The closure of a couple of really well-regarded restaurants recently, and hints that others are in trouble, have raised concerns that some sectors of Adelaide dining are in trouble.

The reasons why restaurants fail are often complex and not obvious to all. Some people point to the importance of location, of keeping up with the times, having high-profile chefs and so on, but restaurants are a fickle business and, as I’m about to show, recognise few hard and fast rules.

One rule that has become apparent to me over many years of restaurant going is this: if you open a restaurant to make money, you’ll go broke. But if you open a restaurant to give people a good time, decent food in a pleasant environment, with terrific service and a big smile, all of it adding up to great value, you’ll make money.

Stratos Pouros with the Cork and Cleaver specials board. Photo: Tony Lewis

Now I’m going to cheat a bit and tell you about Cork and Cleaver which, under the ownership of Stratos Pouras, has been trading very successfully for 37 years. I’m cheating, because I’m repeating a somewhat edited version of something I wrote a while ago in another publication:

“HOWEVER wonderful much of our modern cooking is, it’s not always a relaxing experience eating it when all you want is a meal that you don’t have to think about, rather than a work of art that deserves dissection and deliberation.”

That’s what brought me to Stratos’ Cork and Cleaver restaurant, snug deep in the depths of the eastern suburbs. It’s basically an upmarket steakhouse that has either hit upon a formula for what people really want to eat or the rest of us are stupid, and I think I know how you’ll answer that.

Cork and Cleaver hasn’t created any culinary waves. You don’t read about its chefs heading for the Sydney big-time or to the culinary Olympics. The fact is that it provides very safe, very reliable food, very competently.

You could easily expect after many years of cruising in the middle lane that a torpor might have set in, the staff become arrogant or jaded, the interior fittings run down and tatty. I saw no sign of this. There’s a slightly clubbish feeling as you enter … and in the cosy entrance bar there’s a lot of grey-suited beefsteak drinking burgundy, or maybe it was beer.

We were greeted and seated very smoothly, hot bread rolls were quickly dispensed, along with a small bowl of meatballs in tomato sauce as an appetiser, and we were asked three times in as many minutes if we’d like a pre-dinner drink.

Despite the full house and a lot of chatter, the restaurant’s acoustics were good and quiet conversation wasn’t an effort. The wine list was a joy; indeed the wine waitress said it had been judged second to that of the Hilton’s Grange restaurant, although she couldn’t recall by whom. Sensibly, she had no hesitation in calling for a second opinion from restaurant manager Jim Boutsis (Stratos’ son-in-law) in reinforcing her recommendations. I gained the impression the Cork and Cleaver takes the cork bit of its business quite seriously.

You have to take the cleaver seriously, too, because that’s the menu – handwritten on a large aluminium cleaver, mercifully blunt when you consider the number of domestic rows that happen over a dinner table.

You could almost shut your eyes and recite the entrees: oysters natural, oysters kilpatrick, prawn cocktail, avocado vinaigrette and so on. Just like it was 10 years ago, or even 20, when nouvelle cuisine was but a small though decorative dot on the horizon.

The hot entrees went much the same way: barbecued prawns, beef shashlik and beef stroganoff, plus a slightly deviant-sounding spinach mousse. The main courses were beef, beef, beef and beef, although the rest of the farmyard got a brief look-in with pork fillets, breast of chicken and lamb chops.

Cork and Cleaver spiced steak. Photo: Tony Lewis

 This is a steak restaurant so there’s no point in beating about the paddock. The cuts tended to the American style with Texas T-bone, New York cut, a ranch cut of prime rib on the bone, and the more familiar chateaubriand, fillet mignon, carpetbag and pepper steaks, and steak dianne … here was a menu that was as honest and straightforward as the food.

The beef tartare. Photo: Tony Lewis

I’m sure real men aren’t meant to eat spinach mousse, so it was in defiance of the assembled beefcake around me that I ordered it. It didn’t have much mousse after all, being a mound of virtually solid spinach with several prawns placed on top before being covered with a tangy cheese sauce and browned under the grill. The flavour of the prawns was overpowered in this company but their texture seemed familiar and, overall, the dish worked well enough.

Main courses all include a baked potato and sour cream, and a green salad with a limited choice of dressings served, American-style, before the main. Not all American food fads are comprehensible but this, as with their passion for iced water on the table, most definitely is. A salad can be very refreshing between courses and served this way its incompatibility with hot plates and rich sauces is avoided.

The preparation at the table of a beef tartare, the carnivore’s ultimate delight, was immaculate and made for some diverting restaurant theatre. Every possible ingredient was offered, from horseradish and French green pepper to Tabasco sauce and the traditional raw egg yolk. The meat was finely ground fillet and it was as good an example of this dish as I have seen.”

This was written by me almost exactly 27 years ago, in June, 1988, on Cork and Cleaver’s 10th anniversary. Apart from the prices, the carpet and the now fairly basic steel-framed chairs, very little has changed since then. Not even the customers – Pouras says he’s now serving the grandchildren of his first customers.

Function rooms have been added at the front, but when you pass them and enter through the original front door, you ever so gently slide back several decades. It’s so comfortable it’s like going back to the womb.

C & C sets out to be an American-style grill restaurant, in a stylistically confused Mediterranean setting dominated by two enormous Filipino-made brass palm trees (rescued from the late Swains restaurant), run by a 77-year-old Greek restaurateur. It’s tucked away almost anonymously in a suburban side street with a chef, Greg Favretto, who’s been with Pouras for around 30 years and never been on television. Beats me, but my goodness it works.

The obligatory meatballs, which Pouras now sells by the bucketful in supermarkets, would please the sons of the most discerning food critic. Sadly, no more prawn cocktails, but there are crab cakes with spicy tomato relish ($17.90) – a rather bland filling coated in soft-fried batter, with a pungent sauce that overpowers everything. I’m told they sell like hot cakes.

Barbecued prawns have given way to a somewhat deviant prawns saganaki ($21), decent-sized prawns in a richly-flavoured though very oily sea of tomato, onion and crumbled saganaki. There are other deviant dishes, such as red curry beef ($17.90), southern-style chicken with mustard mayonnaise ($16.90), even vegetarian lasagne ($24), but – as I discovered 27 years ago – this remains a steak restaurant so there’s still not much point in beating about the paddock.

Prawns saganaki. Photo: Tony Lewis

You’d probably enjoy a brief interlude with C&C’s version of a Caesar salad. It has all the right ingredients – cos lettuce, fresh croutons, shaved parmesan, anchovy slivers, a decent dressing, an egg (but fried rather than soft poached or raw) and bacon (a full, curled rasher rather than chopped and crisped). No matter, they’ve been doing it this way for 37 years and it sells.

Caesar salad. Photo: Tony Lewis

Where Pouras and Co get it absolutely right is with the steaks and there are many from which to choose. Headline act is the chateaubriand ($96 for two), a couple of surf&turf-ship&shore type steaks combined with bugs and prawns (a combination I’ve never understood), and a list of classic steaks that show C&C off at its best.

There’s a thick New York cut porterhouse, a pepper steak that’s been unchanged on the menu since 1978, filet mignon with mushroom sauce, steak dianne, a Texan T-bone and more, and a black Angas scotch fillet crusted with Pouras’ special spice mix (also now sold commercially). All come, as they always have, with a whacking great, perfectly cooked baked potato overflowing with whipped sour cream. Prices range from $38 – $45, and Greg Favretto will make sure they’re cooked to the exact degree that you want.

But if there is one dish at which C&C seriously excels, and which is rarely found these days, it’s the steak tartare, mixed by Pouras at the table with 13 ingredients added to the finest fillet he can source. It is still every bit as good as it was 27 years ago.

A wine list that once had Grange at $23.50 and Hill of Grace at $11.50 is still very good, with a strong focus on shiraz and an interesting reserve list (Hill of Grace now $790). We made do with a Redmans Coonawarra shiraz (a relative bargain, up from $9 to $59).

At this point you might as well totally give in and suggest to Jim Boutsis that you wouldn’t mind a glass of port. He’ll return with a generous tumbler sourced from a vaguely solera system of three barrels out the back that he’s been topping up for the past 37 years. If they had beds, you’d probably then take a nap.

Cork and Cleaver
Lunch, Mon-Fri; dinner, Mon-Sat
2 Bevington Road, Glenunga, (08) 8379 8091