• HOURS: 5-7 p.m. Sundays-Thursdays
• PRICES: Food specials $3-$5, specialty house cocktails $6, select wine $5, draft beer $3.

All of Spur’s specialty cocktails are $6 during happy hour, and this is why you came. They are, in a word, wonderful: balanced, delicately flavored, utterly drinkable, beautiful to behold.

At the risk of overselling these beverages, let me say this: If the drinks at your neighborhood dive bar are a drunk girl bumping and grinding on the dance floor, then Spur’s drinks are a prima ballerina performing delicate pirouettes atop a castle made of spun sugar. Truly they are something. And at $6 during happy hour, they’re a real bargain. La Rocio (tequila, red wine, stone fruit) is like a high-end romp through old town Mexico City, the tequila dangerous and sandy on the finish. The Broken Spur #2 (Maker’s Mark, Cointreau, lemon, and amaretto) is an object lesson in showing a little restraint with the citrus. But my favorite cocktail at Spur may be the Plum Dandy: Clear Creek blue plum brandy (from the distillery in Portland), pineapple, bitters, and sparkling wine. It’s the taste of celebration itself.

The HH food menu changes daily, with three or so fresh dishes listed on a chalkboard on the back wall. There is real talent in the Spur kitchen, that is not to be denied. But that doesn’t always mean perfect results. On one visit, the bar had run out of one dish by 6pm, so that the HH food selections were limited to poached Spanish mackerel with tomatoes, capers, and arugula ($6) and a dish of plums. We ordered the mackerel, which was tiny but delicious, and then, feeling out of options, we moved to the regular food menu for tagliatelle with oyster mushroom, Parmesan, and duck egg ($14), and pork belly sliders ($12). The tagliatelle dish is a winning combination of flavors, to be sure, but the pasta was distractingly gummy. And I’ve seen pictures of those sliders—pictures showing fat cubes of pork belly sticking lusciously out from the bun, but what arrived at our table contained about half the amount of belly you see in the photo above. Always very well-conceived, the food is sometimes great, sometimes not. But the cocktails, well, the cocktails are pretty much out of sight.

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Find more happy hours here and get to know David Nelson, the man behind the cocktails at Spur and Tavern Law.