At Kenny’s, beef has a family flavor

GREELEY — Kenny’s Steak House is just about as “Greeley” as you can get — starting with its name.

No “fusion” or any of those other trendy millennial restaurant terms. It’s beef — and lots of it. Just the way cattle baron Ken Monfort would have wanted it.

“Oh, we’ve adapted some over the years,’ said Matt Larson, who co-owns the steakhouse along with Ken Monfort’s son Dick, better known as a co-owner of the Colorado Rockies baseball club. “We try new things, but we’re pretty basic too.

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“In 2001, we tried to do a kind of a family-style menu — you could also call it a la carte — with side dishes enough to pass around and share,” Larson said. “That didn’t go over very well in Greeley. Greeley is a lot of folks from the agriculture and oil industries. They like the idea of a menu where if you order a steak, it’ll come with potatoes and salad.”

Larson estimated that the restaurant, which seats close to 200 diners, goes through about 30,000 pounds of beef a year — and that’s a tribute to the Monfort family as well.

“Kenny” Monfort’s father, Warren, founded Monfort Colorado in 1930 and created the “feedlot” concept. Before, beef cattle were bought right off the range in autumn, but feedlots allowed them to be fed throughout the winter so consumers could have fresh beef all year and meatpackers could be working year-round. Ken, who at age 12 had showed the grand champion steer at the National Western Stock Show in Denver and made a tenfold profit when he sold it, went to work at the company after World War II and, through more revolutionary ideas, built it into a Fortune 500 company that grew from $1 million in annual sales in 1950 to one of the world’s largest — and a dominant force in Greeley’s economy — when it was sold to ConAgra for $300 million in 1987.

Thanks to generous contributions from the Monfort Family Foundation, the name Monfort is everywhere in Greeley, including the Monfort Family Birth Center at North Colorado Medical Center, the Monfort Children’s Clinic, and the Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado.

And then there’s the prominent sign that says “Kenny’s” on the corner of West 10th Avenue and 35th Street, on the lawn beside the steakhouse.

The business originally was called the Stampede Steak Ranch — a tribute to the annual Greeley Independence Stampede rodeo — when Larson and Rob Haimson opened it in 1995 in a building that had housed a Golden Corral chain eatery.

“For the first six years, we were a more casual place, like the Golden Corral,” Larson said, “but we did a big remodel in 2001. Ken Monfort passed away in February of that year as we were remodeling, so when we opened, we decided to call it Kenny’s Steak House in honor of him.”

Larson had worked for Haimson as a manager at Potato Brumbaugh’s, a legendary Greeley restaurant named for a character in James Michener’s Colorado-based novel “Centennial.” Haimson sold his share of the Stampede Steak Ranch to Dick Monfort in 1996, Larson said, “and Dick is still my partner at the restaurant. Dick’s a very involved partner. He’s engaged, but kind of from a distance. He obviously has some bigger things to do.”

The remodel kept the 6,000-square-foot restaurant casual but “with a nice touch of class, with old oak wood throughout, lots of photos from Greeley’s history — the Stampede, the Monfort feed lots and Weld County’s farm and ranch life — and Rockies jerseys in the bar.”

Those connections extend to the beef-dominated menu, which also includes a “Rockies salad” — “our version of a cobb salad,” Larson said — and “Charlie’s chips,” homemade potato chips “that are really delicious with our homemade ranch dressing” and named for Charlie Monfort, Dick’s brother and partner in Denver’s Major League Baseball team.

“The menu’s been sort of a collective brainstorming event over the years,” Larson said. “The chefs come up with some ideas and I’ve come up with some.”

Those unique items include deep-fried bow-tie pasta, gorgonzola steak bites and water chestnuts wrapped in applewood-smoked bacon and drizzled with sweet chili sauce — “one of our most popular catering items,” Larson said.

Catering plays a big role in the business, he said, up to a third of its revenue. “We do a lot of catering. Three years after we opened up, we started testing the waters of catering — at first out of the back of an SUV, but now we’re one of the premier caterers in Northern Colorado. We do about 30 to 45 caterings a month. We cater for a thousand people out in the middle of the country every year for the Cattle Baron’s Ball.

“We also have the liquor contract for the city of Greeley, except for the Stampede, so we serve the liquor at Island Grove Park and events at Union Colony Civic Center,” a facility that also owes its existence to the Monfort family.

With all that work, Larson said, “it’s nice to have a day off,” so the restaurant is closed on Sundays “so we all can be with our families.”

That family tradition continues. Larson’s wife, Leona, who retired after 30 years as a school teacher, now runs the catering business, and his oldest son, Alex, is one of the restaurant’s managers.

Kenny’s employs about 50 people between part-time and full-time, Larson said. “We hire a lot of college students and young people. A lot of my UNC grads move on and get big-boy or big-girl jobs, but they come back and tell me this was their favorite job. I really believe in teaching them a good work ethic in a good environment where they feel respected and where they learn a lot.”

He also believes strongly in giving back to the community, underwriting events and donating gift certificates. Larson has served on many boards and committees, donating time to groups including United Way, the American Cancer Society and the Boy Scouts. He also serves on the board of the Colorado Restaurant Association.

“I’m 54, having fun and enjoy the business,” Larson said. “It’s not always easy, but I look forward to keeping this going for quite some time.”