Cut Club, the new steakhouse inside downtown’s Hotel Max, feels like a restaurant from the not-too-distant past. The menu leans comfortable rather than ambitious or world-spanning. It serves a typical lineup of steak cuts, some traditional sides like oysters, prawn cocktail, and wedge salad, and some cocktails that are between $15 and $20. There’s a host and servers who will hand you paper menus, take your order, bring your food, and give you the check. There are no service charges, no QR codes, no kiosk you tap your order into, no delivery apps.

“We’re going to run this restaurant like it’s 2015,” is how co-owner Ethan Stowell put it when I called him. What he means is that he wants to put all the debates around tipping and all the technological innovations—and headaches—of the last decade to one side. He still doesn’t like tipping for the inequities that it can produce, but customers seem to prefer tips to service charges that hike up check amounts. (Some servers prefer tips to service charges too.)

Stowell is the reason that Cut Club is newsworthy. He opened his first restaurant in 2003 and has grown his restaurant group into a sprawling business; today Ethan Stowell Restaurants operates 18 restaurants, most of them Italian-influenced. But last year Stowell left ESR—he’s still a shareholder and a board member, but ESR will be changing its name while he launches his own projects.

Ethan Stowell at Cut Club, one of the independent projects he’s focusing on after stepping away from Ethan Stowell Restaurants.

“There’s no drama in it at all,” he says of his departure. But as he gets older, he wants to do some more independent projects. He’s still behind the food at Picklewood Paddle Club and the Four Seasons’ Goldfinch Tavern, but stepping away from ESR means that he can focus on a smaller portfolio—it also means he can work the line as a chef at Cut Club sometimes.

There was a time when Stowell was the hot new chef on the scene. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, he was nominated regularly for the James Beard Awards. But as time went on, other chefs got more attention and Stowell’s restaurants sort of faded into the background. Cut Club follows that pattern in that it’s not flashy and doesn’t promise anything unique.

Well, maybe that’s not strictly true: Its happy hour food deals might be the best in the whole city. From 4 to 6 p.m. and after 9 p.m., there are a whole host of dishes for $15 and under, with a rotating dish of the day that’s just $12. I went in on a Thursday and got a spicy chicken sandwich and fries for $12—you can’t get anything in Seattle for $12 anymore. (As for the drinks, there are some happy hour cocktails for $12 and some glasses of wine for $10.)

“Seattle’s an expensive dining town,” Stowell admits. Part of that is because of the city’s notably high minimum wage, which Stowell isn’t complaining about. “We all voted for this,” he notes. But as a restaurateur, he has to deal with it. The happy hour specials are an attempt to get people out, to get them in the door, even if they won’t end up spending huge amounts. “Restaurants don’t make money on high check averages,” Stowell says. “They make money serving more customers. So we just got to figure out a way to get as many people in the door as we can and make them as happy as possible.”

Courtesy of Cut Club

As for the regular menu, Cut Club isn’t trying to compete with the Metropolitan Grill or other high-end steakhouses. If you want to ball out here, you can get a 32-ounce bone-in ribeye for $165 or an eight-ounce fillet for $120, but a lot of the cuts are between $50 and $80. Stowell says the expectation is that steaks would normally be split between two people. The goal is to be “approachable” while also being sustainable as a business.

A restaurant with happy hour specials isn’t revolutionary; Cut Club isn’t reinventing the wheel. But at a time when everyone is fretting about downtown and high prices, we shouldn’t take for granted that you can now walk over from the Westlake light rail station for a $15 burger. Cut Club is aiming to be a casual meal out, which was routine in 2015 but seems very difficult to find these days.