Here at Restaurant Happy Hour, we believe that there is no finer time to enjoy a drink than in that magical period between the end of the workday and the start of prime time television programming. Why?
Everyone knows that happy hour drinks are often heavily discounted by your favorite local bars and restaurants, but not everyone is hip to the fact during happy hour the night is still in its infancy -- brimming with release from the office and teeming with an ever-renewed sense of hope for one’s prospects for the rest of the evening. Now, those prospects might include a thrilling live set by a favorite band, a late dinner at an outstanding restaurant with good friends, a carefully planned or luckily-blundered-into sexual conquest, or just the comfort of returning home to the wife and kids in a slightly happier mood than, say, if the world did not regularly offer a man the regular-and-reliable option of $4 well drinks and two-for-one Budweiser Select bottles between the hours of 5 PM and 8 PM.
Happy hour means many things to many different people, folks. But the magic of happy hour truly lies in that feeling of anticipation balanced precariously in time amidst the end of the day and the middle of the night.
Truly, Happy Hour is the magic hour. There’s no denying it. Some folks like money; some like to dance and dine; but we’ll be happy if you give us that wine. Particularly at a reduced happy hour special rate. Who among true drinking afficiandos hasn’t enjoyed a warm and flat glass of the finest house “merlot” because of a special happy hour price of $2? C’mon. You know you’ve done it. And will probably do it again. Why pay full price for something reasonable when you can get a happy hour “deal” on the cheapest swill in the house. Brilliant!
All things being equal, we choose to focus on happy hours in California - particularly San Diego happy hours. Why happy hours in San Diego? An excellent question and one which the editors here have grappled with many an evening while shooting pool, big bucks, and “the breeze” at our favorite happy hour watering hole in San Diego’s well-loved Pacific Beach neighborhood. Our rather boorish yet strangely logical conclusion and answer to that question: “Well, why the deuce not San Diego Happy Hours, mate? San Francisco is too pretentious, L.A. is so vast as to be unmanageable and undriveable, and the rest of Calfornia is, by all accounts, a red neck cesspool full of unsavory biker clubs, depressing pool rooms, T.G.I. Friday and Sizzler complexes located next to the interstate, and national parks where happy hour isn’t officially sanctioned by the rangers. (Though they’re known to enjoy a sip or two of warming single malt scotch at sunset most nights.)
The editors and publishers of this website have no less a goal than to make happy hour easy and accessible for all Californians over the age of 21 and interested in drinking at a deep discount at restaurant bars, hotel bars, dive bars, speakeasies, VFW Halls, charity bake sale events, or even private parties with the audacity to charge guests for a sip of the hard stuff. Basically, anywhere offering a price break on a drink of alcohol in the state of California is fair game and should be covered by this site. We’re particularly strong in the restaurant happy hour special category - as evinced by our site title.
If a restaurant is running a happy hour special in your neighborhood -- whether it’s a high-volume Applebees with stoned college-dropouts for “servers” or a chic and exclusive Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood run by an absentee celebrity chef and with an atmosphere more like an exclusive dance club than an actual eatery -- this website is going to be all over the happy hour specials those places run. You can’t discount a drink before dinnertime in this state without us knowing about it. Seriously.
Look. The best happy hour is the happy hour that combines libations of reasonable quality with prices of sufficient value to enable a lively and growing crowd to enjoy said libations in sufficient quantities to launch their evenings into a warm, friendly, smell-of-cigarette-smoke-outside-on-the-curb-tinged fever pitch of both satisfaction with one’s present state happy of state of drinking affairs and anticipation for one’s future state of carnal enjoyment, gustatory satiation, or somnolent oblivion. Whatever, as it were, frosts your beer mug.
Our motto here at Restaurant Happy Hour, if we actually had one, might read like this:
“We’d like to have happy hour with the whole world; because maybe then the whole world would be happy.”
Cheers. And enjoy your happy hour safely folks.