These Happy Hours Are So Cheap—It's Unreal

Aalto Lounge

3356 SE Belmont St., 503-235-6041, aaltolounge.com. 5-7 pm daily.

[$2 EVERYTHING] At this Belmont Street den of sleek midcentury modernity and "bracing cocktails" (their words), and DJs spinning outlaw country and hip-hop, the absurdly generous happy-hour specials tend to draw couples looking for luxe a la cheapo. Two dollars will get you almost anything: a serrano-infused vodka pineapple cocktail, a lavender-cucumber gin cocktail, a Jell-O shot-flavored "Paloma," a pretzel with cheese or a grilled cheese sandwich. A tenner buys you an entire bottle of wine. And if you're feeling both fancy and friendly, there's a $12 bucket of four Weihenstephaners with your name on it. But be polite. The happy-hour menu is only available to "well-mannered, appropriately tipping customers." MARTIN CIZMAR.

Best deal: The $2 full-sized Belmont Jewel Cocktail—a mix of bourbon, lemon, pomegranate juice, and orange blossom water. It goes great with your $2 grilled cheese sandwich.

Ash Street Saloon

225 SW Ash St., 503-226-0430, ashstreetsaloon.com. 4-8 pm daily.

[STICK TO PBR] Unsure if Ash Street Saloon is the right after-work watering hole for you? Well, let me ask you this: Are you comfortable walking up to a bartender and asking for a $5 Cunt Licker? If the very thought offends you, Saucebox is just a block away. (If you must know, it's Malibu Rum, vanilla Stoli and fruit juice, but in truth, you're probably not going to order anything more colorful than a PBR here.) One of Portland's waning bastions of questionable taste, the self-proclaimed "dirty rock bar" smells like a minimally sanitized urinal and keeps the television tuned to Syfy. If there isn't a band named something like Goblin Cock assaulting eardrums from the stage, the Suicidal Tendencies blaring from the house speakers should activate your tinnitus just fine. Trust me, you'll miss it when it's gone—which is likely to be next September when its lease expires. MATTHEW SINGER.

Best deal: Pabst is $1.25. Dare to get the burger for just $3 more.

Bartini

2108 NW Glisan St., 503-224-7919, bartinipdx.com. 3:30-6:30 pm, 10 pm-close daily; all day Monday.

[CHEESE PLZ] There are a few places you'll go that will cause certain people to call you "basic." Buffalo Wild Wings, all of Southwest Portland—and Bartini. It's like Portland's own little Sex and the City bus tour shrunk down into a tiny room bordering a fondue restaurant. But with shiny black walls, giant paintings of goldfish in martini glasses, princessy glass chandeliers, a dozen-page book of 100-plus drinks, and an '80s Jazzercise-esque logo, what's not to love? It'll take a while to eat your way through the 30-item food menu (each with its own happy-hour price), so here's a tip: The Gorgonzola-brie fondue is the best, and it's easily shareable. Skip the $6 cheeseburger, but definitely get the $3 mashed potatoes in a martini glass, served with a wedge of brie. Drinks are half-price during happy hour, which is most of the hours Bartini is open. Expect sweetness and possibly a flower or sprig of mint; but at $4 apiece, these drinks seem to say what your best friend would. Treat yourself, girl—you deserve it! SOPHIA JUNE.

B-Side Tavern

632 E Burnside St., 503-233-3113. 4-7 pm daily.

[CHEAP, CRAPPY CANS] B-Side spans time like Vincent Gallo in a photo booth. Sure, the whiskey-tallboy rocker dive now has a few heat lamps on the smoking porch—which still has the approximate air quality of an emerging nation—and the tabletop graffiti gets cleaned up for a refresh every now and then. But you will still tell time with a clock depicting Ted Nugent's face while marking the three-hour "crappy hour," during which tallboys of Hamm's, Rainier and Tecate are a mere $1—one of the only daily dollar-beer specials in the entire city. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: $1 tallboys.

Belmont Inn

3357 SE Belmont St., 503-232-1998, belmontsinn.com. Drink specials 11 am-6 pm, food specials 3-6 pm daily.

[CHEAP QUESO] A defiant reminder of the area's rougher, readier, recent past, Belmont Inn's beer tap list has undergone sizable upgrades over the years, and the pool tables are well-maintained for the sort of guy who might strum a pool cue to Bruce Springsteen while his girlfriend rolls her eyes. Though not a sports bar, this is a bar that enjoys sports—a notable rarity amid the tastemaker zone—and for early games or UFC, well drinks are a mere $3 until 6 pm, select craft beers only $3.50. Cheap food doesn't start till 3, though—and includes dirt-cheap niceties like a $3 cheese-and-bean quesadilla, or a $6 burger that comes with a side of fries either straight or curly. JAY HORTON.

Best deal: Quesadillas—cheap to make or order. $3 gets you bean and cheese, $5 a loaded Southwestern.

Beulahland

118 NE 28th Ave., 503-235-2794, beulahlandpdx.com. 4-7 pm daily.

[QUEENS MANHATTAN] Beulahland is a neighborhood punk-rock and Timbers-fan clearing house that recently changed up its happy hour completely to offer what may be the cheapest drink in Portland to call itself a Manhattan—it's $4, served up alongside a $4 martini, a $4 kamikaze, and other $4 rotators that might include housemade ginger soda and a host of muddled limes. If you think that's a fancy way of saying they don't upcharge their $4 happy hour wells to make fancy-sounding shit out of them, well, you're absolutely right. But it's downright neighborly of them not to. Otherwise, you know, Pabst is $2, crafts are $4 and wine is an improbably cheap $4. Combine any of those with 6 wings for 6 bucks and you're probably ready for the Timbers game to start in the side room. But my favorite item on the menu is a rotation of house pickles for $3. Because pickles. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Conquistador

2045 SE Belmont St., 503-232-3227. 4-7 pm daily.

[VELVETERIA] Conquistador has the best bar nachos in the city of Portland. There are quirkier renditions, bigger ones and cheaper ones. But for the money, and for your taste buds—with five different salsas to choose, Mexican white cheese on top and fresh, warm chips as a base for an ungodly array of non-meat toppings—your heaven is here, in a bar devoted to free jukeboxes, smoking on the patio and ironic appreciations of velvet Spaniards. At happy hour, you can get poquito nachos that are still grande for a mere $6.50, along with drinks so cheap it'll break your heart: $2 Pabst, $3 craft beers, $5 cava and $3.25 well cocktails—not to mention $6 margaritas. Play shuffleboard or pool while you wait. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: $6.50 happy-hour nachos will feed you and a friend.

Dots Cafe

2521 SE Clinton St., 503-235-0203, dotscafeportland.com. 2-7 pm and 11 pm-1 am Monday-Friday.

[DINER BURLESQUE] If aliens, Elvis and Marie Antoinette opened a diner, it might look like Dots. The walls are lined with black-and-white damask wallpaper, oil paintings of Elizabethan royalty, screenshots of Spock, and Warhol prints. The happy-hour menu is just about as nuts. A cool $4 will get you a nacho plate big enough for two with guac and pico or a Thai chicken skewer. A buck more will get you a plate of wings, apparently a house specialty. ENID SPITZ.

Best deal: $3.50 wells, $3.50 select craft brews, $4 nachos.

Dragonwell

735 SW 1st Ave., 503-224-0800, dragonwellbistro.com. 3-6 pm Monday-Friday, 9-10 pm Friday-Saturday.

[GRUB HUB] If you've just come from a walk along the waterfront or found yourself trapped in the Bermuda-shorted hell of Pioneer Place mall, you may need a snack or refreshment to bolster your spirits. The pan-Asian bistro Dragonwell will probably seem a ghost town in the wan hours of the late afternoon, but the place offers one of the most extensive happy-hour food menus in town. At $2, $4 and $6 price points, you can find a multitude of options that range from Asian water chestnut and crunchy rice salad to barbecue pork to fried eggplant in gon-bon sauce. Drinks are slightly more expensive, with a 12-ounce bottle of Tsingtao coming in at $4 and house sake at $5, but you only have to order one to qualify for happy-hour food prices. ZACH MIDDLETON.

Best deal: A $3.50 Sapporo draft and an order of the garlic spiced chicken wings work just fine.

The Fixin' To

8218 N Lombard St., 503-477-4995, thefixinto.com. 2-6 pm Monday-Friday.

[DEEP SOUTH AND LOWDOWN] The Fixin' To is everyone's dream of a Southern dive bar on its best day. The clientele is lively and artfully disheveled, but not actively racist or mean. The one restroom is covered in scurrilous graffiti, but with no urine pooling in the corners. And instead of a wall of video poker, there's a gigantic Nintendo Game Boy that breaks the hearts of all comers with its intermittent functionality. At night, there's music, and during the afternoon it's cheap as hell—$1 Old German and $3 crafts and wells, which is to say that before 6 pm this is one of the cheapest bars in town, period. ADRIENNE SO.

Best deal: The Down and Out—Hamm's and a shot of Old Crow—is $4. A large Rotel and chips, like a nacho you dip yourself, is $5.

Florida Room

435 N Killingsworth St., 503-287-5658. 3-7 pm daily.

[BLOODY ON THE PATIO] Every neighborhood has something like the Florida Room—the kind of place that makes bad decisions feel inevitable. What began as a $3 happy-hour corn dog and some fart-themed tattoos—or a $4 pair of beef sliders just as dirty as both together—may end in a long night of dollar Olympias, which is not a happy-hour deal at all. It's just what they cost.

Best deal: All is cheap, and at happy hour it's 50 cents cheaper. Plus, you know, $3 corn dogs and fries.

Imperial

410 SW Broadway, 503-228-7222, imperialpdx.com. 2-6 pm Monday-Friday, 3-6 pm Saturday-Sunday; late night 10-11 pm Sunday-Thursday, 11 pm-midnight Friday-Saturday.

[NOT CHOPPED LIVER] Imperial, our 2015 Restaurant of the Year, has lost chef Doug Adams, but still offers a burger with sweet pickles and dill mayo that costs only $6 and ranks among the best in the city. The $4 chicken liver pâté made in the mode of Paley's legend Stan Luoma melts into unctuous abandon—truly one of the greatest luxuries you could ever get in the city of Portland under $5. The happy hour rotates a bit—specials come on, specials come off—but recently, there was $8 fried chicken. The best deal, however, is also the most consistent: the $5 price on an excellent draft Vieux Carré. It's all liquor—and alllll goooood. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Related: Imperial Is Our 2015 Restaurant of the Year

Best deal: $5 Vieux Carré. And then another one. And the $4 liver pâté.

Kelly's Olympian

426 SW Washington St., 503-228-3669, kellysolympian.com. 4-7 pm daily, 11 pm-1 am Sunday-Thursday.

[QUICK AND DIRTY] Nothing at Kelly's Olympian is quite what you'd expect it to be. The over-100-year-old bar has plumbing downstairs that seems to suggest patrons once relived themselves by pissing into a trough directly under the bar—which is, we suppose, no weirder than the fact that the owner currently parks his motorcycles on the ceiling. Meanwhile, alongside dollar-off wells and drafts, the happy-hour menu almost exclusively has food you'd find in a Trader Joe's freezer—and for the same prices. But it's all made from scratch. So the $5 happy-hour mac-and-cheese balls are smothered in a house four-cheese blend, breaded with a house mix of panko and Cheetos dust, and dipped in bespoke ranch sauce. The $4 tots come with house fry sauce, and the $4 quesadillas come with housemade salsa. Kelly's devotion to the quick and dirty is almost heartening. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: Just get the mac-and-cheese balls. They're $5.

Little Bird

215 SW 6th Ave., 503-688-5952, littlebirdbistro.com. 2:30-5 pm (6 pm at the bar) Monday-Friday, 10 pm-close daily, all day Sunday.

[BIG BURGER] Little Bird—the downtown sister of Portland's finest restaurant, Le Pigeon—has a happy hour that seems like pure wish-fulfillment fantasy: a Sex in the City apartment no real person could afford. In this alternate universe, it costs only $5 for a double-pattied burger smothered in melted brie that's a bit like what a Michelin-starred French chef would make if he'd seen Wendy's double stack only in photographs. Beautiful, sumptuous sea cow or Fanny Bay oysters are not $2. They are instead $1.75. World-class liver mousse clocks into your mouth at a mere $4. Stirred house cocktails well worth their price at $11 are now suddenly $8. And if you want to splurge, the city's wackiest—and yet still luxuriant—charcuterie plate, all pig-ear terrine and trout-topped deviled egg, is $5 off, at $20. And it happens every single night after 10 pm and all day Sunday. It is…heaven. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: Don't tell, but that $5 burger is actually a $14 burger in disguise.

Luc Lac

835 SW 2nd Ave., 503-222-0047, luclackitchen.com. 4-7pm daily.

[VIETNAMESE TAPAS] It isn't uncommon to see a line of eager customers waiting outside of Luc Lac's tiny downtown storefront at 5 minutes to 4 on weekend afternoons. Staffed by impeccably hip 20-somethings and decorated with parasols hanging from the ceiling, this counter-service Vietnamese eatery has one of downtown's most generous non-burger-themed happy hours. The menu is stocked with more than a dozen $2 plates, tasty snacks from pork- and shrimp-stuffed salad rolls to cream cheese wontons and backed up with a small selection of $3 salads. Luc Lac sports a deep tap list, including Pfriem Wit, Germany's Kostritzer Scharzbier and Belgium's Brasserie Dupont Farmhouse, all $4, with house wines for the same price and a rotating cocktail at $6. You can fill up for about $6, but if you're hungry, don't be afraid to order more from the bar. WALKER MACMURDO.

Best deal: The cream cheese wontons, shrimp spring and crispy rolls, and a chicken salad is a four-course dinner for $9, and a $4 Kostritzer Schwarzbier is a rare treat.

M Bar

417 NW 21st Ave., 503-228-6614, facebook.com/mbar.portland. 6-8 pm daily.

[CHEAPEST GOOD WINE] This glamorous matte-red broom cupboard of a wine bar is tiny, sultry and unparalleled as an intimate date spot on 21st Avenue. But it's not for firsts. Even whispers boom in the one-room, candle-lit bar, where the bartender makes friends with everyone, from 40-something neighbors sipping pinot noir to bar backs seeking refuge from 21st's bro bars. It is, however, a perhaps unparalleled date spot for another reason. The happy hour runs till 8 pm—late enough you won't seem cheap for suggesting 7 pm as a meeting time—and in addition to $4 well-chosen draft beers, you get $3 off glass pours of wine, leading to outright ridiculous deals on the lower-priced pours. Take credit for splurging on three rounds of a well-rounded red that actually only costs $4. Baller on the cheap. ENID SPITZ.

Best deal: It's possible to get a decent, well-selected glass of wine for $3 at happy hour. That can be said of…nowhere else.

Maui's

3508 N Williams Ave., 503-282-1611. 4-7 pm daily.

[PRE-POSTGENTRIFICATION PRICING] In April, the Maui's patio burned down. But luckily for Portland sports fans, it wasn't out of commission for long. In the space of two weeks, the staff made a heroic effort and cleaned the place up and rebuilt the patio and now the cheapest bar south of St. Johns is back to servicing patio smokers with $1.25 happy-hour Pabst, $2.50 well drinks and $3 craft beers. It is a funny world in which the city's most notorious gentrified street has this one little outpost of cheapness left over for the first-wave bohemian gentrifiers now getting pushed out by the real deal.

Best deal: The $2.50 wells are, uh, worth it.

Mi Mero Mole

32 NW 5th Ave., 971-266-8575; mmmtacospdx.com. 2-6 pm Monday-Saturday.

[MARGARITA AND MOLE] First, the disclosure: Triple-M boss man Nick Zukin is a sometime contributor to WW, and someone we reach out to for intel on other spots in this guide. Zuke's own place is dedicated to his passion for Mexican street food, particularly the stewy taco fillings known as guisados. But he obviously also has a soft spot for the day drinker—because the Chinatown location offers day deals that best almost any in the entire city, not only $2.50 beers and $4 margaritas (!), but nachos that drop to $5 and three-deep huitlacoche flautas for a mere $4. That's not even counting the daily deals like all-you-can-eat taco Tuesdays for $14.75, or the all-day, everyday deal of a burrito, beer and shot for $10.

Best deal: Seriously, a $4 margarita with $5 nachos is gringo paradise. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Momo

725 SW 10th Ave., 503-478-9600. 3-8 pm daily.

[SECRET GARDEN] Momo is one of the best hangouts in a neighborhood otherwise swamped with high-end restaurants and cocktail offerings, the only place nearby for 45 minutes' worth of cheap daily unwinding at the end of a long shift at a hard job—and your job can go late or early and it's cool, because happy hour is a whopping five hours long and doesn't end till 8 pm. Here, cheap crafts sit beside jug-sized glasses of wine at some of the best rates on the westside as long as you dodge Bulleit on the rocks in favor of a beautifully toxic, probably flammable $3 well whiskey ginger. But aside from easy and cheap intoxication, the real draw to Momo—especially in daylight—is that it sports one of the city's best hidden patios: a roughly 50-seat enclave preciously guarded by the towering pitted brick and peeling white walls of surrounding businesses. WALKER MACMURDO.

Best deal: $3 wells! Beer is for chumps.

My Father's Place

523 SE Grand Ave., 503-235-5494, myfathersplacepdx.com. 4-6 pm and 10 pm-midnight Monday-Friday, breakfast special 6-10 am.

[THE REAL CHEAPNESS] Although the Central Eastside Industrial District's dive bar of record welcomes a wide swath of well-wishers throughout the day, first call attracts an especially diverse scrum for unofficial sunrise service, split evenly between retirees seeking eye-openers and drinkers still awake from the night before—all can get a $5.75 special with two eggs, bacon, sausage and toast. Drinks are always cheap, but in the afternoon you can eat for nothing: Among a dirt-cheap menu, there are $2 pulled-pork sliders and chicken sliders and fries that will help buoy you through a long afternoon of $1.50 Pabst and $3 wells and craft drafts. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: A stiff gin and tonic and a $2 pulled-pork slider with fries. Only $5 poorer, and the day already feels much different.

NEPO 42

5403 NE 42nd Ave., 503-288-8080, nepo42.com. 3-6 pm daily.

[COMFORT 'HOOD] For years, the signboard hovering atop NEPO 42's sprawling front patio has quoted Oscar Wilde's old adage "Work Is the Curse of the Drinking Class," and its clientele does tend to keep office hours. Around 5, a steady stream of aspirational-normcore regulars begins filling the well-lit, dark-wood pub nouveau interiors to drink select $4 pints from among 20 craft taps or gobble zippy, hearty wings ($5, two for a buck during Blazers games last season). Meanwhile, curious patrons less eager to brave bustling, eerily family-friendly crowds could arrive one hour earlier to find a blissfully vacant bar in which to throw back a stiff whiskey and ginger ($4), nurse a supple Champagne cocktail ($5), or tuck into rather more indulgent fare. Though NEPO recently shelved its battered bacon appetizer, cholesterol-loading patrons need only seek out the masterful fried chicken—golden-brown chunks of crisped succulence either layered atop a waffle ($7) or hidden within the bacon-, spinach- and pepper-laden mac and cheese ($9). JAY HORTON.

Best deal: The $6 Evinrude Special (Evan Williams Green Label and Old German tallboy), plus the $6 OG Dog (a ginormous frankfurter wrapped in a sturdy potato bun and slathered with jalapeño relish, homemade sauerkraut, and a house mustard itself steamed with Old German). Area dives may offer their own variations for one-third the price, but Wilde had another quip about cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Night Light Lounge

2100 SE Clinton St., 731-6500, nightlightlounge.net/home. 2-7 pm Monday-Friday, 3-7 pm Saturday-Sunday, 11 pm-1 am daily.

[NACHO TOWER] The place famous for (briefly) hanging a painting depicting Adolf Hitler wearing a "Make America Great Again" baseball cap is also one of Southeast's best late-night happy-hour spots—although on a late Tuesday, the only other customer might be a man in a cowboy hat spewing a monologue to the bartender about how jazz saved his life even as a "white boy." But PBR is $1.50 a pint, french fries are a mere $2, and $6 salads and nachos are enough to feed a table of three. And even though Hitler is gone, the bar did sport a painting of a cute cat licking itself—a biological act turned erotic with the artist's decision to blur the kitty's private area. SOPHIA JUNE.

Best deal: The $6 nachos, which look about a full foot high and are layered hot with guacamole, jalapeños, green and red onion, pico de gallo, sour cream and black olives. Wash it all down with a $1.50 pint of PBR.

North Bar

5008 SE Division St., 503-546-9973, northbarpdx.com. 3-7 pm daily.

[BAR BITES] North is where you end up when you venture east enough on Division Street to pass all the bougie taco spots. The bar is a no-nonsense, Goodwill-art-decorated, Cascadia-flag-waving neighborhood watering hole. Happy hour is just as no-nonsense, with several food items for $2: quesadilla consisting entirely of cheddar in tortilla triangles, basic hummus and pita, chips and salsa, green salad, and bare-bones nachos with melted cheese and salsa. Drafts and well drinks are $1 off—and PBR is a cool $1.50. SOPHIA JUNE.

Best deal: $1 PBR all day Tuesday, and $5 margaritas every day at happy hour from the bar's slushie machine.

Paymaster Lounge

1020 NW 17th Ave., 503-943-2780, paymasterlounge.com. 2-6 pm daily.

[PATIO POOL PARTY] If you're in Northwest Portland sucking down $1.50 happy-hour Hamm's and downing $5 nachos under an anatomically suspect drawing of a cat's penis—well, you're here, at a bar named after a check-cashing spot that also happens to be home to the best patio in Northwest Portland. Hell, that pool-tabled patio is so good that even a drunkenly driven car tried to park on it once. For four hours each day in this labyrinthine bar—complete with a small front patio to mirror the huge one in back, a weird-balls vending machine and an even weirder TV room—$7 nets not only a burger but the french fries that rightly go with it, and Sauza tequila costs just a dollar more than a $3 well-vodka soda. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: $7 burger and fries, $4 Sauza.

Rae's Lakeview Lounge

1900 NW 27th Ave., 503-719-6494, raesportland.com. 2-6 pm daily.

[DAY DRUNK] Oh, Rae's, you are so strange—a patio with a view of a now-fictional lake, a Montgomery Park after-work rec room, a day-drinker's haven that looks a little like an airport lounge. Everything is cheap, but what is cheap is always unexpected. Rillettes for $4? A croque monsieur for $6? A $7 mini-Bourguignon that is essentially a Frenchified pot pie? They are not high-class despite European pedigree, but they'll hit the spot after celebrating with High Life's Champagne for a mere $1 or a dizzyingly cheap $9 half carafe of wine that's $3 by the glass. Although…the real stomach-filler for the day-drunk is the huge $3 doughy biscuits and gravy. Too late for happy hour? No problem. Rainier pints are $1 after 9 pm. Too early for happy hour? No problem. Mimosas are $1 at brunch. Or you can just get a 61-ounce rum-and-gin "Thunder Bowl" for $24 anytime. Oh, God—you're never leaving. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: $1 High Life, $1 Rainier, $1 mimosa, $3 biscuits.

Renner's Grill

7819 SW Capitol Highway, 503-246-9097, rennersgrill.com. Noon-1 pm power hour, 3-6 pm, midnight-2:30 am daily.

[TAKE THE BUS] This hole in the wall on Capitol Highway—which recently bought and cleverly renamed the Hawthorne Hideaway as Renner's Hawthorne Hideaway—has been serving drinks and pub food in the village for over 70 years, and you can feel every one of them. You'll see old men telling stories of going to Renner's in the '60s, rambunctious dudes in cowboy hats swapping jokes, and 20-somethings coming in for a Rainier at the only genuine watering hole in the neighborhood. You're surprised they're still alive—given the volume the pricing encourages. Well cocktails are $1 Tuesdays, cheap domestic drafts $1 on Monday. Every damn day you're alive, both early and late, wells are a mere $2.75—and those same wells are $2.25 at "power hour." MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: The bartender we talked to swears by the $6 triple-drumstick deal. We mostly just swear after drinking too much.

Scandals

1125 SW Stark St., 503-227-5887, scandalspdx.com. 4-8 pm daily and all day Sundays.

[CHEERS ON THE CHEAP] Scandals touts itself as "Gay Cheers," and it more than lives up to it, full of yearslong regulars and yet immediately welcoming to the redheaded stranger wandering through. It feels like the friendliest place in town, from its always-packed landing strip of a patio, to a bar lined with flirtatious singletons, to its tiny, Timbers-watching TV corner tucked away to one side. And with $1.50 PBR and $3 wells, the happy hour drinks are the cheapest within any reasonable radius of the bar. On Fridays and Saturdays, meanwhile, your well vodka will magically transform for the same price into one of the bar's stunning rainbow of Absoluts. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: $1.50 Pabst is cheap anywhere.

Slingshot Lounge

5532 SE Center St., 503-445-6649. 3-7 pm Monday-Friday.

[HAIL THE CAESAR] The corner of Southeast 56th Avenue and Foster Road consists mainly of the Gun Room and a waft of pot from Foster Buds. But in the shadow of an "Anyone Can Get Addicted to Pain Pills" billboard lies happy-hour oasis Slingshot Lounge, a true neighborhood watering hole with surprisingly good, cheap food. There's not even a spot at the bar to sit in the low-lit room near the end of happy hour, which offers seven $3-to-$5 snacks, including a $4 Caesar salad piled high with Parmesan cheese and crunchy homemade croutons, and a $3 basket of fries big enough for three. Drafts and wells are a buck off at $4 and $3, respectively—and the wells are stiff. SOPHIA JUNE.

Best deal: $1 pint of Olympia and $3 for so many fries.

Spare Room

830 NE 42nd Ave., 503-287-5800, spareroomrestaurantandlounge.com. 3-6 pm daily.

[MOM'S MEATLOAF] A sprawling dive that serves as Cully's unofficial community center, this former bowling alley hosts a range of entertainment, from string-band square dances to Kill Rock Stars showcases to bingo nights for the senior set to the funk stylings of Cool Breeze or Prince tribute band Erotic City. A bar for all time and seasons, it weathers afternoons particularly well, when well drinks and Budweiser both drop to $2.25 and Pabst sinks to a low, low $1.25. But then, this is also a bar where $3 Beam and Cokes happen all day every day, $5 nets you pancakes and bacon in the morning before 11 am. That same $5 will get you a burger and fries at lunch, a spaghetti dinner on Monday or a meatloaf dinner on Tuesday. JAY HORTON.

Best deal: Come on Tuesday at 5 pm, and get meatloaf and a PBR for $6.25 total.

Star Bar

639 SE Morrison St., 503-232-5553, star-bar-rocks.com. 4-8 pm daily.

[TOT'CHO CITY] An urban sanctuary composed of hair metal and cheap happy-hour sliders, Star Bar seems explicitly designed to piss off people who don't like to mix their whiskey with Whitesnake—right down to the deadpan homage to Big Star's #1 Record with which it shamelessly brands its windows. At happy hour, beneath velvet paintings of panthers, you can imbibe the mighty tater-tot variant of nacho—the tot'cho—for a mere $4. A hamburger stuffed with blue cheese will enter your body for $6. And craft beer—often very good craft beer—is a mere $3.50. Wine is $5, but if you're drinking wine here you're wrong in multiple ways we shouldn't need to point out. JAMES HELMSWORTH.

Best deal: Tot'chos and a pint of Pabst, together at last for a mere $6.

Swift Lounge

1932 NE Broadway, 503-288-3333, swiftloungepdx.com. 4-8 pm Monday-Saturday, 4 pm-2 am Sunday.

[MASONIC BAR] Calling Swift Lounge the coolest hangout on Broadway is like proclaiming Stanford's the finest dining in all of Lloyd Center, but the place really is a quintessential den of Portlandia-style hipsterism. Drinks are served in Mason jars, the bacon is cured in-house, and the DJs spin '90s hip-hop. Good luck snaring an open table on Saturday night. Once the crowds for the Hungover Brunch clear out, though, Sunday afternoons are typically chill enough to grab a seat on the sidewalk by the time the "Jolly Hour" kicks in, with a slate of satisfying $5 sliders, pint glasses of sangria for $3 and plates of honey-dipped crispy chicken for $4. Pay in cash and get change for the NBA Jam machine by the restroom. MATTHEW SINGER.

Best deal: The Old Couple, a tallboy of Old German with a shot of Old Crow for $4.

Tapalaya

28 NE 28th Ave., 503-232-6652, tapalaya.com. 4-6 pm daily.

[WING THING] Tapalaya is a not a Cajun restaurant per se—it's a New Orleans restaurant, and here that means a hefty dose of Vietnamese from its first-generation Vietnamese Big Easy chef, Anh Luu. Which is a roundabout way of saying get the $6 fish sauce wings at happy hour, because they're great: spicy, crispy, sweet and large. They pair just fine with a $3 martini or a $5 gris-gris margarita, which—as it turns out—is a fine idea. Other Vietnamese-inflected dishes include a decent-enough $5 lemongrass steak skewer and the best $5 banh mi within a square mile of the restaurant. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Best deal: $6 wings, $3 martinis.

Yamhill Pub

223 SW Yamhill St., 503-295-6613. 10 am-4 pm, 4-7 pm Monday-Friday.

[CHEAP THREE WAYS] Yamhill Pub, one of the last true dirt-cheap bastions of the blue-collar working class in downtown Portland, has more art on its walls than any gallery in the Pearl—mostly drawn in Sharpie, with layers deep and stratified as any freeway road cut. The happy-hour deals are equally stratified—if you want to spice up the life of a day drinker, all you gotta do is swap the deals around. From 10 am to 4 pm weekdays, people who plan to make a day of it can get a buck off wells and pitchers—pitchers of Pabst drop to a just $6. But when 4 pm rolls around, the bar switches gears for the knock-em-back beer-and-shot crowd. Well whiskey drops to a mere $1.50, and you can get a full pint of Pabst for the same price. Or show up on Saturday, when Bud and Coors cost $3 from noon to midnight.

Best deal: A pint of Pabst and a quaff of cheap whiskey for $3 total.

Willamette Week