Cocktails & Eats

Where to drink right now: 10 hot, happy hour deals

Del Frisco's Pomegranate Martini
Welcome to happy hour at Saint Genevieve!
Photo by William Vo
Mini tostadas with snapper ceviche at Mockingbird Bistro
Photo by Paula Murphy

It’s another sweltering August in Houston. Keep cool with 10 more thirst quenching happy hour specials at hot spots around town. These deals are not only good for wetting your whistle, they're also stomach pleasing and dollar saving.

Blu Restaurant & Lounge

The suburbs need drink deals too. Happy hour at Sugar Land's Blu Restaurant & Lounge runs from 4 to 7 p.m. daily and features dishes from the regular menu for only $4. Choices include the sweet potato samosas, edamame dumplings and tequila ceviche.

Whether it's inside at the swanky bar and lounge or outside on the restaurant's 1,400-square-foot patio, for $5 you can enjoy specials on hand-crafted cocktails like the Blinker made with rye whiskey, grapefruit and raspberry and the 9INE TO 5IVER — a mix of red and white wine, brandy, citrus and peach bitters.

Also available: $2 domestic drafts, $3 imports, $4 craft beers, and wines by the glass for $5.

Houston Texans Grille

Catch the big game — any big game — on more than 65 high-definition TVs while you enjoy food and drink specials at the Houston Texans Grille in CityCentre. There’s a regular happy hour, Mondays through Fridays from 4 to 7 p.m., and a reverse happy hour, Sundays through Thursdays from 10 p.m. until close.

You won’t leave hungry with chicken lime quesadillas, nachos and mini-burgers as options on the two-for-one appetizer menu.

Red and white house wines, a 20-ounce beer of the month and well liquors are yours for $4 and under. Select liquors are only a dollar more and the bar is stocked with just about all Three Olives’ flavors.

Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steak House

The opening of Del Frisco’s sister restaurant, Del Frisco’s Grille, isn’t the only exciting news — so are the bar menu prices available every day from open to close at this Galleria steakhouse. Along with more than a few great dishes to sample — sesame crusted tuna, seared filet tips and smoked salmon rillettes to name a few — Del Frisco’s menu also offers a variety of cocktails, from a pomegranate martini to the classic Old Fashioned.

MKT BAR at Phoenicia Specialty Foods

MKT BAR downtown runs a happy hour deal Mondays through Fridays from 4 to 7 p.m. A $6 bites menu is comprised of several dips (herb hummus and pomegranate yogurt dip for example) with baked pita chips, homemade plantain chips with mango salsa and chimichurri sauce and za'atar dusted, hand-cut fries.

Wines by the glass go for $5, draft beer is $4 and bottled beer is $3. Get crazy all day long on Wine Wednesdays. Snack and sip for cheap from open until close with half price bottles of select wine paired with an $8 charcuterie and cheese plate.

Mockingbird Bistro

The 5-5-5 happy hour at Mockingbird Bistro is available weekdays from 4 to 7 p.m. Five bucks will get you select eats, wines by the glass, classic cocktails and two-for-one local brews. Try the lobster risotto lollipops with sweet corn infusion and mini snapper ceviche tostadas.

Add to your dining pleasure with a Lynchburg Lemonade, Greyhound or Cuba Libra.

Bistro Bar at Bistro Alex

From the beverages to the cuisine, Bistro Bar at Hotel Sorella offers a half price discount on all bar menu items weekdays from 3 to 8 p.m. The prices may be small, but the portions are anything but tiny. For $7 or less you can choose from items like the Bistro Burger, pulled pork BBQ burger and chicken tenders (all with fries), and an assortment of flatbreads.

Discounted beverages include beer, wine, well drinks and specialty cocktails such as the Mandarin Cosmo, Pimm’s Cup and French Italian Martini made with Grey Goose Orange, Tuaca and lemon juice.

Note: Take advantage of the complimentary valet with any food or drink purchase.

Jasper’s

From 3 to 7 pm every day, libations and edibles at Jasper’s in The Woodlands are a mere $5 across the board. Noteworthy nosh includes buffalo chicken pizza, crab cake sliders, Angus beef sliders, and Teriyaki chicken lettuce wraps. The drink menu offers the likes of select wines by the glass, an apple or raspberry martini and an Orange Dream Cocktail made with tangerine vodka, orange juice, triple sec, and whipped cream.

Saint Genevieve

Saint Genevieve at West Ave has a 6-7-8 menu Tuesdays through Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m. At the $6 level, order the Blistered Shishito Peppers or Herb Gnocchi Tots. Spicy Spanish meatballs and reuben empanadas are on the $7 menu and for $8, you can order the margherita flatbread.

Treviso prosecco and Tito’s Vodka are $7 each and an $8 menu include Alias Cabernet by the glass and the Mellow Time Cocktail, a combination of Jameson Irish Whiskey, lemon juice, honey, bitters and applewood smoked salt.

J. Black’s

From 4 to 7 p.m. daily and all night Sundays, starters at J. Black’s on Washington Avenue are half off. Options include grilled cheese with tomato basil dipping sauce, calamari and pigs in a blanket. Save on drinking, too, with $2 off all drinks and 25-percent off bottles of wine.

Tuesday is “Pints and Pizza” night — $3 select craft pints and half-priced artisan pizzas.

BRIO Tuscan Grille

The Tuscan Tasters bar menu at Brio Tuscan Grille lets you get dishes such as spicy shrimp and eggplant, beef carpaccio, the BRIO Burger and several flatbreads and bruschettas for $3.95 each. This deal is available in the bar Mondays through Fridays from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., with a reverse happy hour from 9 p.m. until close.

From 4 p.m. until close, also Mondays through Fridays, reap the benefits of $5 low-priced drink specials on housemade sangrias, mojitos, martinis and wine. Another perk: A dozen-plus martini flavors for $5 each on Martini Wednesdays. With one location in CityCentre, keep your eyes peeled for another location opening mid-August in River Oaks.

Have a favorite happy hour deal? Let us know!

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Here's why a top Texas pizza team makes a yearly pilgrimage to New York

Photo courtesy of Missy Davis

In late April, some of the Home Slice team took a field trip to New York to bring authentic NYC flavors and service back to Houston.

There's a saying in the pizza world: "smooth is fast." No yelling, no chaos, no sprinting across a kitchen. Just calm, practiced movement, one pie at a time. It's a philosophy Home Slice Pizza has tried to bottle since its very beginnings. Every year, to make sure this message lands, the team flies to the Big Apple to watch it in action.

In late April this year, 17 Home Slice employees including kitchen managers, front-of-house staff, server trainers, and lead servers boarded flights from Texas to New York for four days of eating, walking, subway rides, and the kind of bonding that only happens when you're crammed around a table at a legendary Brooklyn pizzeria at 9 pm on a Monday. The trip includes employees from the store's Houston location in Midtown, and Home Slice is busily working on its new location in the Heights that will open this fall.

"You can serve New York-style pizza," says Sara Ronder, who has made the trip more than a dozen times. She works as an executive assistant to founding owners Terri Hannifin, Jen Scoville Strickland, and Joseph Strickland. "But there's a whole other level you just soak in when you go."

The tradition dates back to 2006, a year after Home Slice first opened its doors. The restaurant's founders, Hannifin and Strickland, met as roommates at NYU. New York pizza was a way of life for them. They had no idea at the time they'd open a New York-style pizzeria in Austin one day. But after they did it, they knew bringing the team back to where it all began would be important. The team has made the trip every year since — minus a few during the Pandemic.

The itinerary this year was a masterclass in eating: Rubirosa for lunch on arrival day, a sunset Staten Island Ferry ride, then dinner at Lucali in Brooklyn to kick things off. Day two brought a full pizza and sub crawl — Prince Street Pizza, Faicco's, Joe's Pizza, Lucia Pizza of SoHo, L'industrie Pizzeria, Upside Pizza, and Regina's Grocery — before a sit-down dinner at Roscioli.

Wednesday opened with breakfast at the classic Ukrainian diner Veselka, then split the group into teams fanning out across the boroughs: Brooklyn Bridge walks, a Roosevelt Island Tramway ride, Patsy's in Harlem, the Museum of the City of New York, and stops at Juliana's and Angelo's Coal Oven Pizzeria. The trip closed things out with lunch at John's of Bleecker Street, then led back to Austin and Houston.

Dividing up a slice in front of Joe's Pizza. Photo courtesy of Missy Davis

Lucali kept coming up as the runaway favorite. Karen Flores, assistant kitchen manager at the North Loop location, was transfixed watching the pizza maker work the room, stretching dough, stacking pies, drawing little heart shapes in the air for appreciative guests, and never breaking a sweat.

"It didn't matter how busy it was," Flores says. "There was no hecticness. Everybody was just kind of doing their things nice and calmly."

For first-timer Matthew Stoughton, a front-of-house employee at the South Congress location, a highlight came from Lucia Pizza of SoHo, where a server named Maria remembered the group from a visit eight months prior: what they ordered, where they were coming from, how the night went.

"She was amazing," Stoughton says. "There's a group of 17 people in this tiny little bar, and she was just totally crushing it." Or as the Home Slice Ethos puts it, "smooth is fast."

Kelly Ball, a front-of-house server trainer and lead server at the original South Congress location, says the trip recalibrated her relationship to high-volume service.

"It's the comfortability that people have being in close spaces together; the way that they move around each other, and you even find yourself kind of hustling at first, just to match the vibe," she says. "And then you realize that you're the one hustling, because everything is actually just kind of going. So I really enjoyed that part."

Between meals, the group played scavenger hunt bingo around the city, snapping photos of classically New York sights for prizes. They sought out things like rats in the subway, pigeons wrestling with too-large food items, campaign sticker art, and sidewalk cellar doors.

Johns of Bleecker Street The whole group at Johns of Bleecker on their last day in New York.Photo courtesy of Missy Davis

And of course, aside from coming back with inspiration on how to prep and serve the best New York slice in Austin, the team has also come back a whole lot closer.

"That whole saying, a 'New York minute' — I'm so confused about what that actually means now," laughs Ball. "Because in New York there's so much happening in a minute, but also it just flies by. So it's just that general sense that we're all doing this together, we will get there, we're gonna do it as a team, and it's gonna be awesome."

Plus, now that they're back and have tasted the pizza that inspired it all, when a New Yorker comes into Home Slice and gives praise, it means all that much more.

"When somebody says, 'I'm from New York and this pizza is legit,'" Flores says, "we made that happen. I made that dough. And at the end of the day, I think that that is a beautiful thing."

home slice pizza new york pizza

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