A steakhouse named after a television ranch family.

Bonanza Steakhouse takes its name from Bonanza, the NBC television western about the Cartwright family and their Ponderosa Ranch, and English Wikipedia says both Bonanza and its later partner chain, Ponderosa, took their names from the series. The company’s own account, on the brand page of its current owner, says Bonanza Steakhouse was founded in 1963 by Dan Blocker, the actor who played Eric “Hoss” Cartwright on the programme, and that the chain’s opening restaurant was in Westport, Connecticut.

Westport remembers the restaurant under a slightly different name. The local news site 06880, written by Dan Woog, recalled in October 2018 that the steakhouse on Post Road East was called the Bonanza Sirloin Pit, and that it served meat “in a quasi-fast food way”: customers joined a line, snaked through it and picked up their meal at the end. The same post says Blocker made a personal appearance there, a memory Woog returned to in January 2024 after a reader confirmed it. The building had earlier been the town’s Greyhound bus depot and later became the Peppermill restaurant, 06880 says, and there was a second Bonanza a mile west on the Post Road.

The tie between the chain and the television show was part of the brand from the start. The current company page says that at Bonanza and Ponderosa “families can find the spirit of the Old West,” and speaks of “continuing the Cartwright family tree” while saying the brand now belongs to every kind of family. That is the identity in brief: a name, a ranch and a cast of characters borrowed from a television western and applied to an affordable steak restaurant.

English Wikipedia says the brothers Sam and Charles Wyly bought the small Bonanza chain three years after it opened and grew it over the following two decades. The company says the chain has been franchising since 1966, so from early on many Bonanza restaurants were run by local owners under the shared name.

Two names, one steakhouse group.

Bonanza and Ponderosa began as rivals. The company says Ponderosa Steakhouse was founded in 1965 in Kokomo, Indiana, two years after Bonanza, and English Wikipedia says Ponderosa was sold to Metromedia Restaurant Group in February 1988. In September 1989, Wikipedia records, Metromedia also bought Bonanza from the Wyly brothers, but kept the two chains as separate legal entities until 1997.

That year, according to Wikipedia, Metromedia combined them into a single organisation, Metromedia Family Steakhouses, in which each restaurant could be marketed under either the Ponderosa or the Bonanza name. The result, Wikipedia notes, is that restaurants in the same area could carry either name. The result was two signs from the same group, each borrowed from the same television western — one from the show’s title, one from the ranch where it was set — standing for the same kind of restaurant.

Metromedia’s steakhouse company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2008 and emerged in 2009 as Homestyle Dining LLC, English Wikipedia records. Wikipedia says the chain was sold in late 2017 to FAT Brands, the owner of Fatburger, which brought Bonanza and Ponderosa into a larger group of franchised restaurant brands.

Local Bonanza restaurants have closed one by one. The Hazleton Standard-Speaker reported in November 2021 that the Bonanza Steakhouse on Route 93 in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, open since 1994, had closed for the final time as its owner retired. WJON in St. Cloud, Minnesota, reported on 28 October 2022 that the St. Cloud Bonanza was closing permanently after 48 years in business, and that it was the last Bonanza in Minnesota; its owners thanked generations of staff in a farewell post.

Ownership changed again in 2026. Restaurant Dive reported on 21 May 2026 that a bankruptcy court had approved the sale of FAT Brands’ assets following the company’s Chapter 11 filing in January, and that Ponderosa & Bonanza were among the businesses to be sold to a group of lenders known as FBG Bid Co.

Design and documentation.

The chains in this group are restaurant names that closed, shrank to a handful of locations or came back under new owners. A restaurant brand lives in more places than a packaged product does: on a pole sign seen from the road, on a menu board and a printed menu, on uniforms, napkins and cups, and in the shape of the building itself, which was often designed so that a passing driver could recognise the chain before reading a word.

That is why so much of a restaurant identity outlasts the business behind it. Buildings are sold and reused with their rooflines still recognisable; signs are taken down and kept; menus, matchbooks and advertising characters survive in collections and in memory. When a name is revived, the new owner usually works from those surviving pieces, so the identity a guest meets today may be a reconstruction of an older one.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the chain, who has owned the name, when it closed or came back, and how its signs, logos, mascots and buildings have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A western name, a buffet and a new owner.

The current owner took over that summer. Restaurant Dive reported on 9 October 2026 that FBG Bid Co. had bought FAT Brands’ remaining businesses out of bankruptcy in the summer and that the parent company had since renamed itself OHG Brands; the Bonanza brand page now sits on the OHG Brands website. FBG Bid Co., now OHG Brands, has owned Ponderosa & Bonanza since 2026.

The company still sells the brand through the western. Its brand page describes Ponderosa and Bonanza with the line “Happiness Unlimited & Freedom by the Plateful” and promises “the spirit of the Old West.” The shared Ponderosa & Bonanza website describes a dining room with “farmland decor” on the walls, full service at the table alongside a help-yourself buffet, and calls the restaurants “America’s kitchen.” The site also leans on wordplay drawn from ranch life, telling guests to “stake your claim” at the restaurant.

Seen together, these pieces show how much of the Bonanza identity has always been borrowed. The name, the Cartwright family, the ranch and the Old West setting all came from a television programme, and the chain has kept using them long after the series left the air. The line service remembered in Westport has given way, in the company’s description, to table service and a buffet, but the western framing has not changed.

For a design guide, Bonanza shows how a restaurant can borrow a whole world from popular culture — a name, a ranch, a family and a landscape — and keep it as its identity through decades of changing owners; compare Steak and Ale, another steakhouse name once held by Metromedia, and Friendly’s, another American family restaurant name. For this guide we use branding-iron red, rope tan and prairie cream with a frontier slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bonanza Steakhouse’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.