Best Kept Seattle Secrets: Happy Hours 

If there’s one thing every Seattleite loves, it's a great happy hour. Value paired with friends and yummy food; there’s nothing better to end the workday. Capitol Cider has not one but three happy hours. Every Monday through Thursday from 4 to 6 p.m. you can enjoy five inspired dishes each week for just $5, well drinks for $4, a canned cider offering for $3, counterfeit (non-alcoholic) cocktails for $2 and $1 off all drafts. Night owls can grab late-night deals from 10 p.m. to midnight during our late night happy hour. On Fridays, a special #BivalvesandBooze happy hour showcases a different oyster variety from the Puget Sound for just 2 bucks; the deal starts at 4 p.m. and goes until they run out. The oysters are paired with the craft cider cocktail, the Cider 75, which features Seaside Pippin Cider, gin and lemon. 

Capitol Cider’s robust happy hours are the brainchild of Executive Chef Erik Jackson, who is passionate about locally sourced food. Jackson takes pride in supporting local farmers growing different or unusual produce. His menus reflect the seasonality of the PNW region. 

How do seasonal ingredients play into the weekly happy hour? Every week, our guests can look forward to a completely new and inspired happy hour menu. This week we had apriums, a hybrid of apricot and plum from Collins Family Farms. We built an entire dish around the fruit, putting it raw in a salad, pureeing part of it for a vinaigrette, and even using the inside of the seed to add a vanilla note. Having farm-fresh produce in the restaurant gives me the opportunity to explore different dishes and styles.

What was your inspiration behind the happy hour program?  Initially, it was an idea to keep the creative juices in the kitchen flowing and offer our diners something fun, while making use of product that would otherwise go to waste. I’ve been here for two years and I rarely create the same dish twice. We try to create openness in diners. You have to get them to trust you as a chef so that no matter what you put on the menu, they know it’s going to be good. In the end, I want the dish to be fresh and exciting so people come back week after week. We try to use all the food that these farmers have worked hard to produce and grow. We don’t want to take any of it for granted. 

What do you look for in a "good" happy hour? When I create a happy hour menu, I try to achieve a mix of textures and flavors, hitting on fried, fresh, meaty, and sweet to cover all the bases. Our biggest happy hour hits have included the grilled BLT (which we added to the dinner menu when we dropped our spring updates), the broccoli stem tempura with red curry aioli, that leans towards east Asian flavors and methods, baked oysters that piggyback on the Bivalves and Booze happy hour, and we always sell a ton of the grilled steak with chimichurri dishes that feature various herbs and heirloom chilies. We’ll often throw a sweet item on the menu like a crème brûlée, a fruit tart, or a fun fried snack that we wouldn’t normally be able to offer because of the volume we do. 

Recently, I featured coconut arepa cakes with local strawberries and chocolate mint; they were a great sweet twist on something that’s traditionally savory. One week we used broccoli to create broccoli stalk hushpuppies with a fermented garlic vinaigrette. The dish really took off and ended up on our main menu.

How does value come into play? At $5 a plate, some weeks I feel like I’m giving the house away with our specials. But it’s great because we can take tomatoes that are a little soft and use them in a way that makes them shine by hard roasting them and turning that around into a tomato sauce or a salsa. Using product that would otherwise go to waste creates value for the restaurant and allows us to keep our footprint small. 

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