Flashback Friday: This restaurant made no secret about what it was serving: Dead Cow

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that will run Fridays on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants they once loved but now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.

This week’s featured restaurant, The Dead Cow, had two locations in Wichita in the 1980s.

All burger fans, of course, know it in the back of their minds.

But in the early 1980s, Wichita had a couple of burger restaurants that explicitly reminded customers what they were eating.

Dead Cow.

Wichitan Ken Haberly and his wife, Jan, opened their first Dead Cow restaurant in 1981. Ken, a former car salesman who decided he was more cut out for restaurants, took over a building at 3505 E. Harry, across from St. Joseph Hospital, that had once been home to a Ralph Baum’s hamburger stand. (There’s a Spangles at the address today.)

When they were trying to come up with a name for the restaurant, Ken Haberly told The Wichita Eagle at the time, his wife jokingly suggested the succinct “The Dead Cow.”

dead cow embed 03 Aug 1984, Fri The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kansas) Newspapers.com

Ken laughed it off at first, but then he started to believe that the name could work. His nephew and niece drew a mascot for the restaurant, which featured a cow with its feet pointing straight up, a smirk on its face.

“We thought if we handled it tongue-in-cheek then people would take it that way and not be turned off,” he told the paper at the time.

The restaurant was known for its straightforward menu items, all with bovine-related names. “The Cow” was a single hamburger. “The Steer” was a double. Fried potato skins were called “Rawhides” and fried sliced potatoes were “Cow Chips.” The kid’s sandwich, naturally, was called “The Calf.” Ken proudly told the paper his patties weren’t pre-formed, that his onion rings were homemade, and that, every morning, he went to work cutting up a 100-pound bag of potatoes.

People loved the food, and in 1983, the Haberlys opened a second location of The Dead Cow, this one at 1402 W. 21st St.

But The Dead Cow was not known only for its dead cow. Ken Haberly also became famous locally for the portable sign he placed outside of his original restaurant. He would always come up with funny sayings for the sign, and in a newspaper story, he was dubbed “one of the most humorous sign writers” in town.

“Why does a cow cross the road?” the sign once read. “To get to the udder side, of course.”

Another time, it read: “Early election results: dead cow leads by a head.”

When the restaurant first opened, Ken Haberly — who worked frying hamburgers as a student at East High and who first met his wife at Sandy’s hamburger stand — said that he was trying to appeal to “customers wanting the ‘pre-golden arches’ era.”

But The Dead Cow eventually closed, unable to keep up with pressure from the growing number of national restaurant chains moving into Wichita.

Ken Haberly’s restaurant career did not end with The Dead Cow, though. He went on to open a couple of other local eateries in the following decades, including Rowdy Joe’s Steakhouse & Saloon in Old Town in 1993 and Dooley’s at K-42 and Maize Road in 2001.