What's Your Favorite Happy Hour?

After Dark wants to know about your preferred spot for after-work drinks and deals.

My favorite happy hour is a matter of convenience. And gravy.

On many evenings, I head from the Pittsburgh Magazine offices to movie screenings, most of which take place at either the AMC Waterfront 22 or Waterworks Cinemas. Both of those theaters sit a stone’s throw from an outpost of the Burgatory chain.

Burgatory has an excellent happy hour. Their drafts are $5, across the board, as are their appetizers — many of which are more than big enough to count as an entree. My preference is the Fork It, the in-house take on poutine (hence the gravy), alongside a cold beer.

I leave the office, head for Burgatory, and sit over fries and suds until movie time rolls around. This is exactly what I want from happy hour: Time and space to unwind.

The vital part of the offer for me, though, is the food discount. There are a great many places I can find a decently priced draft; there are fewer where I can sit down with a dinner’s worth of food for $5. I wouldn’t be there nearly as frequently were it not for Fork It and its neighbor apps.

It has always confused me that so many happy-hour specials are solely for drink prices, with no corresponding food deal. I always thought the whole point of happy hour was to get people to stop in after work; I, for one, immediately want to eat as soon as work is over.

I’m open to other schools of thought, however — and I also want to find out about great happy hours I haven’t noticed. They’re kind of like diners and dive bars; everyone is convinced that theirs is the absolute best.

This After Dark, then, is less an opinion and more a call for submissions: What’s your favorite happy hour, and why?

You can email me at scollier@pittsburghmagazine.com, or reply to this article’s post on Facebook or Twitter. I’ll be collecting some of the recommendations in a future post.

I’ll also, in all likelihood, be trying a few of the favorites. So if they’re near a key movie theater, that’d be a big help.