, one-story brick restaurant on West Kellogg had been open just over a year when, in August of 1968, The Eagle shared news that the Riverbed Shopping Center at 21st and Hood, east of Amidon, would be the site of the chain’s second Mr. Steak. At the time, the busy shopping center was home to a Taco Tico, a Pizza Inn, Gulf Oil Co. and a beauty college. Today, the old Mr. Steak building is home to a bingo parlor, and its neighbors are Thai Binh Super Market and Tacos Alondra. The second Mr. Steak opened in December of 1968.
Then, four months later, the east-side Mr. Steak opened its doors at 7008 E. Kellogg. Today, the building is gone, and the site where it stood is part of Rusty Eck Ford’s car lot.
In the early days, Mr. Steak was focused on its “perfectly aged corn-fed beef steaks,” which were charbroiled and served with baked potatoes, whipped potatoes or French fries plus crisp, green tossed salads with choice of dressing, Ranch House toast and coffee. In 1969, a sirloin steak dinner cost just $2.49.
“You will delight in the atmosphere and pleasant decor, with pleasant efficient service which you usually expect only at the expensive supper clubs,” boasted an ad that ran in The Eagle announcing the east-side restaurant’s grand opening.
Mr. Steak was a family place that made sure kids felt welcome. Not only did younger diners get special menus that featured punch-out Mr. Steak masks, but they also were able to choose from a selection of just-for-kids meals like “Snow White and the 3 Shrimp” and the “Little Jack Horner Steak.”
“A curious thing, most parents leave Mrs Steak feeling that their wee ones brought them out to eat!” read another 1969 newspaper ad for the restaurants. “Incidentally, we don’t serve liquor.”
Though it’s unclear why, the 21st Street Mr. Steak appears to have closed down from late 1969 until early 1972, when it reopened with a new owner: Sid Bruner, who was reported to have just graduated from the Mr. Steak College in Denver with the title of “Knight of the Sir Loin.”
Bruner, who died in 2009, is perhaps the most remembered of the local Mr. Steak franchisees, and he gave many Wichitans restaurant jobs. (Meanwhile, the founding franchisee of the west-side restaurant, Aboud, left the chain in 1969 to start his own restaurant, The Flaming Steer at Main and Kellogg. He followed it up with the popular Old Way Station at 6615 W. Central in 1973.)
Throughout the 1970s, the Mr. Steak chain — wanting to keep up with the times — began straying from its original steak-and-potato menu and added things like salads, kabobs, chicken dinners and seafood dishes like deep fried clams and lobster tail. At its peak in 1978, Mr. Steak had 285 restaurants across the country.
The changes continued through the 1980s, when Mr. Steak began to focus on dishes like baby back ribs, taco salads and chicken breast salads. The free birthday meal promotion was added in 1983.
But business began to slip over the years, and in 1988, the chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was the beginning of the end.
In early 1988, the west-side Mr. Steak moved from 4722 W. Kellogg to 7150 W. Harry, taking over the space that Brown’s Grill had recently vacated. But the move didn’t work out: The West Kellogg Mr. Steak appears to have closed sometime that summer.
Then, in 1991, franchisee Lou Lantz — who had taken over the East Kellogg Mr. Steak in 1975 — announced he was closing the restaurant, saying that the business “isn’t what it once was.”
That left Bruner’s restaurant on 21st Street, which was able to hold on for another three years. One of the last things Bruner did as owner was agree to take over a booth at the Wichita River Festival food court. Mr. Steak was a presence at the festival from 1992 until 1994. But in mid-1995, Bruner closed his Mr. Steak, citing health problems. The building was taken over in May of 1995 by a restaurant called India Gate.
The final Mr. Steak restaurant in the United States, which was in St. Charles, Missouri, closed in 2009.
People who once worked at Mr. Steak, though, continued to feel nostalgic for the place.
In 2004, nearly 10 years after Mr. Steak had left Wichita, former employees that had worked at the west store from 1971-1994 gathered for a reunion at a local Pizza Villa.
Even today, several Mr. Steak nostalgia pages exist online, including a Facebook page called “I Worked at a Mr. Steak Restaurant!!!”
This story was originally published January 24, 2025 at 5:02 AM.
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