Cleaver & Cork, with Alex Pope’s help, opens in the Power & Light District

Restaurants in the Power & Light District tend toward a certain domineering severity, but you don’t think 50 Shades of Grey when you step inside the district’s new Cleaver & Cork, at 1333 Walnut. More like 10 shades of cool slate.

When the Cordish Co., which owns the P&L, pulled the plug on the six-year-old Maker’s Mark restaurant last year, out went that venue’s sunny gold-and-red interior. Cleaver & Cork, which opens Thursday, February 26, shows off a heavy refurbishment that has installed gray upholstery, gray slatted-wood backs for the booths, panels of smoked-gray glass, and gray seats at the illuminated onyx bar (a rare intact remnant from Maker’s Mark).

All of which leaves the color to the food and the drinks. Handling the former is chef Alex Pope, owner of the Local Pig butcher shop and the Westport restaurant Bridger’s Bottle Shop (to be officially redubbed Local Pig in April). Pope isn’t an owner at Cleaver & Cork, and he’s not exactly the c-word here, either.

“Don’t use the word consultant,” Pope tells me. “That’s the concept behind my role here but not exactly what I’m doing.” Rather, he’s the culinary adviser.

In addition to creating the dinner-only restaurant’s menu with longtime collaborator Andrew Heimburger (formerly of Local Pig, now Cleaver & Cork’s executive chef), Pope is supplying the meat for such dishes as a fried pork chop with heirloom white beans, a pork osso buco, and a hearty sausage soup.

This isn’t Cordish’s first time contracting high-profile local advice to spiff up a property. A year ago, it hired Port Fonda chef and owner Patrick Ryan in a similar role for the Mexican-themed Tengo Sed Cantina. That relationship has already run its course. Ryan, recently named a James Beard Award semifinalist, tells me: “I haven’t had any communication with them [Cordish] for months.” (Ryan is still listed as Tengo’s “menu creator” on the Power & Light District’s website.)

Eric Willey, formerly of Bluestem restaurant, is the managing partner of Cleaver & Cork — he does have an ownership stake — and has hired several familiar restaurant faces, including head bartender Andrew Olsen of the Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange. Olsen has created the craft-cocktail program for the new restaurant, and his menu includes such distinctly un-gray beverages as the Horsefeather (Kansas City whiskey, ginger beer and Angostura bitters) and the Valentino (blended scotch, Roasterie toddy vermouth, orange and Heering cherry liqueur).

Olsen is a commanding presence behind a bar featuring cast-iron light fixtures that look like 19th-century cattle carcass hooks. “They’re actually logging skids,” Willey says. “But the idea is to evoke cattle hooks.”

But Pope is quick to point out that Cleaver & Cork isn’t a steakhouse, even with a menu that features a smoked rib-eye, a grilled Kansas City strip and a thick beef tenderloin.

“We’ll have a variety of interesting meat choices, but we’ll also have seafood, pork, pasta and sandwiches,” Pope says. The entrée prices will range from $17 (for penne pasta in a pork-and-sausage ragu) to $38 (for beef tenderloin). The kitchen will serve food from 4 to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

Willey says lunch service might be an option in the future — “Maker’s Mark never had much of a lunch business,” he explains — but his initial focus is building a dinner clientele not heavily dependent on events. Restaurants in the P&L have tended to draw dining crowds from Sprint Center shows, big sporting contests and First Fridays, only to slow way down when the calendar is lighter.

“It’s great to have that built-in traffic,” Willey says, “but it’s just as important to develop customers who are familiar with Alex’s talent and understand that this is a Power & Light restaurant with a lot of local talent.”