T-Rex Barbeque

Alright folks, be forewarned: today we have an extremely sensitive topic lined up. One that might have some of you running for the chicken exit (no pun intended). So brace yourself because today’s topic is oysters, those slippery, slimy, love-em-or-hate-em bivalves. And if you’re in the hate-em camp, then please read no further because we’re going to get graphic with it.

Belons, Bluepoints, Kumamotos, I love them all. And they’re even more loveable at one dollar a slurp. If you mosey on over to North Berkeley’s T-Rex Barbeque , Monday through Friday between the hours of 3pm and 6pm, you can slurp to your hearts content, dozen after delectable dozen.

The $1 happy hour oysters are the chef’s choice and although I’m no oyster connoisseur, I know that T-Rex always serves up incredibly fresh and wonderfully appointed half shells. The accompanying mignon sauce is thick with diced shallots and the chipotle sauce alongside just needs a few drops of the house-made Tabasco to liven it up.

For those of you who can stand to watch your happy hour partner gulp them down faster than they can shuck them, but don’t want to partake yourselves, there are a few other wonderful small plates available. T-Rex specializes in barbeque and they have quite a few samples on the happy hour menu including pork riblets with spicy cayenne sauce for $5, nachos with pulled pork and salsa for $6 and a smoked brisket banh mi, an interesting version of the classic Vietnamese sandwich.

Alas, the menu is decidedly unfriendly towards vegetarians but if you are a non-meat eater, you can certainly get your money’s worth in cocktails. During happy hour draft beer is $3, good ol’Pabst Blue Ribbon is a mere two bucks (gotta love it), and well cocktails are $5. Nothing like a shot of Herradura and a plump, briny oyster to take the edge off. Down the hatch!

Deets:
T-Rex Barbeque (Reviews & Map)
1300 Tenth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710
510.527.0099
Happy Hour: 3pm-6pm, Mon-Fri

Di Bartolo

So we moved to Oakland’s Grand Lake neighborhood a few months ago and were stoked to be walking distance from Grand Ave. Cheap deals galore: amazing lunch deals at Miss Saigon, free weekday popcorn at the Grand Lake Theater, all-you-can-eat fruit sampling at the Saturday Farmer’s Market, $4 well drinks at the Lucky Lounge (to be reviewed very soon), and no less than ten inexpensive nail salons on every block. Heaven for two bargain hunting cheapskates like us.

But then mom comes to town wanting to treat and we need someplace a little more upscale. Cheap noodle soup won't cut it. Enter Di Bartolo, the most elegant place in the hood. A couple years ago John DiBartolo, owner of Café Di Bartolo next door, decided to break away from coffee and bagels, and along came his chic Mediterranean inspired restaurant with a wood-fired oven and a red-curtained private happy hour nook in the back.

And happy it is. From 4-7 the drinks flow smoothly with $3 draft beers, $4 well drinks, and wonderfully crafted $5 martinis. The well vodka is Fris (praised elsewhere on this blog) and the bartenders are highly skilled in shaking up just the right ratios. Nestled in the back you feel like you’re at a private party exclusively separate from the hoi polloi dining out front.

If you can get here early, then come for the drinks but stay for the food. The kitchen offers up a few half-priced happy hour nibbles from 4-5:30pm. There’s a feta salad with stone fruit that is truly delightful. The garlic fries are addictive and loaded with bits of garlic. The specialty of the house is the pizza and there are a few on the happy hour list including the pancetta and egg concotion (I’ll take my eggs with coffee and toast, thank you very much). The pizzas are a bit more that five bucks but with cocktails this cheap, you can afford to splurge a bit.

And speaking of splurging, their specialty cocktail list reads like poetry. They use ingredients like rosemary, cucumber-mint, and figs to create some pretty outrageous refreshments. They don’t come cheap, but damn they’re gorgeous.

Deets:
Di Bartolo (Reviews & Map)
3306 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94610
510.451.0576
Happy Hour: 4pm-5:30pm (food), 4pm-7pm (drinks), Tues-Sun

Mariscos La Costa

La Costa is not a place for the shellfish-shy. Located in the heart of the Fruitvale District , home to Oakland’s largest Latino population, this taqueria is the wet dream of seafood. La Costa is a no-frills joint, somewhere between a taco truck and a fast food drive-through. You order from a menu painted on the wall above the front counter and the friendly guys at the window take it all down; within minutes your number is called in Spanish and you have a tray of mouthwatering mariscos in front of you.

Tostadas and seafood cocktails are the specialties of the house. The tostadas are topped with ceviche, fresh prawns, huge pieces of octopus, or any combination thereof. The seafood is crazy-fresh and the Cadillac version, with whole prawns and giant morsels of octopus tops out at $3.75. Criminally cheap in my book.

I haven’t yet tried the seafood cocktails but they look great and seem to be de rigueur for any order. They don’t resemble the shrimp cocktail most of us might be used to; these are more soup-like and are served in a giant plastic cup with grated cheese and all manner of seafood floating about in the gazpacho-like broth. A medium-sized cocktail will run you about $7.50 which is quite a deal considering the amount of goodies they cram into one cup.

Speaking of cocktails, there are none here. BYOT (tequila) if you have a hankering for the chile-suppressing power that only hard liquor can provide. Also, the dining is alfresco so carry a sweater if there’s a chill in the air. Better yet, bring that flask of heart-warming tequila!

Another perk: oysters are $1 each and they’re big & meaty. Again, not for the faint of heart when it comes to the fruits of the ocean. If you do decide to bring along some die-hard carnivores there are items on the menu to appease such as lengua and carne. But understand that these are mere distractions. At La Costa, seafood is the name of the game.

Deets:
Mariscos La Costa (Reviews & Map)
3625 International Blvd, Oakland, CA 94601
510.533.9566
Hours: 9am-7pm Daily

Downtown Restaurant & Bar

The entrees at Downtown Restaurant & Bar are in the double digits, which usually doesn’t freak me out that much except when the portions are appetizer-size. Downtown just isn’t the kind of place where I’d order food because you get very little bang for your buck. The drinks, however, are another story altogether.

First of all, the décor is definitely worthy of double-digit prices, especially the beautiful oak bar which is my favorite place to sit. And the huge windows along the front wall let in tons of light and make for wonderful people-watching, especially on those blue-sky Berkeley days when everyone is doing their downtown business with an extra skip in their step.

I don’t know how we ended up here for a drink, but I think it was one of those nights when we decided we were going to “splash out, whatever it takes” (a favorite phrase which means we’re ready to lay down some dough). So, shaking nervously, we ordered two martinis without even asking the price first, and settled into some deep breathing exercises to calm us while we waited for our drinks.

The well vodka is an interesting brand that I’d never heard of and the bartender that night was friendly enough to bring us out the bottle to take a look. He was raving about the taste, and sure enough it was very tasty indeed. Fris Vodka (with one of those double-dot umlaut-thingies above the letter i) is a Danish brand that goes down real smooth.

It’s fun to sit at the bar and spy on the diners through the glass partition separating the bar from the dining room. I’d call the crowd “funky elite.” Most of them seem to be 60-something ex-hippies who have since entered the upper-middle class and aren’t afraid to flaunt it. In a funky-elegant way, that is. There’s a slight country club feel as people hob nob at different tables giving air kisses and promising to call each other. The narcissism of the Baby Boomers is alive and well in Berkeley.

If you ask real nicely, the bar staff will bring you a plate of superb sourdough bread with a ramekin of real French butter. Perfect accompaniment to an ice-cold martini with two of the plumpest olives I’ve ever tasted. They do have a few FiveBucksYouBet-worthy bar snacks on the menu, including house made potato chips for $3 and baguette with a choice of cheeses for $4. But glancing at the plates around me I wasn’t impressed.

So back to the drinks. We had a few rounds and then went back to our breathing exercises while waiting for the bill to arrive. “Splashing out, god damn it, whatever it takes,” I muttered, wincing as I glanced at the total. Surprise, surprise! Only five bucks each! Although Downtown doesn’t offer any after-work specials per se, I would definitely call time spent in their bar a very happy hour indeed.

Deets:
Downtown Restaurant & Bar (Reviews & Map)
2102 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA 94707
510.649.3810
Open Tues-Sun, with late night menu Tues-Sat

6 Degrees on Solano - Albany, CA

Thank the heavens that the good folks behind 6 Degrees transformed both the physical and spiritual essence of 1403 Solano Avenue. Before they took over, the place offered the kind of prix fix twilight specials that always included Clam Chowder and Baked Filet of Sole. And the clientele seemed to match the retirement home/cruise ship ambience.

I’m not going to say that the clientele is vastly improved, but the food and furnishings certainly have. 6 Degrees is the kind of place that looks extravagant but doesn’t have extravagant prices to match. The kind of place you can go with your parents, take care of the tab, look like a mensch, and not have to eat ramen the rest of the week.

Their current happy hour is very happy indeed, especially when it comes to bar food. The well cocktails are 2-for-1, which translates as $3.00 a drink. So as you take the last sip of your first drink, you have a prearranged freshie already coming down the pipes. They have the usual four or five standard M-drinks: mojitos, martinis, margaritas, manhattans, etc. House wine and beer are four bucks, and all other drinks are $1 off.

But the small plates are where the bargains really begin. Their bar food is priced from one to three dollars. In a world of ever-escalating inflation, it’s a source of joy to see that a buck can get you a lovely tomato-and-cheese Pizzetta, and that three dollars brings an even lovelier Mediterranean Spread plate with several multi-colored dips arranged around a roasted head of garlic.

Warning: come for the grub, not the crowd. But hell, it’s Albany, whad’ya expect? Just relax, sip on an icy cold one and share a plate of Pomme Frites (hell, at two bucks a pop, order a few plates) and then head down to Oakland to get your groove on.


Deets:
6 Degrees on Solano (Reviews & Map)
1403 Solano Ave, Albany, CA 94706
510.528.1237
Happy Hour: 5pm-7pm Daily; 9:30pm-11pm Fri & Sat

Kingman's Ivy Room - Albany, CA

When you take someone to the Ivy Room for the first time, the first thing out of their mouth is usually, “I can’t believe this is in Albany!” Because when you think of the word hip, the well-manicured, pasty-white town of Albany does not usually come to mind. The Ivy Room, however, is the epitome of hip. Velvet couches, gilded wallpaper, sparkling chandeliers. And furniture that is both high-tech and retro at the same time.

The Ivy Room used to be a total blue-collar dive bar, sporting the same dark and cavernous address since the 1940’s. The drinks were cheap and the live music was raunchy and loud. Then Mr. Kingman, of Oakland’s Lucky Lounge, took it over in 2006 and redid the interior, top to bottom. Swapped the live music for DJs (with bands still booked every now and then), dolled up the décor, and put in windows to lighten the place up.

The only thing that didn’t change was the drinks: as cheap as yesteryear. The happy hour here is nightly (gotta love it) and extends from 5pm to 8pm for the commuting cubicle-dwellers. But the best part is that all well drinks are $3.00… dirt cheap by any standards. And the pours are extremely friendly (their tequila shots are served in a double-fisted tumbler).

A usual night will have us chatting with the friendly bar-peeps about the latest electronica (the tunes here are always awesome) or Robert Downey Jr.’s newest flick or whether Hillary Clinton would order the Luck-Be-A-Lady or the Poison Ivy (two of the bar’s signature cocktails).

Tonight we asked for our tequila shots shaken with lime, a request that surely would have gotten us kicked out of most establishments. But the bartender here took it as a creative challenge, whipping us up a citrus-infused concoction unlike any margarita I’d ever had. Later on an 18-piece band was set to entertain, complete with electric harps and harmoniums.

And all this on a Monday night. In Albany.

Deets:
Kingman's Ivy Room (Reviews & Map)
860 San Pablo Avenue, Albany, CA 94706
510.526.5888
Happy Hour: 5pm-8pm Daily