Sauced

Happy Hour of the Week: Vito’s

Forget your workaday worries and settle in with a strong drink at this sexy-seedy First Hill Lounge.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jan 19, 2011 at 09:43AM 1 Comments

Vito’s takes you back, which turns out to be exactly where you want to go.

Photo: Vito’s

• HOURS: Daily 4-7pm
• PRICES: $3 well drinks, beers, and select wines. Half-off the lounge menu (regular prices $5-$12).

Last spring, Jeff Scott and Greg Lundgren bought Vito’s, a First Hill restaurant and bar that had opened nearly 60 years prior and was certainly showing its age. But rather than give it the My Fair Lady-treatment, Scott and Lundgren embraced the sexy-seedy Italian lounge—leaving the lights low and the candles lit, maintaining the assertively outdated deep-red-and-black color scheme, and introducing a list of specialty cocktails that looks a lot like that at The Hideout, their perfect little art-themed bar up the road. No need to think too hard on these drinks or invoke adjectives like “craft” and “preprohibition.” They are expert and tasty, and brought to you promptly and politely. So pick the one that sounds best, my weary friend, then fahgetaboutit.

Happy hour at Vito’s happens every day from 4 to 7pm and includes, among its enticements, half price on the lounge menu. That menu tops out at about $12 in any case, so HH offers quite the dinner deal. I won’t lie to you and pretend this food will change your life, but ask yourself: Does it need to? Here you are, lounging in a loungy booth, relaxing with a mellow mixture of rye whiskey, punt e mes (vermouth), and Maraschino, and maybe some bean-and-anchovy dip or gooey garlic bread or a simple Roman bean ragu.

Maybe you’re biding time until someone shows up to put that piano to work. Maybe you’re here to forget the eight hours of coding you did today, or the poor production assistant you had to can due to budget cuts. Maybe you’re trying to soften the sharp edges around a recent breakup or maybe today is that day in winter (happens every year) when you’re ready to admit the rain has won. It doesn’t really matter. Because Vito’s is going to work its way under your skin until you’re convinced you’ve traveled back to a time—maybe not a simpler time, but certainly a different time—when a cocktail was just a cocktail and no one troubled themselves about the farm where the cannellinis were grown and whether or not it used pesticides.

And sometimes, at the end of a hard day in Techietown, that’s exactly the time you need.

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Tags: Cocktails, First Hill, Italian Food, Happy Hour of the Week

Cafe Lago and Its $4 Happy Hour Menu

Beer, wine, gnocchi alla bava: these things cost $4.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Sep 16, 2010 at 05:43AM 0 Comments

Cafe Lago does happy hour all through October.
Photo: Carla Leonardi

Have you noticed that Italian food is everywhere these days? Americans always love our Italian but it’s definitely having a moment. So we should all be primed for Cafe Lago’s “quattro menu,” a special HH menu that celebrates the restaurant’s 20th anniversary.

Now through October at the Montlake cafe, some things cost four dollars, provided you order them between the hours of 5 to 7pm, Monday through Thursday. These things include house red and white wines, well drinks, and bottled beer. A platter of crostini, gnocchi alla bava (fontina oozes out of the gnocchi when it’s heated, gooing things up considerably), zucchini salad, and a little pizza are all $4. An espresso and biscotti are also $4.

Guess how much a half-size antipasto platter costs? Did you say $4? Wrong! I tricked you. It’s $8. But you get the picture. Fun chance to try a standard-setting Seattle Italian restaurant on the cheap.

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Tags: Happy Hour, Italian Food, Montlake, Special Menus

Happy Hour Spotlight: Panevino

Five-dollar spaghetti and $3 wine at a new pasta place on Broadway.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Aug 19, 2010 at 12:45PM 0 Comments

• HOURS: Daily 3 to 6pm; 9pm to close
• PRICES: $3 beers, wine by the glass, $5 martinis; Food specials between $3 and $5.

Admittedly, the menu at Panevino is a little scary. It’s huge, which is rarely a good sign. And when you read it closely you see that most dishes are just slight variations on other dishes—for instance, spaghetti tarantina is spaghetti pomodoro with a few mussels and calamari tossed on it and a little heat added to the sauce.

In total, there are seven tomato sauce-topped pastas. Yes, tomato sauce is fundamental to Italian cooking, but look at it. All appearances point to a menu conceived, in the grand tradition of the Olive Garden, with efficiency in mind.

But Panevino is taking care in the kitchen. I know that because I’ve tried its foundation dish, spaghetti pomodoro—pasta, tomato sauce, a little basil. It’s a dish where bad ingredients and sloppy technique are impossible to hide. And I liked it a lot. The pasta had that very slight crunch, and the tomato sauce walked the sweet/acid line perfectly, and just enough amount of oil was added so that it lubed up well to the spaghetti. To say a very obvious thing when describing good Italian food, it reminded me of eating spaghetti pomodoro in Italy. Only Panevino served me approximately four times the amount of pasta I would have received in the motherland.

Which is why, when I return, I’ll return for happy hour. The happy hour menu includes small plates of pasta (they’re still pretty big)—penne al pesto, fusilli with spicy Italian sausage and that ubiquitous tomato sauce—for $5. House wines are $3, bruschetta is $3…it’s a good situation. With lots of white subway tile behind a pretty bar and a dining room that opens out onto a streetside patio, Panevino also offers something we don’t see enough of on Broadway. That something is charm.

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Tags: Happy Hour, Capitol Hill, Broadway, Italian Food