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Driftwood Room
729 SW 15th Ave., 503-820-2076, hoteldeluxeportland.com. 4-6 pm and 9:30 pm-close daily.
[CHAMPAGNE DRIFT] The Driftwood Room is a windowless jewel box of luxe tippling that lures a cosmopolitan array of visiting guests, West Hills dowagers, and genteel bohemians sipping high-class $9 champagne cocktails and wine paired amiably with heaping user's choice french fries ($5) currently served up with aleppo peppers and sriracha mayo—or a big ol' plate of gooey four-cheese mac with bacon ($9). JAY HORTON.
Best deal: Fancy $5 french fries.
Irving Street Kitchen
701 NW 13th Ave., 343-9440, irvingstreetkitchen.com. 4:30-6 pm daily.
[FRIED OYSTERS] Irving Street Kitchen's Southern-influenced cuisine isn't cheap during dinner, so take advantage of happy hour when you can. Drinks—selected wine, a couple cocktails, and PBR with a whiskey back—are just $6 each, and some of the food offerings are smaller yet well-executed dishes off the regular menu. Peppercorn-sauced meatballs ($7) make for a hearty snack, or go a lighter route with chicken-fried oysters ($6), which come with tasty Herbsaint aioli. ROB FERNAS.
Best deal: $7 meatballs, $6 wine.
Punch Bowl Social
340 SW Morrison St., 503-334-0360, punchbowlsocial.com. 3-6 pm, 10 pm-close daily.
[CANADIAN COWBOY BOOTS] Home to seemingly every company holiday party in town, Punch Bowl Social is a shopping-mall smashup of bowling and shuffleboard and cocktails and karaoke and pingpong and video games and…a surprisingly serious devotion to scratch-made Southern comfort fare, enough so that it just brought on Canadian celebrity chef Hugh Acheson as a business partner. And so Canadians and Midwesterners should take heart that Acheson shares the Canadian quality of being very particular about poutine. The mammoth plate is a traditional wealth of gravy and curd that will feed three drunks handily. But if we're dousing carbs in fat, I'd still go for the bacon pimiento with pullman toast, which is like the mall version of cocaine. Standard drink specials are unremarkable, but the goofy ones serve you well. Go for a $6 daiquiri or a big ol' glass of $7 punch. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.
Best deal: That $8 poutine costs the same as the junior burger—but it feeds more people.
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 second-generation Vietnamese Big Easy chef, Anh Lu. 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.
Wooden Chicken Pub
12500 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-253-8893, woodenchickenpub.com. 4:30-6:30 pm daily.
['MERICA] It is possible that massive Parkrose party bar the Wooden Chicken has the cheapest Bud in town to go with its collection of Bud and Bud Lite tap handles—each brought in by customers from God knows where. But however that came about, pints of Bud at happy hour go for $2—Pabst prices—and pitchers are a cool $7.50. That's all the better to wash down a series of $3 food specials that seem impossible, from 10-piece fried mac and cheese to four wings to a duplex of cheeseburgers or pulled pork sliders. If it's Monday, it gets even harder to fathom: $3 for spaghetti with Italian sausage. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.
Best deal: $3 wings, $7.50 pitcher of America beer, previously known as Budweiser. God bless America.
Willamette Week