Hip usually comes at a cost. When a restaurant's hip, you can't get a reservation or you can't afford one. If you somehow manage to get a table, it's too noisy to hear yourself eat or too early to eat. The Standard Grill's different. It's undeniably fashionable and entirely affordable. The dining room's filled with celebrities and everybodies.

The restaurant opened in the Meatpacking District, right underneath Andre Balazs' Standard Hotel and the High Line Park. On warm nights, I like the sidewalk seating or the breezy, bistro-style barroom with tile floors and a white oak bar.

The best seats are definitely in the main dining room — a beautifully appointed space with vaulted ceilings, roomy maroon booths, bay windows and a shiny floor covered in 480,000 pennies.

It's the little things — the checkered tablecloths, brown-bagged bread, and bowls of baby radishes and chunks of Parmesan waiting for you on the table — that make it feel warm and accessible, even when Cameron Diaz and Cindy Crawford are sitting at the next table. A side dish, "on the house," brings delights like crispy potatoes with paprika aioli, compliments of the kitchen.

The chef, Dan Silverman, ran the kitchen at Lever House, a place for power meals in the middle of midtown. The Standard Grill is dressed-down food for a downtown crowd. It's an American grill menu with offerings like raw oysters, rib eye, pork chops and a porterhouse. The lamb chops aren't your average chophouse chops. They're smartly marinated in lots of lemon and spices, flash-seared and served with polenta and a basil mint sauce. The burger was good, not great, and the New York strip was so unevenly cooked — cold in the middle and overcooked at the edges — it had to make a round trip right back to the kitchen.