The first thing to know about Dallas is the clock. 3 PM is the most common opening in the city's listings, ahead of 4 PM, which puts the first round an hour before most of the country pours one. With over 500 bars in the listings, the house price is $5 wells and drafts, listed at 87 separate addresses, and the floor sits well under it: $2.50 domestic bottles at Ships Lounge on Greenville Avenue, Lakewood Landing on Live Oak Street, King's X on Forest Lane and Reno's Chop Shop Saloon in Deep Ellum, all four on the same weekday 3-to-7 window.
Every bar, price and window on this page is quoted from a Happy Hour Map listing at a Dallas address. Deals change without notice, so confirm before you go.
Greenville Avenue carries more listed happy hours than any other street in Dallas — about 30 of them, from the Lower Greenville blocks in the 1400s up past Stan's Blue Note and its $3 domestic drafts at 2908. Deep Ellum is the tighter cluster, with roughly 30 more on the 2400-to-3700 blocks of Elm, Commerce and Main, Twilite Lounge and Adair's Saloon among them. Oak Cliff adds close to 30 across N Bishop Avenue, W Davis Street and W Jefferson Boulevard, and that is where the cheap Tex-Mex pricing concentrates. Uptown works McKinney Avenue and Cedar Springs Road, downtown fills in around Main, Commerce and Akard, and the Belt Line Road and Preston Road corridors up north hold about 40 between them — restaurant bars nearly all the way, where $6 wine and $8 signature cocktails outnumber cheap beer.
$5 wells and drafts is the single most repeated listing in Dallas, at 87 addresses. Each of these five either beats that price or attaches something to it.
$3 domestic drafts is the cheap end of the Dallas beer listings; a dollar off beer bundled into a $5 highball deal is the most common one. The beer specials that break out of that template:
Close to two-thirds of the city's margarita listings come in under $5, which makes the sub-$5 pour the baseline rather than the prize. These five step outside the $3.50 / $3.99 / $4.50 pattern that repeats across the Tex-Mex rooms:
Wine is the thinnest category in the Dallas data — 22 listed deals, against 129 for wells.
$8 signature cocktails is the second most repeated listing in the city, at 48 addresses. The five below sit outside that band:
Listings that name no drink category: food pricing, a Sunday bloody mary, and a few genuine one-offs.
Margaritas are where Dallas undercuts itself. 76 listed deals name margaritas or tequila and 49 of them price under $5, so $3.50 at Rafa's Cafe Mexicano on W Lovers Lane and El Tizoncito on Frankford Road, or $3.99 at Senor Bean on Olive Street, is the going rate rather than a find. Food is the other dependable line: Hudson House lists $1.50 oysters at its Lovers Lane, Abrams Road and Preston Road rooms, and Happiest Hour on Olive Street runs half-price appetizers. Saturday is the wrong day for any of it, though. Barely a tenth of the listings run on a weekend or every day, and only nine bars in the entire set open a second late window — Station 4 on Cedar Springs takes $3 well drinks from 9 PM, The Nines on Main pours $5 frozen drinks at the same hour, and Citizen on Fairmont Street runs $5 cocktails from 10 PM to 2 AM Friday through Sunday.
3 PM starts, $2.50 domestic bottles at the old neighborhood bars, sub-$5 margaritas in Oak Cliff and along Lovers Lane, the Greenville Avenue and Deep Ellum walks, and $1.50 oysters.
This article covers the highlights, but there are over 500 happy hour spots in Dallas total. Download Happy Hour Map to browse them all on a map with live hours, "happening now" filters, and one-tap directions.
Browse the full list on our Dallas happy hours page.
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