About Happy Hours from its creators – “Happy Hours, the USA’s premier happy hour guide, shows all of the food and drink specials going on near you. Click through to see a photo of the bar or restaurant, and details such as the menu, location, amenities, and what other people have to say. Our happy hour ranks are based on the community, so don’t forget to vote up your favorite spots. Happy Hours is powered by GoTime.com and many of the nation’s top print and web publications including the Village Voice, LA Weekly and Phoenix New Times.”
Happy Hours is a great city based iPhone application to discover bars and restaurants that are having drink or food specials. They have different lists like “Most Liked” and “Editor Picks” in addition to the search results. Since the app is different for each city you have to choose a major metroplex and then you can filter down within those results. The Dallas Observer provides all the information for the Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex.
By default the app goes to your search results screen when first opened. There are different ways to filter your results, for example day & time, location, specials, cuisine, features, and buzz. Day and time defaults to the current time, but you can change it if you are looking for something in the future. The location option is to narrow your results down even further within the metroplex. You can select and deselect certain cities and neighborhoods to narrow down your location.
Specials only has two options, drink specials or food specials. In cuisine you can choose from a large list of different cuisines to narrow your food pallet. In features you can search for very specific features of a venue, for example dj, after hours, ATM, free wifi, valet, etc. The last sorting option is buzz. In buzz you can choose genres of places, for example cheap eats, date spot, good for groups, quiet, etc.
The best features of the app are the most popular and editor’s pick sections. These are great for discovering places that other people frequent. Most popular is basically the same list but sorted with the most popular at the top instead of by distance. Editor’s picks is a list of editor’s picks that are available for the time you have selected. You can also use the filters that I talked about before in both of these lists.
Overall Happy Hours is an amazing free app for finding happy hours near you. It is only available on the iPhone for now, but the Dallas Observer does a great job of keeping up with the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex.
