Ethan Stowell is Seattle’s Italian Restaurant Mastermind

Halfway through my interview with Seattle chef and restaurateur Ethan Stowell, he hits on something that largely explains the success of his ever-expanding empire of Italian restaurants. Unlike other cultures, Americans, he suggests, want a variety of types of food, and Italian is affordable and accessible for those who want to eat out several nights per week.

“People are shopping by cuisine and category,” Stowell explains. “Like, do you want Chinese tonight? Do you want Italian? Or Mexican.”

In Seattle, and now in Spokane in eastern Washington, diners often choose Italian, and when they do, they visit one of Ethan Stowell Restaurants’ growing roster, which is now about a dozen strong. His Tavolàta concept (four locations) is a trattoria-style restaurant with shareable plates and a mouthwatering menu of freshly made pasta dishes. His finer dining, award-winning concept How to Cook a Wolf (two locations), according to its website, “pays homage to MFK Fisher and the philosophy of taking simple ingredients and transforming them into culinary splendor.” Rione XIII (one location) is inspired by Trastevere, with fried artichokes, cacio e pepe, and Roman-style pizza. Staple & Fancy is a chef-driven, multi-course feast of seasonal Italian dishes. There are also two New York-style pizza restaurants and the new Bosco Pasta & Panini in Spokane for casual dining.

So yeah, Ethan Stowell has put a lot of Italian concepts out there and Washingtonians have rewarded him with a loyal following, whether they are in the mood to share a charcuterie and cheese board with friends at Tavolàta, go on a date night to How to Cook a Wolf, keep it casual, or let a chef call the shots for the evening.

Here, Stowell tells La Cucina Italiana about his path to Italian cooking and muses on how he has stealthily grown one of the most impressive collections of high-end Italian restaurants in America. Plus, he gives insight into how his ESR group has grown and what may be coming next.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You opened Bosco Pasta & Panini and Tavolàta Spokane in just the past few months. How have you managed to emerge from the pandemic so quickly?

They were all scheduled to open. They were all deals that were already signed before the pandemic. Obviously, the pandemic construction shutdown slowed them down by six months or so. But, you know, it is what it is. The downtown stuff we have in Seattle still is kind of shut down. Downtown Seattle downtown is a ghost town. But the majority of the neighborhoods have been supportive throughout the whole thing.

Did you do any provisions and things like that?

Not really. You know, people come to us for a full dining experience. So we wanted to recreate that to go. We did a lot of package dinners and bottles of wine or retail pricing, and that kind of thing.

So that kind of got you through?

Yeah, for sure. And then also the expansion of outdoor dining. We built a bunch of structures and people have really enjoyed eating outside. So we're gonna keep those around forever. Those will be huge for the health of the industry going forward.

OK, let’s talk about your connection to Italian food.

When I started cooking in the mid-1990s, it was the heyday of like French Laundry, Daniel, Charlie Trotter, Jean-Georges, and all those guys in larger markets doing multi-course tasting menus. Our first restaurant was contemporary American. Doing fine dining food is fun, but it's intense all the time. And then I just kind of realized that I really liked a more casual and natural approach to food. I had training to do fine dining, so I really applied that to more of a rustic setting. And I know a lot of people are doing that now but at the time nobody was doing Italian. There wasn’t a lot going on. So we started off making a late-night pasta joint, which is Tavolàta.

That was a good idea.

I still feel so weird, so old, to say that back in the day, you know, all these chefs were doing fine dining places and then that they are opening casual places to support their fine dining place, but that's kind of the model we did as well. I found myself liking to work in a more casual place. Not really casual since you are making everything from scratch. Everything homemade like we did it at the other restaurant, just the more casual family-style approach. And we ended up being a lot busier. Customers were easier to make happy. It felt good.

What about the menu?

I love pasta, you know. I always have, but at the time we started up, it wasn't like fine dining cooks can do pasta, so we just kind of gravitated toward that way, and it's grown from there. The old style of food is just more my personality that's come out over the years. And the approach to food has been something that's grabbed me, and I felt more comfortable with it. So I mean, it's been just a natural progression over the years.

As far as your introduction to Italian cooking, it was really just kind of like being more of a trained chef who then went to Italy and saw that Italians put together flavors and dishes and the simplicity of it attracted you? Is that accurate?

Yeah, for sure. You know, how the Italians interact with food and how they interact with ingredients. And, historically, what they were thinking. It felt like they just had more fun dining. 

As a chef, instead of having to be serious about, say, this scallop and uni course, it just felt like it was more fun to have a bowl of gnocchi. It can be with braised oxtail and maybe some shaved truffles, but it just felt like it was more fun to do it, to cook it and eat it and interact with it. So it was definitely the cultural piece that I really enjoyed.

How did it go over at your fine dining restaurant when you started transitioning to this more Italian way of cooking?

The first time I started adding pasta to the menu in my first restaurant in 2005, yeah, it was different. The cooks who worked for me were like, “We shouldn't be cooking pasta.” My response was, But we're hand-making our pasta. Why is this different from anything else?

When it came to sourcing ingredients, were you only using things imported from Italy or did you find purveyors in the Pacific Northwest?

Well, look at what grows up in the Northwest. Mushrooms are huge in Italian food. Clams, mussels, seafood, you know? You change the application of what you're doing with it. You do clams with homemade sheeted-out tagliolini. You're not trying to be fancy with it. You're just trying to be good with it.

Let’s talk about ESR’s different Italian concepts. How do you define them?

Well, I mean, How to Cook a Wolf is probably a little bit more of a refined version of Italian. It's more high-end. Tavolàta at its heart, we want a strong bar presence. We want a strong happy hour, good for groups, and that's what it's been. How to Cook a Wolf is your date-night place, your anniversary place. Rione XIII is like a Roman-style place, with cacio e pepe and carbonara and amatriciana, plus artichokes and Roman-style pizza. And then other ones that lean in that direction obviously are mkt. and Staple & Fancy, where you put yourself in the hands of the chef.

Tavolàta is now up to four locations, including the new one in Spokane. Why is that so successful?

It's a popular thing to do in Seattle, to have a glass of Chianti and a salumi board. Have a buffalo mozzarella dish, and, you know, call it a snack, and share a bowl of pasta. It hits on all the aspects: we use a lot of local ingredients, it's all handmade. You know, and pastas are super good. Right? So people like it a lot. And it tends to be a little bit more affordable, so you can go out more times a week. People are shopping by cuisine and category, right? Like, do you want Chinese tonite? Do you want Italian? Or Mexican?

The restaurants all have strong design elements as well. Can you talk about that?

We tend to gravitate to older buildings that come with a little more character built in. We like a connection to the outside, like operable windows. We don't love super-high ceilings. We always build some sort of structure so that your sightlines come down. We want them to feel a little bit more intimate, more compact. We like areas where we can move, you know, like banquettes. So you can shove tables together and get larger groups. We like to build restaurants that are durable, that don't don't feel like we put a massive amount of money in. Because we like restaurants that feel good, feel approachable, and feel a little bit refined, but not so fancy that it's intimidating to go there. We want to be the place you go on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night.

You have made one big sort of out-of-character move, opening Wolf in New York City on the second floor of the flagship Manhattan location of Nordstrom, which is a Seattle-based company. What can you say about that?

We've had a good relationship with the Nordstrom company in Seattle. And they were opening their flagship store in New York, and they wanted to bring a couple of local restaurant brands out to New York. So they asked [Seattle chef-restaurateur] Tom Douglas and myself. They asked me to do a more upscale restaurant for the building. We very specifically use Northwest ingredients. There is work from Northwest artists. We wanted the place to feel really good and warm. I was up there last week. It's a super-cool restaurant. They’re back up and running now.

How do you like having a restaurant in New York?

That was more of a feather in the cap kind of thing. Somebody offers you to open a restaurant in New York, that's every cook's dream, right? Not everybody gets the opportunity to do it. Or has the ability to do it. And to do it with a cool partner was great.

After New York, you then opened the Tavolàta in Spokane. How did that happen?

We've been talking about expanding outside of Seattle for a while. We want to go to a few different cities. We were looking at Spokane, we're looking at Boise. We don't feel the need to tackle all the biggest markets. We don't have the need or the desire or the ego to say, Hey, we're going to Chicago or DC, we're going to Boston or LA. That's not how we think. We want to go to a market that is smaller, so we're a bigger fish in a smaller pond. And particularly in places like Spokane, where Italian food was heavily underrepresented. We wanted to go there, someplace where we feel like we're bringing something new to the scene.

Back in Seattle, how has the rise of Amazon and other tech companies affected the restaurants? I would imagine that it presented some great opportunities for you, but also some challenges. What are some of the pros and cons of Seattle going from this nice mid-sized city to becoming this powerhouse?

I have been here my entire life. And it's been great to see the city expand. It's been great to see the city grow, and there's been so much development. Seattle's just growing so fast, and so quick and so strong. It's been good to go along for the ride, right? Because it does present a lot of opportunities. The challenges are definitely real. Seattle's gotten to be a very expensive city to live in. Which makes navigating the restaurant industry a little bit tough. I mean, there's still a big chunk of people in Seattle that have the expectations of the same price point they did 20 years ago, and that's just not realistic. I'm a believer that I want the food to be approachable for everybody from a financial perspective. I don't want people to feel like they're spending too much money going out. Good food shouldn't be just for the wealthy elite.

Let's wrap up with a question about Italy. When was your last trip there? And what are some of your favorite places in Italy?

I guess it has been 18 months. I went to Venice for a week. That was cool. But favorite areas? I love going to Parma. That's a great region. That's probably my favorite style of food out there. A little bit out in the country, a lot of cured meats. Very specific types of pizza and pasta. Rome's obviously a super-cool city to go to. You have to do a little bit of digging to find good restaurants because there are some bad ones. But if you do some research, you can find some amazing spots. Udine, north of Venice, where San Daniele ham is from, is another favorite.

What about the style of eating in Italy? It’s very different from America, right?

I've got kids now that I take when I travel. So I don't go to 10 pm dinners like I used to do all the time. But that was my favorite thing. You know, get your reservation at 9:30 or 10 o'clock at night. You walk there, like in Rome. You have a two-and-a-half-hour dinner, some good drinks and a bottle of wine then walk home for a half-hour to walk off your meal. I mean, the lifestyle is so good.