where to drink on Saint Paddy's

19 Houston restaurants & bars celebrating Saint Paddy's Day with food & drink specials

This Sunday will be hectic for Houstonians. Not only is it the last day of both Spring Break and the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, but March 17 is, of course, St. Patrick's Day.

As we all know from The Boondock Saints, everyone's Irish on Saint Paddy's. Celebrating the holiday isn't mandatory, but it is encouraged.

While this publication would never tell anyone how to spend their time — although we do offer suggestions on a weekly basis — it's easy to think of worse ways then heading to NRG Park for one last turkey leg at the rodeo carnival followed by visiting any of the restaurants and bars listed below for a little Irish cheer.

Not saying. Just saying.

B.B. Lemon will be inviting Houstonians to eat, drink, and be Irish for an all-day, St. Patrick’s Day soiree. Guests will enjoy Irish dancers, bagpipers, green beer, and whiskey specials. They’ll also be launching new menu items. 11 am.

BoomerJack's Webster, which opened last month, has some amazing drink specials on Saturday and Sunday. Guests can enjoy $4 Jamesons, $4 Guinness, $4 green tea shots, $5 Irish car bombs, and $2 Jell-O shots. 11 am.

Tex-Mex hotspot Candente will celebrate St. Paddy’s Day with their margarita of the month, The Spicy Duende (aka The Spicy Leprechaun). It has Socorro Blanco tequila, Midori, lime juice, pineapple juice, sliced fresh jalapeno, and a dash of fire water. 11 am.

Christian’s Tailgate Bar & Grill will be participating in St. Patty’s Day pub crawls at both their Heights and Midtown locations. Both events will feature $2 Jell-O shots, $5 shamrock margaritas, and $7 Irish car bombs.

Conservatory Galleria will be serving a speciality cocktail the weekend of St. Patrick’s Day. Guests can enjoy the “St. Paddy’s Paradise,” made with Paddy’s Irish Whiskey, Midori, lemonade, and Tajin for $10. 11 am.

Over at Eight Row Flint Heights, guests can bring their dancing shoes and enjoy a live DJ from 6-10 pm. The bar will also be serving Guinness and Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey specials. 11 am.

On Saturday and Sunday, EZ’s Liquor Lounge will be throwing a parking lot party with live music and specals on both Guinness and Tullamore Dew. A local bagpipe band will also be bringing some Irish tunes to the crowd in the afternoon. 11 am.

FM Kitchen & Bar will ensure you don’t get pinched with $4 draft green beer, or make it a combo with a $10 green beer and Tullamore Dew boilermakers. Hang out all day and enjoy $5 Happy Dad seltzers. 11 am.

Heights & Co. will be boasting a “Spring Leprechaun'' cocktail, made with rum, lemon, lime, stone fruit, and of course, a drop of coloring to make it green. Other green options include a green beer for $4 and their popular Mini Hulk Smash for $13. Noon.

Heights Bier Garden will host a Saint Patrick's Day Shenanigans Party. Enjoy live music with Bourbon Street Band from 2-5 pm, and DJ Jimmy Jamz from 6-10 pm. They will have a full menu, as well as green beer and drink specials provided by Tullamore Dew. 11 am.

King’s BierHaus will have an all-out St. Paddy’s Day party at both locations (Lazybrook/Timbergrove and League City) on Saturday and Sunday. We’re talking $5 half-liter beer specials, a St. Paddy’s food/drink menu, Irish whiskey and shotski specials, a crawfish boil, live music, and free Astros tickets every hour. 11 am.

Stop by any Kirby Ice House to sip and savor green beer or take the festivities to the next level with $4 Jameson shots from 7 pm until close. And every TV in the house will be tuned in to college basketball. 11 am.

The newly relocated LIttle Woodrow’s EaDo will pay homage to the space's history as Lucky's Pub with a three-day, St. Patrick’s fest, starting on Friday. We’re talking live music and DJs, bagpiper performances, crawfish, food vendors, and food trucks. Plus, 50-cents from every green Bud Light sold will be donated to Bregman Cares, the nonprofit started by Astros star Alex Bregman that's devoted to autism awareness. Noon.

Courtesy of BB Lemon

B.B. Lemon will have green beer and bagpipers.

The Locker Room Sports Bar & Grill, located in Third Ward across from Texas Southern University, invites folks to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with $5 green beer, $7 Jameson shots, and $7 green tea shots, all while watching the NCAA March Madness Selection Day. 11 am.

Over at Lyric Market in downtown, enjoy live music and grab a St. Paddy’s Day-inspired cocktail or green beer from Lyric Bar before watching the Downtown St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Saturday. Parking is complimentary in the Lyric Garage with a food or drink purchase. 11 am.

Pier 6 Seafood & Oyster House will toast to Ireland with a patio party featuring live music, entertainment, and a featured Jameson lemonade. Throw on your green attire and take in chefs Joe Cervantez and Lexy Garcia’s menu of fresh-caught, tide-to-table fare. 11 am.

Pitch 25 will feature a special St. Patrick’s Day cocktail: "Los San Patricios de Pitch 25." It’s an homage to the alliance of Mexico and Ireland; both countries fought together and for each other during the Mexican-American War. 11 am.

Pluckers Wing Bar, known for its plethora of famous sauces, delicious wings, and wide variety of beers, is offering green beer all day long on St. Patrick’s Day. Additionally, they will be offering $1 off cocktails including the lucky green classic, The Psychedelic Frog. 11 am.

Head to The Upside Pub in Garden Oaks for $5 green beer, $3 green Jell-O shots, and $7 Jameson shots. Take the edge off with an order of Irish Pub Skins — fried potato skins topped with corned beef, bacon, sour cream, and green onions. 11:30 am.

holidays where-to-eat where-drink

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

where to drink on Saint Paddy's

19 Houston restaurants & bars celebrating Saint Paddy's Day with food & drink specials

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

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